Thursday, November 04, 2004

The best teacher.



If you really want to do comic books, and you want to draw them, you must know Will Eisner's work. I'm not telling you that you probably know who he is and what he did, I'm saying that you have an obligation of knowing how he did - and still does - some of the most innovative and atemporal comic book pages of our times. He's the kind of artist that, if you look at his work over and over, there will always be something new for you to learn from it.

Eisner always put the reader inside the story, making a world we all believed in. His background showed us people lived there. His characters had the best body language you'll ever find in a comic book, and his style was everything at once: modern, classic, classy, bold, expressionist, minimal, poetic and sincere. He would do whatever it took to tell his stories. And he told them well.

Go buy yourself a Will Eisner book. NOW!

While doing the Smoke and Guns pages, I picture how would this particular page be if it were drawn by Will Eisner. I know my version will look different, but just the sensation to be working on the kind of story you can image Will Eisner doing always makes my day.

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