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Will Eisner's last book, The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, (W.W. Norton; 148 pages; $20) arrives in bookstores early next week, just a few months after he died at age 87. A key figure in the development of graphic literature, Eisner worked in "the biz" for over 60 years. He set new standards for the form's possibilities with his cinematic weekly Spirit series during the 1940s, and then again in the late twentieth century, with his tireless boosterism for long-form "graphic novels." His final book combines literary biography and criticism...
...spite of its admirable ambition, The Plot doesn't perfectly gel into a masterpiece. It suffers chiefly from a problem I have found in many of Eisner's graphic novels: a sometimes-fatal distrust of the audience. Expository dialogue, repetitious action and one-dimensional characterization make The Plot feel more like a lesson than a deeply involving story. In the biographical first third, for example, character development never goes beyond stereotype, as if giving Golovinski more than one dimension would confuse us. One scene depicts a young Golovinski stealing his mother's necklace for no apparent purpose. Presumably fabricated...
...hours of your time, spread over two evenings in the theater. To see what is essentially a subtitled Italian television mini-series without recognizable stars, special effects, or for that matter, hot sex or graphic violence. To say that The Best of Youth demands an unusual commitment from us understates the case...
...seeks to jumpstart his own career as a graphic novelist, Stevens seems well-positioned to portray this phase of a young person’s life, imbuing it with an air of reality and truth. Although Stevens says that “Guilty” is not an autobiographical work, it feels as though the events that unfold in this book could have happened, even if they never actually did. While this makes for a story where less happens, it gives the work a subtle, textural quality of wordless image and emotion that slows the narrative, forcing the reader...
...Graphic novels, by nature, are a visual medium. As a result, a significant portion of the emphasis normally placed on a novel’s writing is shifted over to the artwork. In this case, this shift is a very fortunate move as, sadly, the writing in “Guilty” can sometimes verge on the mediocre and there are also a number of misspellings in the dialogue. However, Stevens’ drawings are often so realistic and subtly attention-grabbing as to render the dialogue almost entirely irrelevant...