Top 15 Quotes & Sayings by Will Eisner

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American cartoonist Will Eisner.

Last updated on April 15, 2025.

William Erwin Eisner was an American cartoonist, writer, and entrepreneur. He was one of the earliest cartoonists to work in the American comic book industry, and his series The Spirit (1940–1952) was noted for its experiments in content and form. In 1978, he popularized the term "graphic novel" with the publication of his book A Contract with God. He was an early contributor to formal comics studies with his book Comics and Sequential Art (1985). The Eisner Award was named in his honor and is given to recognize achievements each year in the comics medium; he was one of the three inaugural inductees to the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame.

American - Cartoonist | March 3, 1917 - January 3, 2005

Source: Wikipedia

I want to point out to adults that there is a world of good material available to you now in comic form - in this medium - and learn to give it your support because the more you support it, the better the material will be as it comes out.

Will Eisner

Humor has historically been tied to the mores of the day. The Yellow Kid was predicated on what people thought was funny about the immigrant Irish. When you're different in a society, you're funny.

Will Eisner

A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.

Will Eisner

As for me, I am in pursuit of excellence. I have no time to get old.

Will Eisner

Superheroes are mostly aimed at young teen-age males concerned with their manhood. The medium will have to address itself more to content. . . . I see 22 year olds draw massive Schwarzenegger types, outfitted with metal studs, pressing a mostly naked woman to their breastplates. And I think Poor girl, thats got to be cold.

Will Eisner

[Before the Spirit] I had been producing comic books for 15-year-old cretins from Kansas [I wanted to aim for] a 55-year-old who had his wallet stolen on the subway. You can't talk about heartbreak to a kid.

Will Eisner

Comics, which are really best described as an arrangement of images in a sequence that tell a story - an idea - is a very old form of graphic communication. It began with the hieroglyphics in Egypt, it first appeared in a recognizable form in the Medieval times as copper plates produced by the Catholic church to tell morality stories.

Will Eisner

The term comics long ago became obsolete and inaccurate. It merely defined the content of the early joke-based comical strips. Sequential Art is a more accurate description of the form. I first suggested it because I believed something needed to be done to correct the feeling of inferiority by artists and writers in this field.

Will Eisner

Ive spent my whole life working in a medium that was regarded with contempt largely because of historical reasons.

Will Eisner

I write about what I know and what I have experienced. This keeps me an "honest" writer.

Will Eisner

We have this history of impossible solutions to insoluble problems.

Will Eisner

Comics deal with two fundamental communicating devices: words and images. Admittedly this is an arbitrary separation. But, since in the modern world of communication they are treated as independent disciplines, it seems valid. Actually, the are derivatives of a single origin and in the skillful employment of words and images lies the expressive potential of the medium.

Will Eisner

Still,[...] in all forms of comics the sequential artist relies upon the tacit cooperation of the reader. This cooperation is based upon the convention of reading and the common cognitive disciplines. Indeed, it is this very voluntary cooperation, so unique to comics, that underlies the contract between artist and audience.

Will Eisner

Thus, sped by currents of curiosity afloat the swift river of rumor do secrets sail to strange ports.

Will Eisner

Before World War II, I was living a very cloistered existence, as most cartoonists do. The work I was pouring out did not come from any real, personal life experience; this was all the residue of the accumulation of Rafael Sabatini, O. Henry, all the short-story writers that I'd been reading.

Will Eisner

Top 15 Quotes & Sayings by Will Eisner

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