Word: eisner
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When Iger took over the top job at Disney in 2005, many dismissed the new chief, a onetime local-TV weatherman who had risen steadily through the corporate ranks, as a lackey of the previous CEO, the notoriously difficult Michael Eisner, whose boldness was often considered an asset. Many inside and outside Disney questioned whether Iger, 56, had the maverick's instincts to run the storied company. Shareholders Stanley Gold and Roy Disney even filed a lawsuit to void his election by Disney's directors...
Iger proved he is a shrewd operator early on. The day he was named CEO in the spring of 2005, he spoke to Steve Jobs, the Apple Computer and Pixar Animation chief executive whose stormy relationship with Eisner led him to court new production and distribution partners for Pixar's films. By the time Iger officially took over in October of that year, he and Jobs had mopped up the bad blood and discussed ways of adopting the iTunes model for selling video. They shook hands two weeks later on a pioneering deal to sell ABC programs on the video...
Tweaking fairy tales also allows moviemakers to tell stories about themselves without boring us. The Shrek movies are full of inside jokes (the kingdom of Far Far Away is essentially Beverly Hills; the first villain was widely seen as a stand-in for then Disney chief Michael Eisner). Fairy-tale parodies are safe rebellions, spoofing formulas and feel-good endings while still providing the ride into the sunset that pays the bills. In Happily N'Ever After, a wizard runs a "Department of Fairy-tale-land Security," seeing to it that each story--Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, etc.--hews to the book...
...peruse the strip in sequence - as you can in the handsome collection called The Spirit Archives, now up to its 22nd volume - is to see Eisner shift within genres and tones. One week's story might be a melodrama, the next a comedy, the third a 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...
...draftsmanship was up to the level of the vision. Here's, I promise, my last Feiffer quote: "Eisner's line had weight. Clothing sat on his characters heavily; when they bent an arm, deep folds sprang into action everywhere. When one Eisner character slugged another, a real fist hit real flesh. Violence was not externalized plot exercise; it was the gut of his style. Massive and indigestible, it curdled, lava-like, from the page." As does Feiffer's prose...