Word: comicality
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...Jules Feiffer became famous in the '50s for what many called the first adult comic strip, Sick Sick Sick (later just Feiffer), which ran in The Village Voice and other papers. But Feiffer knew the superhero comics so well because he loves them as a kid and he wanted to be an artist; he studied these strips from the wrist up. In his late teens he assisted Will Eisner in drawing The Spirit. Here's his evocative iconography of the comics hero...
...Will Eisner, who died two years ago at 87, was a force in the medium - two media, really, comic strips and graphic novels - and as both an artist and an entrepreneur, for more than six decades. TIME.com maven Andrew Arnold calls him "one of comix' greatest forward-thinkers." In the biz from his teens (everybody started young in comics), Eisner wanted to break out of the newspaper-illustration straitjacket, saying, "A daily strip to me is like trying to conduct an orchestra in a telephone booth." So at 23, on June 2, 1940, he introduced The Spirit, which...
...kinship to the superheroes. New York (Metropolis, Gotham) was here called Central City, though later the Spirit traveled abroad. Sometimes he nearly disappeared from his own strip, making only a perfunctory appearance in the lives of supporting characters or guest villains. In that sense, The Spirit was a proletarian comic strip with a collective hero: the "little people" of Central City...
...parable. But beyond the variety of stories was a striking visual consistency: the tone was bold, dark and mature - a grownup vision, compared to the adolescent world-view of the standard superhero strip. To quote Feiffer: "Will Eisner was an early master of the German expressionist approach in comic books - the Fritz Lang school. ?Muss 'Em Up' was full of dark shadows, creepy angle shots, graphic close-ups of violence and terror. Eisner's world seemed more real than the world of other comic book men because it looked that much more like a movie. ... The further films dug into...
...from iddeal. The L.A. museums were a car-drive away, and everyone drives out there. Back here in Manhattan, Newark might as well be New Delhi. As Spiegelman wrote to the show's producers: "While swell for New Jersey residents, placing the first half of the 20th century's comic strip artists into the Newark Museum is, from the perspective of this provincial New Yorker, the equivalent of hiding them in a Federal Witness Protection program." The Jewish Museum also censored some of Crumb's more robust drawings, provoking Spiegelman to withdraw his art from the show he had helped...