A passing; a beginning...

I was saddened to see in the news that Will Eisner had died on Monday.

For those unfamiliar with him, Eisner was one of the earliest, and longest-lasting, masters in the art of "Sequential Art" (a term he coined), or the art of the comic book. From the late 1930s until his death, Eisner created superheroes, inspired and mentored other cartoonists, produced instructional materials for the government and industry, and with the publication of A Contract With God (a semi-autobiographical story of tenement life in the depression), created arguably the first graphic novel (another term of his conage).

He is perhaps best known for The Spirit, the adventures (and occasional misadventures) of a two-fisted good-hearted crime fighter in a blue suit, fedora domino mask and gloves. In many ways the Spirit was the role that James Garner would later make his own. The series ran in the 1940s and '50s as a comic book supplement that appeared in many Sunday newspapers. Eisner once defined his target audience for the series as "a 55-year-old who had his wallet stolen on the subway. You can't talk about heartbreak to a kid."



For more on the life of this amazing man, see this article.


At the other end of the emotional scale, I was pleased to find that a book that I first read when it came out six years ago holds up to re-reading.

INVISIBLE WORLD
by Stuart Cohen.
New York : Regan Books, 1998.
ISBN: 0060392274



Andrew Mann is awakened one night by a phone call, telling him that Clayton Smith, his childhood best friend, the friend that had drifted away years before to become a jet-setter and an artist, has committed suicide in Hong Kong.

The next day, while working in the office of his father's Chicago plumbing company, he receives a package from his dead friend with a large sum of money, airline tickets to get to his funeral, and a cryptic note that says, "I've always been your wild card; play me".

Leaving his staid, Midwestern rut, Andy flies to Hong Kong and finds that Clayton has left him a legacy, involving a map - supposedly the brocade map that the Great Khan sent west as a gift for the Pope in the 1400's. But other people want that map, for reasons of their own.

Following his friend's last request, Andy enters a journey of discovery and learns about art, elegance, gangsters, smugglers, his friend and himself, following clues left by Clayton that lead him to Beijing, Inner Mongolia, and beyond into an Invisible World of the spirit.

To most people, I suspect, the world of textile collectors in which Andy finds himself - where centuries-old pieces of fabric are smuggled and sold for fabulous sums - would be as foreign as Inner Mongolia; I know they were to me. But Cohen clearly is of the cult who adores cloth, and he makes the reader truly feel the excitement of the quest. He makes the colllectors as real as he makes Hong Kong and Mongolia. This is Cohen's first book, and an intimidating start; it will be interesting to see whether he can do it again. In any case, I'm going to have to see if he's written anything else.

Closing thought for today:
"In reflecting on our problems, we should include ourselves." -- Shunryu Suzuki