Quotes by Will Eisner

A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.

Before World War II, I was living a very cloistered existence, as most cartoonists do. The work I was pouring out did not come from any real, personal life experience; this was all the residue of the accumulation of Rafael Sabatini, O. Henry, all the short-story writers that I'd been reading.

Comics, which are really best described as an arrangement of images in a sequence that tell a story - an idea - is a very old form of graphic communication. It began with the hieroglyphics in Egypt, it first appeared in a recognizable form in the Medieval times as copper plates produced by the Catholic church to tell morality stories.

Humor has historically been tied to the mores of the day. The Yellow Kid was predicated on what people thought was funny about the immigrant Irish. When you're different in a society, you're funny.

I did not have the dreams that the other artists working with me had, of 'moving uptown,' becoming an illustrator or a gallery painter, or those others who said, 'I'm going to go uptown and be a writer, I'm going to work for The New Yorker one day and escape this ghetto.' For me, there was no escape.

I want to point out to adults that there is a world of good material available to you now in comic form - in this medium - and learn to give it your support because the more you support it, the better the material will be as it comes out.

I've spent my whole life working in a medium that was regarded with contempt largely because of historical reasons.

In the beginning of the century, in 1900, the newspapers in this country began running comic strips, and they were called jokes or funnies. The word comics developed later, but it is that that began to give the name - the ambience of comics - the feeling of being a frivolous kind of art-form.

The work we do is as demanding as any of the great painters because nothing that happens on the page of a comic is accidental. It has to be imagined first in your mind before you do it. Those of us who know something about the art of painting know that working on a canvas, very often a lot of serendipitous things happen that work to the advantage of the painter ultimately.