Top Graphic Novel Reviews

One of the pioneers of the industry. Like wine, he creations gets better with age.
He has since left the world but his works will always leave a lasting impression for many many years to come. Here is a tribute to the great Will Eisner.

William Erwin Eisner (born March 6, 1917, Brooklyn, New York City, New York, United States; died January 3, 2005, Lauderdale Lakes, Florida) was an acclaimed American comics writer, artist and entrepreneur. He is considered one of the most important contributors to the development of the medium and is known for the cartooning studio he founded; for his highly influential series The Spirit; for his use of comics as an instructional medium; for his leading role in establishing the graphic novel as a form of literature with his book A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories; and for his educational work about the medium as exemplified by his book Comics and Sequential Art.

The son of Jewish immigrants — his father a former painter, marginally successful entrepreneur, and one-time manufacturer in Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue garment district — Eisner attended De Witt Clinton High School. There he drew for the school newspaper (The Clintonian), literary magazine (The Magpie) and yearbook, and did stage design, leading him to consider doing that kind of work for theater. Upon graduation, he studied under Canadian artist George Brandt Bridgman (1864-1943) for a year at the Art Students League of New York. Contacts made there led to a position as an advertising writer-cartoonist for the New York American newspaper. Eisner also drew $10-a-page illustrations for pulp magazines, including Western Sheriffs and Outlaws.

Wow, What a Magazine! #3 (Sept. 1936): Cover art by a teenaged Will EisnerIn 1936, high-school friend and fellow cartoonist Bob Kane, future creator of Batman, suggested that the 19-year-old Eisner try selling cartoons to the new comic book Wow, What A Magazine!. “Comic books” at the time were tabloid-sized collections of comic strip reprints in color. In 1935, they began to include occasional new comic strip-like material. Editor Jerry Iger bought an Eisner adventure strip called “Captain Scott Dalton”, an H. Rider Haggard-styled hero who traveled the world after rare artifacts. Eisner subsequently wrote and drew the pirate strip “The Flame” and the secret agent strip “Harry Karry” for Wow as well.

In the late 1970s, Eisner turned his attention to longer storytelling forms. A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories (Baronet Books, Oct. 1978) is one of the first American graphic novels, combining thematically linked short stories into a single square-bound volume. Eisner continued with a string of graphic novels that tell the history of New York’s immigrant communities, particularly Jews, including The Building, Dropsie Avenue and To the Heart of the Storm. He continued producing new books into his seventies and eighties, at an average rate of nearly one a year. Remarkably, each of these books was done twice — once as a rough version to show editor Dave Schreiner, then as a second, finished version incorporating suggested changes. 8

In the introduction to the 2001 reissue of A Contract with God, Eisner revealed that the inspiration for the title story grew out of the 1969 death of his leukemia-stricken teenaged daughter, Alice, next to whom he is buried. Until then, only Eisner’s closest friends had even been aware that he and his wife, Ann Weingarten Eisner, had a daughter. They also have a son, John.

Some of his last work was the retelling in sequential art of novels and myths, including Moby Dick. In 2002, at the age of 85, he published Sundiata, based on the part-historical, part-mythical stories of a West African king, “The Lion of Mali”. Fagin the Jew is an account to the life of Dickens’s character Fagin, in which Eisner tries to get past the sterotyped portrait of Fagin in Oliver Twist. His last graphic novel, The Plot, an account of the making of the anti-semitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was completed shortly before his death and published in 2005.

Eisner has been recognized for his work with the National Cartoonist Society Comic Book Award for 1967, 1968, 1969, 1987, and 1988, as well as its Story Comic Book Award in 1979, and its highest accolade, the Reuben Award, for 1988.

He was inducted into the Academy of Comic Book Arts Hall of Fame in 1971, and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1987. The following year, the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards were established in his honor.

“As a soul, Will was generous, ambitious, insightful, and fair. He did not hesitate to give of himself in these last decades. A constant presence at conventions, Will made equal time for the captains of this industry, the aspirants looking to break in, and the fans whose lives he touched with his body of work. He was always a gentleman, in the classical sense, where the word actually means something beyond mere politeness.” 

