Greg Goldstein's Comic Art Gallery

Tag: Denis Kitchen

Will Eisner — Cheering The Bronx

Original Art and The Artists

Dropsie Avenue, June 1995

Dropsie Avenue is the third (and final) graphic novel in the Contract With God Trilogy.

As noted previously All Contract With God did was change the face of comic book storytelling and popularize the concept, and phrase, “graphic novel.”

Eisner’s career remains fascinating. He had all but given up on comic book work after he discontinued the Spirit in 1952, but the growth of comics’ fandom convinced him to return in the 70s. He did indeed revisit The Spirit, but more importantly, he realized his personal literary aspiration of creating something completely unique and personal with COG, its sequels, and other graphic novels he produced until his death in 2005.

Dropsie Avenue (1995) tells the evolution of a fictional street and its residents in New York’s Bronx Borough — spanning more than 100 years, beginning about 1870 One of the many reasons I enjoy this page is that it features a street pole with the name of the street, and hence the title of the graphic novel.

Eisner owned outright nearly all the comic book material he created in his lifetime. He had great foresight to retain his intellectual property, and remain a true independent until his passing.

Welcome to Will Eisner week, 2021.

Pete Poplaski — Family Affair

Original Art and The Artists

Batman: The Silver Age Newspaper Comics Vol. 3 (1969-1972), November 2016

Pete Poplaski has been called an “artist’s artist” by many creators. His name might not be known as well as other artists, but his talent is unquestionable.

Pete, who broke into comics in the 70s underground community, ultimately became Kitchen Sink Press’ art director, and among many accomplishments helped give some of Robert Crumb’s projects just the right design touch. 

Kitchen had the rights to reprint the DC Batman and Superman comic strips in the early 1990s, and Pete created brand new covers that evoked the classic style of those strips.

When we acquired those reprint rights at IDW in 2012, we went back to Pete to see if he would be interested in picking up where he left off, and fortunately he was.

Wayne Boring. Dick Sprang. Al Plastino. Carmine Infantino. You name a classic artist, and Pete can replicate the style.

And perhaps most astonishing of all is this giant wraparound cover for Batman Silver Age Volume 3. Featured on these covers are nearly everyone in the Bat family from that era. Good guys and villains alike. All the type is hand lettered.

And when I say giant, I’m not kidding. When combined, the two pieces are nearly four-feet wide.

I’ve never seen another piece of comic art quite like it.

September 19 is “Batman Day,” so we’re going to ride the Bat-train for a few weeks and post some additional theme-appropriate art. No “Bam or “Pow” included.

Poplaski creates color guides by photocopying the original and, if too big, taping the pages together.

Will Eisner — Second Act

Original Art and The Artists

Will Eisner’s Quarterly #2, Spring 1984 and A Life Force, 1988

We continue with our month long celebration of the “Independents” — Independent creators and projects that continue to impact the comic book medium.

A Life Force is the second graphic novel in the Contract With God Trilogy.

Contract with God? All that did was change the face of comic book storytelling and popularize the concept, and phrase, “graphic novel.”

Autobiographical and journalistic. Sometimes harsh, sometimes uplifting. Mature, and in places, unflinching. Eisner described his narrative, an “exercise in personal agony,” a way of dealing with the death of his daughter Alice (from Leukemia) years earlier.

Eisner’s career is fascinating. He had all but given up on comic book work after he discontinued the Spirit in 1952, but the growth of comics’ fandom convinced him to return in the 70s. He did indeed revisit The Spirit, but more importantly, he realized his personal literary aspiration of creating something completely unique and personal with COG, its sequels, and other graphic novels he produced until his death in 2005.

A Life Force was first serialized in Will Eisner’s Quarterly starting in 1984. The innovative storytelling and artistic detail on this page (i.e the classic line cross-hatching) makes it a keeper.

Eisner owned outright nearly all the comic book material he created in his lifetime. He had great foresight to retain his intellectual property, and remain a true independent until his passing.

Eric Powell — That’s Gotta Hurt

Original Art and The Artists

Will Eisner’s The Spirit # 11, 2016

Concluding our celebration of the 80th anniversary of The Spirit, with additional creators’ takes on the beloved and influential character.

Looks like the Spirit forgot to beware the Ides of March.

Matt Wagner brought the Spirit back to life for Dynamite in 2015 with an ongoing series. Although Matt drew the cover for the first issue, the amazing Eric Powell created many of the rest of the main covers, including this terrific one.

I first discovered The Spirit via the over-sized, black & white reprints from Warren Publications in the mid 70s. I was bowled over by Eisner’s artistry and sophisticated use of sequential narrative but also by the enormous emotional punch these stories seemed to pack into a brief seven pages. Whether it was humor, romance, pathos or irony, I found a depth of character and resonance that seemed to be missing from the mainstream comics of the day. I can honestly say The Spirit changed my perceptions of a comics creator and made me consciously aware of the artistry involved in rendering these tales. I’m a comics artist and writer today because of Will Eisner and The Spirit.

— Matt Wagner, quoted in the Westfield Comics Blog

Kitchen Sink started the tradition of all-star creators working on the Spirit, a tradition that continues today…

Tim Bradstreet — Hard Boiled

Original Art and The Artists

The Spirit New Adventures #6, 1998

Continuing our celebration of the 80th anniversary of The Spirit, with additional creators’ takes on the beloved and influential character.

