As already mentioned in class this first writing assignment revolves around Will Eisner's The Spirit. For this short exercise (3-5 pages) you should first of all read a number of The Spirit stories as they appear in The Best of Spirit anthology which is on reserve in the library (below you will also find four more Spirit stories in digital format --however, as I said in class, you should read this particular text 'the old fashioned way', on paper).
For your actual writing assignment you should first of all offer a historical contextualization of Eisner's work: where does
The Spirit fit into the history of sequential art in general and of comics in particular. Secondly, you should choose two pages in one of the stories (try to choose the two pages that you find are most interesting in terms of their encapsulation and layout --there are plenty of these in Eisner's work and don't be afraid to move deep into
The Best of Spirit anthology to the late 40s material) and simply describe the particularities of The Spirit's stylistic features. Please note that I am not necessarily looking for any particularly deep analysis. What your paper should end up being is a simple description of encapsulation, panel to panel relations, full page layout, use of color, line and text, insets, etc. What this should end up being, more than anything, is an exercise for applying and using comics terminology and an excuse to encourage you to look at an example of comic art closely and attentively.
I'm including here, along with the already mentioned extra Spirit stories, an issue each of DC's
Action Comics and
Detective Comics so that you can use these as comparative texts to Eisner's technique in
The Spirit.
Finally, as a conclusion to your short paper remark what, if anything and in your opinion, makes
The Spirit such a standout example of comic art. Enjoy.
Will Eisner,
The Spirit
DC's
Action Comics #1 (1938)
DC's
Detective Comics #27 (1939)
Please refer to Andrei Molotiu's essential "List of Terms for Comics Studies". Use the illustrated examples as a guideline.
There's also this Comics Terminology
Graphic 1 &
Graphic 2 (from Abel & Madden,
Drawing Words and Writing Pictures)
**In order to overcome the technical issues we might have with the .cbr extension I have renamed all linked comic books with a .zip extension. As mentioned in class zip and cbr files are the same thing, the only difference being that the .cbr extension allows your Comic Book Reader application to open and display the images in the zipped folder as a paginated book. All you need to do, after you've downloaded the files to your computer, is change the file extension from .zip to .cbr. Have fun.
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