Will Eisner Week – The Spirit Artist’s Edition

In honor of Will Eisner Week we here at the Schulz library have set up a sweet display of Eisner’s works by the front desk.  Probably the neatest thing in this display is WILL EISNER’S THE SPIRIT: ARTIST’S EDITION that IDW put out a couple years back.We spent some time with this book today and it was really a nice experience that I would strongly recommend.  Each page is a full-size, high-quality representation of what Eisner’s original art boards looked like.It’s really amazing to see how this stuff was done.  It also really humanizes a legend like Will Eisner, as the copious amounts of white out remind us that he wasn’t just nailing it with every line.

Another aspect that is super interesting is how he would just paste in a photograph for part of a background.  My assumption with this is one of his assistants would use that to create the rest of the environment.

Or how he would paste in new drawings over his art to fix things, like with the clouds in this panel:

Or on this amazing page, check out how he replaced the figures where The Spirit is punching a guy, and then how he used the white out as a speed line in the bottom panel.

Holy smokes, this is such an amazing resource and I hope that every student here takes the opportunity to check it out.

We’ll be highlighting more Eisner gems throughout the week, so stay tuned!