Talking about panel shapes and whether to use borders before storytelling or characterization doesn’t match my understanding of comic construction structure, but he’s the acclaimed cartoonist. He starts with text as image, showing how to letter in conjunction with the story’s mood, before moving to exaggerated images on their own, with no words. … Modern readers can be expected to have an easy understanding of the image-word mix and the traditional deciphering of text.Įisner’s emphasis on comics as language means he takes an order of lessons that doesn’t seem natural to me. When one examines a comic book feature as a whole, the deployment of its unique elements takes on the characteristic of a language. The book’s original structure as a series of class notes revised into essays is maintained, which means I still find Eisner’s text, at times, a bit stuffy and old-fashioned. Small updates have been made to the text, such as including the term “graphic novel” instead of “comic book” much of the time and acknowledging the greater prominence of the medium of comics than in Eisner’s era. (Note the coordinating color scheme: the gold-covered book has red highlights, the blue-covered has gold highlights, and the red-covered has blue.)Įisner’s original Foreword is included, as is a new editor’s note by Denis Kitchen, who explains changes in the work and how decisions were made.
The book welcomes the reader in immediately instead of seeming off-putting in its blocks of text, and the flat white paper shows off the images better than the slick gloss of the previous. There are easy-to-skim headings and pullquotes, in an attractive red highlight color, and captions placed with the images they refer to instead of hanging off the page edges like afterthoughts.
The presentation is much sleeker and more modern, with a layout that looks like it was created by a professional art designer, instead of the high school research paper appearance of the original. Comparing the revised Comics and Sequential Art to the original edition (first published in 1985) showed me immediately how much of an improvement the new printing was.
Norton issued updated editions of Will Eisner’s classic instructional manuals on creating comics.
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