Will Eisner, Cartoons, and Me
I have never been a giant Will Eisner fan. I was always grateful for his contributions to the Mad Magazine compilations I used to buy (or am I imagining these? The bio makes no mention of Mad) but that's about it. But please don't read that as a dismissal of the man. To me, it's like a classical music enthusiast who's gotten so much out of Bach, Mozart, and Brahms that he simply hasn't had time to check out Beethoven in any depth. I know the outlines - I can usually pick out an Eisner drawing the way that music fan might recognize the signature V for Victory (or is it 5?) in the 5th. Is the lack of Beethoven a horrible hole in the music fan's life? He's the only judge of that. He might pick up a Beethoven boxed set in 5 years and weep into the night for what he's missed, or the time he's wasted listening to those other hacks. He might also break out into goosebumps in anticipation of the voyage of discovery he's about to take.
But anyway, my heroes have always been cartoonists. My father kept comix around from his own misspent youth - original Peanuts and Pogo collections mostly. I learned to read from them (and, alarmingly, from a Complete Poe collection). Those, along with the Bill Cosby records I grew up listening to, shaped my personality in ways that still astonish me today. (Not to mention confusing others, for instance when I Pogo-fies a turn of phrase.) As an adult, I added George Booth to my list of heroes. Tasha reduced me to tears this Christmas with a gift of Omnibooth, the out-of-print George Booth collection which I had never owned but only read (and reread) my Mom's copy, and which I spoke wistfully of one day last May...Tasha noted it in her Palm Pilot and it went from there to under the tree, a complete and total shock and surprise.
I still love the classics, and I'm also getting more and more into more current stuff. I read Watchmen last year and thought it was amazing; I'm not so impressed with The Sandman yet, but I'm going to keep giving it a chance. I hear from other fans that the book I started out with, Preludes and Nocturnes, is weaker than the rest of the stuff. Oh, and just last week I used a Christmas gift certificate to buy Marvel 1602. I have a feeling I'd enjoy it more if I was more into Marvel in general - I was a DC kid, mostly because of Batman comix, but I've hated the Dark Knight stuff I've read. I can take a little dark, but this stuff just felt like he was rubbing my face in it. We get it, the guy's got to be half crazy - now would you mind getting to the story? While we're young?
Other cartooning heroes of mine:
Don Martin (watching The Sopranos recently reminded me of him, because their funny Italian language words frequently reminded me of his great sound effects)
Jack Davis (an Atlantan!)
Mort Drucker (amazing caricaturist who also does comic mayhem brilliantly)
Sergio Aragones (speaking of comic mayhem; also brilliant lettering)
UPDATE: I still can't find any evidence that Will Eisner drew for Mad. However, some of the entries my fading memory attributed to him were definitely NOT his. I was thinking of Superduperman and Shermlock Shomes from the early Mad days. Those were drawn by Wallace Wood. There was an early Mad artist named Bill Elder - I suspect I'm confusing Elder with the similarly named Eisner.
Oh, and that's the 4th Symphony of Beethoven, not the 5th. Maybe.
PS While I'm updating: if you don't know nothin' about comics, or even if you love them a lot, you need to visit Fantagraphics. I now own two Fantagraphics books and I love them, and I'm developing an unhealthy lust for the new volume of Peanuts.
PPS Oh my God. Before there was Diana Rigg, there was Miz Mam'sell Hepzibah.