-Charles Brownstein (Executive Director for Comic Book Legal Defense Fund)

“…I’m going to miss him enormously, more than I can say. I made a speech last year, where I said how strange it was to discover that the gods of comics, the people who made the medium, were, when I met them, cranky old Jews. Will Eisner wasn’t cranky, and he was never old. He was, in all ways, a mensch. 

And I keep weighing it in my head, the sorrow at losing Will with the knowledge of how fortunate I was to have known him (”you’re always sorry, you’re always grateful,” as Sondheim said about something quite different). 

I’m more grateful than sorry.”

-Neil Gaiman

Will Eisner died of complications from a quadruple bypass surgery performed on December 22, 2004 in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida.

I am a big big fan of his. And I sure am not the only one around. He and Alan Moore are so different in terms of their personality but there is no doubting both of their literally genius.

Born November 10, 1960, in Portchester, Hampshire, Gaiman is an English Jewish author of numerous science fiction and fantasy works, including many comic books(and graphic novels). As of 2005, he lives in Wisconsin, between Madison and Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. He is married to Mary T. McGrath, an American, and has two daughters, Holly and Maddy, and a son, Michael.

A popular writer of fantasy and the dreamily macabre, Gaiman created the landmark comic Sandman. The comic ran for 75 monthly episodes and was an industry phenomenon in the early 1990s. Once a popular “underground” author, Gaiman later became a mainstream success thanks to Sandman and other screenplays, short stories and novels. Gaiman’s books include Good Omens (1990, co-written with Terry Pratchett) and American Gods (2001); his illustrated novel Stardust was published in four parts by DC Comics in 1997 and reprinted as a text-only novel in 1999. His fantasy mini-series Neverwhere was broadcast by the BBC in 1996; a novel by the same name was a best-seller in 1997. He also wrote the children’s book The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish (1997).

After forming a friendship with famed comic book scribe Alan Moore, Gaiman started writing comics, picking up Miracleman after Moore finished his run on the series. Gaiman and artist Mark Buckingham collaborated on several issues of the series before the collapse of publisher Eclipse Comics, leaving the series unfinished. He wrote two British graphic novels with his favorite collaborator and long time friend Dave McKean: Violent Cases and Signal to Noise. Afterwards, he landed a job with DC Comics, his first work being the limited series Black Orchid.

His New York Times bestselling 2001 novel for adults, American Gods, was awarded the Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker, SFX, and Locus awards, was nominated for many other awards, including the World Fantasy Award and the Minnesota Book Award, and appeared on many best-of-year lists.

Gaiman was the creator/writer of monthly cult DC Comics horror-weird series, Sandman, which won nine Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, including the award for best writer four times, and three Harvey Awards. Sandman #19 took the 1991 World Fantasy Award for best short story, making it the first comic ever to be awarded a literary award. Norman Mailer said of Sandman: “Along with all else, Sandman is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it’s about time.”

Gaiman’s 1999 return to Sandman, the prose book The Dream Hunters, with art by Yoshitaka Amano, won the Bram Stoker award for best illustrated work by the Horror Writers Association, and was nominated for a Hugo award. In 2003 The Wolves in the Walls, illustrated by his longtime collaborator Dave McKean, was published, and it was named by the New York Times as one of the best illustrated books of the year. It is currently being made into an opera by the Scottish National Theatre. 2003 also saw the appearance of the first Sandman graphic novel in seven years, Endless Nights, which was published by DC Comics and was the first graphic novel to make the New York Times bestseller list.

In 2004, Gaiman published the first volume of a serialized story for Marvel called 1602, which was the bestselling comic of the year, and is currently a Quills Award finalist in the graphic novel category.

Additionally, With Roger Avary, Neil Gaiman has written the script for Beowulf, to be directed by Robert Zemeckis and set to begin filming in fall 2005 with Anthony Hopkins and Angelina Jolie starring in it. Gaiman also writes songs, poems and novels. Gaiman forged an intense friendship with singer Tori Amos in the early nineties. Before she achieved stardom, she sent him a demo tape of her album Little Earthquakes, and they became fast friends. As such, references have been made to Gaiman (often rather cryptically) in at least one of her songs on each of her albums.

He seems like an eccentric character eh? With all that long fuzzy hair and his continued contempt for Hollywood movies inspired or adapted from his comics. Well, if you look deeper into the reasons, you can empathize with him. V for Vendetta the movie was good BUT if you (like me) had read the comic before hand, you would have found the movie has done a great deal of injustice to the graphic novel.