Tim Bradstreet — with Eisner’s blessing — redraws some of the Spirit’s backstory in Will’s style for the cover of  The Spirit New Adventures #6.

The foreground? Bradstreet reimagines The Spirit a bit more hardboiled, a bit darker, less whimsical version of the character. And he sports possibly the greatest comic book trench coat ever.

(As you can see from the original vs. published cover, The Kitchen Sink trade design cropped much of the background.)

The complete collection of the New Adventures, which includes contributions by Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and others is available from Dark Horse Comics.

On June 2, 1940, Denny Colt made his debut… and promptly died.

Eisner introduced his detective with jaunty body language, lots of attitude and over-confidence, and a close relationship with Police Commissioner Dolan (and that was all in the first half dozen panels.) The cartoonist already knew his character well. Colt went off to capture the villainous Dr. Cobra and was found dead, drowned in a flood of toxic chemicals. After his funeral, Colt woke from suspended animation, dug himself out and assumed a new role as the Spirit, haunting Wildwood cemetery and keeping his city safe with Dolan’s connivance.

— Paul Levitz, summarizing the Spirit’s origin in his book, Will Eisner: Champion of the Graphic Novel

The classic film noir trench-coated detective: Alan Ladd with Veronica Lake in This Gun For Hire; Robert Mitchum (with Jane Greer) in Out of The Past; and Humphrey Bogart — in pretty much everything. (Ladd would have made an excellent Spirit back in the day.)

Darwyn Cooke — Captures The Spirit

Original Art and The Artists

Continuing our celebration of “Will Eisner Week” and the 80th anniversary of The Spirit, with other creators’ takes on the beloved and influential character.

The late Darwyn Cooke?  The closest thing to Will Eisner this modern generation of talent had seen. Visionary storyteller, writer, illustrator, letterer and more. Not only could he do it all, Darwyn could do it well. VERY well.

He was the logical choice for an ongoing series of Spirit stories — the first since Eisner’s run ended in 1952.

DC launched the series with a Batman Sprit crossover, and this terrific splash is the final page of that story. Inked by J. Bone, this issue, and the subsequent ones of the ongoing series are the closet in spirit (ahem) to Eisner’s vision more than 50 years prior.

Darwyn, we miss you.

“I think everybody who is consumed by storytelling within this medium has had some profound schooling from Will…

I can remember it was one of those days when I was thirteen, and I was in a comic store, and there was nothing that I wanted to get. On the wall was a copy of Warren’s Spirit magazine. I think it’s number three, where he is running down the elevated track straight at you, and the train is behind him. It’s just one of the most exciting images I have ever seen…”

-Darwyn Cooke interview From Will Eisner: A Spirited Life by Bob Andelman

Young Darwyn Cooke found a copy of Warren’s Spirit #3 and the world was never the same. Also pictured, his cover for the first issue and collection of DC comics stories.

Will Eisner — Peak Spirit

Original Art and The Artists

The Spirt, Register and Tribune Syndicate, September 12, 1948

2020 marks the 80th Anniversary of the Will Eisner’s Spirit, a comic series that ultimately became a game changer in the medium. This week is also celebrated annually as “Will Eisner Week,” dedicated top one of comics’ most influential legacies. So let’s dive in…

This cool page is from “Cache McStash”, and is from Eisner’s peak period on the Spirit. In fact, it is published just one week after his own personal favorite story, “The Story of Gerhard Shnobble,” perhaps the most perfect film noir ever created for the comics.

And don’t let the misleading credits on the otherwise great Grand Comics Database fool you. This story is all Eisner — script, pencils, inks, and letters — as confirmed by Denis Kitchen.

I was fortunate enough to be asked write the intro for the Spirit story “Sound” featured in the hot-off-the-presses Spirit 80th celebration from Clover Press.  No spoilers, but, I love the way Eisner integrated sound effects into his storytelling, and, on this page the simple ticking of the clock enhances tension and movement.

Like everything else he did, he found a way to make his two dimensional comics cinematic in scope.

“I grew up on the movies, that’s what I lived with. The movies always influenced me… Doing the Spirit strip was like making movies. It gave me a chance to be an actor, producer, author and cameraman all at once.”

— Will Eisner, quoted in Jim Steranko’s History of The Comics, Volume 2

Clover Press has just published an 80th Anniversary celebration of Will Eisner’s Spirit, available directly from the publisher or in comic book stores and other traditional outlets.
Color me alive — three different color takes of the Spirit’s origin from 1966: The original, possibly colored by Jules Feiffer; The 1975 Warren magazine reprint, possibly colored by Richard Corben; and the brand new Clover Press version, definitely colored by Jeremy Cox.

NYCC — Gotham Giant

Original Art and The Artists

New York Comic-Con wrapped on Sunday… and from all accounts, it was a smash success for all concerned, especially the fans. The show appeared packed pretty much the entire time, and gridlock enveloped the Javits Center midday, especially moving from one floor to the other. But spirits were high despite the claustrophobic conditions and many of the creators told me that had their best NYCC ever.

Many photos to be posted in the next few days, but here’s a teaser: