On Gary Groth and others' criticisms of Will Eisner

[For context, Gary Groth had written an editorial in an earlier Comics Journal criticizing Eisner's work. He basically goes on for quite a while about how overrated he thinks Eisner is. It's not that great in my opinion]

FEIFFER: As I said to you yesterday, because of my own association with Eisner, and affection for him--it's really much greater than affection, because in some ways my career begins with him, and my career before I worked with him began with him--I found I couldn't read your piece [editorial in The Comics Journal #119], because it was just too upsetting to me. But I started by reading this first letter by whomever [Gerard Jones in Journal #121], and then Fiore's response to you afterwards which I thought was actually the most impressive.

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There's no question that, as the letter writer--Jones, guess it is--said that the serious critical work can be done in counter to the applause Eisner has gotten. Although why there's a rush to that, when it took so many years to get that applause, and so many years to get that notice, and the guy was unheard of for such a long period of time, why, now that he's been recognized for hardly even a decade, there has to be rush to critical judgement, and let's bury the schmuck, he's getting too much praise, or too much attention. Only in America. Why one has to look at Eisner's work and say "Was there Hemingway in there? Where's the Fitzgerald in here? Where's" -for Christ's sake-"Proust in here? Where is Joyce? Where are his influences?" In fact, Eisner was, while working in the cartoon mode, was well aware and influenced by Ring Lardner. There's a touch of Lardner in some of those stories. Certainly O. Henry. And much that was going on in movies in addition to the popular movies, in the German Expressionist movies. I mean, there's the smack of Fritz Lang in his work I've written about before. But he knew a lot about this stuff, and the reason he chose movies to be inspired by, as opposed to what was going on in fiction, is the obvious one: that it was the closest thing that came to comics. It was a popular medium. It was a visual medium. It was what everybody saw, what everybody was moved by. And like comics, it was a sister form that was also considered vulgar. This was before anybody was writing, before there was mass criticism in favor of movies. Before Partisan Review discovered movies, before anyone had ever heard of Manny Farber, before the New Wave critics, before Truffaut or Godard were writing seriously about movies, before anybody thought Howard Hawks was an artist, before anybody thought that John Ford was anything but commercial director. So Eisner was not going after what he thought was a serious form. When he borrowed from movies, he borrowed from movies, because it it was in the air to borrow from movies. As it was in the air for me, when I was writing for him, to borrow from radio. I mean, these were the norms. And part of the norm of American commercial writing--and we're talking commercial here, because if Eisner wanted to be anything else but commercial he would have gone into another business--is sentiment. If you're not dealing in sentimentality on a greater or lesser level, just as if you're not dealing in violence, then there's no room for you in the comics business, there's no room for you in the television business, there's no room for you in the movie business. There is room for you in poetry, there is room for you in small literary reviews. But there's no room for you in mass American arts, in any form, popular arts or the less popular arts. Eisner was interested in comics. And if you're in comics, somebody has to hit somebody else, somebody has to drive a car over a cliff, somebody has to blow up an airplane, somebody has to be a good guy, and somebody has to be a bad guy. But, more than anyone else in that form, up to that time, and past that time, Eisner was able to squeeze more human interest and more dimension and take heroes and use them--as he used the Spirit--as side characters to telling another story. Sometimes that story was too sentimental, sometimes the story was too trite, but often enough it was full of wit and cautionary values and fascinating visual perceptions that went beyond the visual and made it part of one's perceptions, the way seeing early Fellini films became part of our perceptions as we left the theater and the world was redefined visually by 8½ or La Dolce Vita. Whenever you finished reading Eisner, the world was redefined by his eye, his camera eye. That contribution was so original, and so innovative, at that time to this time, that I think that anything else one can say about it, whatever shortcomings, whatever lack, whatever you feel--whether I agree with it or don't agree with it, and disagree with much of it--is beside the point. Whether it's valid or not, you cannot tell me that this is less than the contribution that Jack Kirby has made, or less than the contribution that Frank Miller is making.

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I'm sure there's much to criticize in Eisner's later work. But there's much to applaud in the fact that after not touching that work for many, many years, he came back to it, and he's looking at it with a fresh eye, and he's not doing bullshit violence, and he's not buying into the mainstream, and he's going off on his own track, and it happens to be a track that's personal to him, and whether he's stretching that enough or not is beside the point. As critical as one can be of some of that stuff, it's still more interesting to a reader whose interest is larger than one of the caped hero-genre and flexing their muscles, to a reader whose point is somewhat larger than the further deification of the Sly Stallone syndrome. He's trying something. And that should be encouraged and applauded, rather than trying to bury him.