💬 Jules Feiffer on Gary Groth and others' criticisms of Will Eisner, from The Comics Journal 124, August 1988
[For context, Gary Groth had written an editorial in an earlier Comics Journal criticizing Eisner’s work. He basically goes on for quite a while about how overrated he thinks Eisner is. It’s not that great in my opinion]
“Eisner was interested in comics. And if you’re in comics, somebody has to hit somebody else, somebody has to drive a car over a cliff, somebody has to blow up an airplane, somebody has to be a good guy, and somebody has to be a bad guy. But, more than anyone else in that form, up to that time, and past that time, Eisner was able to squeeze more human interest and more dimension and take heroes and use them–as he used the Spirit–as side characters to telling another story. Sometimes that story was too sentimental, sometimes the story was too trite, but often enough it was full of wit and cautionary values and fascinating visual perceptions that went beyond the visual and made it part of one’s perceptions, the way seeing early Fellini films became part of our perceptions as we left the theater and the world was redefined visually by 8½ or La Dolce Vita. Whenever you finished reading Eisner, the world was redefined by his eye, his camera eye. That contribution was so original, and so innovative, at that time to this time, that I think that anything else one can say about it, whatever shortcomings, whatever lack, whatever you feel–whether I agree with it or don’t agree with it, and disagree with much of it–is beside the point. Whether it’s valid or not, you cannot tell me that this is less than the contribution that Jack Kirby has made, or less than the contribution that Frank Miller is making. … I’m sure there’s much to criticize in Eisner’s later work. But there’s much to applaud in the fact that after not touching that work for many, many years, he came back to it, and he’s looking at it with a fresh eye, and he’s not doing bullshit violence, and he’s not buying into the mainstream, and he’s going off on his own track, and it happens to be a track that’s personal to him, and whether he’s stretching that enough or not is beside the point. As critical as one can be of some of that stuff, it’s still more interesting to a reader whose interest is larger than one of the caped hero-genre and flexing their muscles, to a reader whose point is somewhat larger than the further deification of the Sly Stallone syndrome. He’s trying something. And that should be encouraged and applauded, rather than trying to bury him.”