And that is the same with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Interestingly enough, he does not really like the term ‘Graphic Novel’ saying that it is just another word for expensive comic books. Oh well.

His Proper Bio

Alan Moore (born November 18, 1953, in Northampton, England) is a British writer most famous for his work in comics, including the acclaimed graphic novels Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell. He has also written a novel, Voice of the Fire, and performs “workings” (one-off performance art/spoken word pieces) with the Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels. The oldest son of the brewery worker Ernest Moore and printer Sylvia Doreen, Moore’s childhood and youth were influenced by the poverty of his family and their environment.

Moore’s exceptional writing talent won him his first American series, Saga of the Swamp Thing. Moore displayed great depth and insight in his work, demonstrating that he was able to write on a wide range of topics and situations. Moore’s stories set the pace for the “Sophisticated Suspense” by which most comics under DC’s Vertigo line operate under today. In addition to Swamp Thing, Moore also penned several other DC titles, such as The Green Lantern Corps, a Batman Annual and several Superman stories.

Moore had a long-standing dispute with DC Comics, and he was unhappy that his deal with Wildstorm unexpectedly placed him in the DC “family.” Wildstorm attempted to placate him by forming an editorial “firewall” to insulate Moore from DC’s corporate offices. However, various incidents continued to irritate Moore. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen #5 contained an authentic vintage advertisement for a “Marvel”-brand douche, which caused DC executive Paul Levitz to order the entire print run destroyed and reprinted without the advertisement. 

Moore was further irritated when Paul Levitz decided that a story Moore wrote for the Cobweb character to appear in Tomorrow Stories #8 featured references to L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, John Whiteside Parsons and “The BABALON Working”. The story was blocked by DC Comics who feared being sued by the notoriously litigious Scientologists. DC was embarrassed when it was later revealed that they had already published a version of the same event in their Big Book of Conspiracies.

Film adaptations of Moore’s work also proved controversial. With From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moore was content to allow the filmmakers to do whatever they wished and removed himself from the process entirely. “As long as I could distance myself by not seeing them,” he said, he could profit from the films while leaving the original comics untouched, “assured no one would confuse the two. This was probably naive on my part.”

Today Moore is working on several series: Tom Strong Adventures, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Supreme: The Return, Promethea, as well as several other series on the horizon. Moore is also a vegetarian and a practicing magician.

-culled from The Wikipedia

David Brin is more of a science fiction writer then a graphic novelist. Nonetheless, I decided to do a bio on him because of some outstanding graphic novels he wrote. He is well, obviously very smart.

Glen David Brin (born October 6, 1950) is a well-known American author of science fiction. He is the winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards as well as the Interstella War Award. He lives in Southern California and has been both a NASA consultant and a physics professor.

Several of his novels have been New York Times Bestsellers. His 1989 ecological thriller, Earth, foreshadowed global warming, cyber-warfare and near-future trends such as the World Wide Web. A 1998 movie, directed by Kevin Costner, was loosely based on The Postman. His novels have been translated into more than twenty languages. Several studio-financed screenplays are under pre-development consideration.

Brin’s first non-fiction book, The Transparent Society, published by Perseus/Addison Wesley Inc. in 1998 deals with contemporary concerns about privacy, accountability and secrecy in the world of the coming century.

As part of his concern to ensure that young readers get the best possible bridge to a lifetime habit of reading, Brin has developed a new series of novels, the OUT OF TIME series, about high schoolers from our era who get yanked into the future to solve problems and teach their descendants courage — before being put back in time for classes the next day. The first few volumes of this exciting and yet thoughtful series were penned by Nancy Kress, Sheila Finch and Roger MacBride Allen.

David Brin’s wife, Cheryl Brigham, is also a scientist. They have a young daughter and two sons. Brin speaks before many groups and schools, sharing his passionate enthusiasm for the future. His novels have been translated into twenty languages and non-fiction articles have appeared in many magazines. Claiming to be — “in love with this amazing, scary, fascinating century”– David Brin makes extensive use of his scientific training in his writing, bringing to his novels an intense passion for the exploration of ideas, and the human spirit.