Eisner will surely be in any comic fans top ten artists list and his work in these pages reveals why. Paul Levitz says in his preface that Eisner's life has been well documented. It can be split more or less into three phases: the Spirit years 1940 to 1952; PS magazine and corporate comics 1951 to 1972; a resurrected Spirit and graphic novels until his death in 2005.
It's the two hundred illustrations (with plenty in color) that made the book come alive for me, in particular the splash pages for the Spirit where Eisner creates all kinds three dimensional structures out of the name, the Appendix has thirteen of these plus others throughout the pages. After the Spirit newspaper comic supplement Eisner started American Visuals to explore commissions that used comic art for corporate use and in particular for the US Department of Defence where he worked on 227 issues of PS The preventive maintenance monthly. This unusual title used comic art to explain to G.I.s how to use and maintain military equipment (incidentally, Abrams have published a thick digest size book of selected pages from the magazine all showing the artist's work. ISBN 9780810997486).
Reprints of the Spirit from the forties, several graphic novels and teaching at New York's School of Visual Arts provided Eisner with work in later years. He called the graphic novel A contract with God and other tenement stories (1978) and The plot (2005) comic literature, this seems to me a rather flamboyant description. The plot though was an unusual title because it dealt with exposing the decades old 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' and published just before his death'
This is a wonderful pictorial survey of Eisner's life, the book is large, nicely designed and printed and his fans will enjoy looking at lots of pencil roughs, original art with white paint for correcting drawings and the usual messy artwork with register marks, blue lines, scribbled printer instructions et cetera, of course none of this ever gets printed
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