WILL EISNER (1917 2005) The Spirit

Sale 2673 - Lot 23

Price Realized: $ 1,750

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 2,500 - $ 3,500

WILL EISNER (1917-2005)
"The Spirit." Full page weekly comic strip, November 8, 1946. Ink over pencil on board. 14 x 22 inches. Unsigned.

Provenance: From the collection of Jules Feiffer.

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Feiffer commentary: You look at this work and it just stops traffic. Nobody was like Will and nobody did anything like this. It's beautiful and it's art, without a doubt. I may have worked on this page as his assistant. The comic book page, before Eisner had reduced itself to six or fewer panels and wasn't jammed with information. Eisner, in the spirit, brought the Bronx back into comic. He just jammed everything into one page and somehow made it storytelling and understandable and atmospheric. Comic book pages at the time would be six panels at most, this is 11 panels. That was unheard of. Eisner was the only one to do that. My assumption is that in 7 or 8 pages of "The Spirit" section, he had so much story to tell that he had to cram it all in. I look at the page, I see the atmosphere created by a fellow Bronx boy. It may be called Central City, but that's the Bronx, as I grew up in it.