I forgot to post this yesterday...

Comic book icon Will Eisner passed away yesterday, at the age of 86. The most prestigious award in comics (the Academy Award equivalent) is named after him - the Eisner award. I'm ashamed to say that I've never read one of his comics - he was before my time - the 50's, 60's and 70's. But his style and his passion have influenced many of the creators today. I've read so many tributes to him, and everyone speaks so highly of him, he was someone that was respected, even idolized, by his peers.

Brian Michael Bendis, writer for Ultimate Spiderman and just about every other book out there:

"You can’t die if you single-handedly invented the language of an entire art form and the concept of the graphic novel. Its impossible. He is immortal.

Will Eisner is the most inspirational, most inventive and most sincerely passionate man I have ever met on this planet. I was not friends with him and my run ins were very brief, but for me very meaningful. They probably could have been more than they were but I felt completely unworthy to be in the same room with him.

A couple of years ago when I was lucky enough to be invited to the Eisner awards for the first time, I was unaware until I got there that the award was actually given to you by Will Eisner.

And any pro who actually gets to win one of those things will tell you that as nice as it is to get a little thing like that the true prize was getting the sincere handshake and little moment of acceptance from the man who invented something you love so much that prior to his inventing it did not exist. "

Neil Gaiman, who wrote American Gods, Good Omens and The Sandman said on his site:

"I was woken up this morning, with the news that Will had died last night, aged 87, and I've let a few friends know, and already had to speak to one journalist about who Will was and what he did ("It's as if Orson Welles had made Citizen Kane and redefined what you could do in film, and then carried on making movies until now," I said, wishing I could come up with a better analogy, and knowing that that didn't explain it. And I didn't mention how proud he was of any of us who did good comics -- how much he cared about the medium -- or how glad I am that I got to tell him that I wouldn't have written comics if it wasn't for him.)

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."

He will definitely be missed, but not forgotten.

Posted by Yano at January 5, 2005 10:21 PM