Happy Fourth of July with Uncle Sam and Will Eisner!

Happy Fourth of July!

Happy 98th Birthday Will Eisner!

Happy birthday
Will Eisner 
(March 6, 1917 – January 3, 2005)

Will Eisner is the great old man of comics. He started out at the birth of comics, in the late 30's as a young, enthusiastic comic creator hopeful. Eisner grew up in Brooklyn with a painter father who had difficulty bringing in enough money to feed his family. This instilled in young Eisner a valuation for art and the impetus to work hard. In the late 30's he would start a "packaging" shop with Jerry Iger where they would make the contents of a whole comic and sell it to a publisher.

The Great Comic Book Heroes, Golden Age goodness! Edited by Jules Feiffer

When I was an impressionable kid, I would spend hours pouring over the books at my local library. One book in particular I would come back to again and again and again. It was The Great Comic Book Heroes edited by Jules Feiffer.

The Great Comic Book Heroes was a distillation of the dawn of the superhero comics in the early 1940’s.