Two more notable figures have left us: comic-book writer and artist Will Eisner and illustrator Kelly Freas, both of whom died earlier this week.
I’m not personally familiar with Eisner’s work, but I certainly know his name. He’s a legend among comic enthusiasts, the first to take the comics medium — which he called “sequential art” — seriously, the first to see the possibility that comics could be about more than just superheroes, and the guy who coined the now-common term “graphic novel.” He was there from the beginning of the modern comic book in the 1930s and is believed by some to be the inspiration for the character Joe Kavalier in Michael Chabon’s brilliant novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. He worked with or mentored a lot of other legendary figures from the comics world, including Bob “Batman” Kane and Jack “X-Men” Kirby, and in 1987 the comics industry named its annual awards, the comic-book “Oscars,” after Eisner. He continued working on and publishing new comic/graphic novel projects right up until his death Monday at the age of 87.
I’ve seen a couple of nice obituaries out there, including this one in the Chicago Tribune, and a slightly more detailed one in the New York Times (registration required). In addition, writer Neil Gaiman (creator of the wonderful Sandman), shares his initial thoughts on hearing of his friend’s death as well as a funny and touching tribute he wrote in 1996, a little piece called, “The Spirit of 75.” If you remember being a kid with money burning a hole in your pocket and a comic book with your name on it, you ought to enjoy that one.
Finally, Mark Evanier, who also knew Eisner, tells a few anecdotes here.
Kelly Freas also worked in comics — he did covers for Mad magazine for several years and is credited with developing the personality of Mad‘s iconic character, Alfred E. Neuman — but he’s probably better known as an illustrator for science-fiction magazines and novels. His work has graced the covers of books by Asimov, Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Frederik Pohl, among many others.
I first encountered the work of Kelly Freas when I was about ten years old, although I didn’t know it was his work at the time. My uncle Layne, who is thirteen years older than me and something of a, ahem, tough customer, had a gargantuan record collection and whenever I was visiting his house, I couldn’t resist flipping through it. It gave me something to do while the adults talked about their boring grown-up subjects.
Layne’s tastes ran to what was then known as hard rock, and I was unfamiliar with most of the groups he liked. It seemed like they all had dangerous sounding names: Blue Oyster Cult, Deep Purple, Mountain, Argent, Blackfoot. I knew nothing about the music, but those names were kinda scary, and I thought that was cool. (It probably helped that Mom was quite vocal in denouncing those groups as “too loud.”) The albums were cool, too, completely unlike the records I was used to seeing. I hadn’t started to develop my own musical tastes yet, so all I had to compare with Layne’s collection was my mother’s considerably smaller one, and there really was no comparison at all. She liked Elvis, the Bee Gees, Kenny Rogers… “safe” artists with album covers to match, usually consisting of tame, portrait-style photos of the artist.
Layne’s records, on the other hand, were like twelve-inch-square works of art that featured beautiful, sometimes disturbing, paintings that were raw, occasionally violent, and often sexual. I recall feeling a visceral thrill as I looked through Layne’s records; they were unexplored territory and it was exciting to look at them, to discover a whole other musical world composed of dark energy and unknown mysteries. It felt as if I was dabbling in some kind of forbidden magic. I especially liked the ones that borrowed from fantasy or science fiction and I studied those in detail, often feeling a strange sense of recognition as I absorbed their imagery. One of my favorites was a Molly Hatchet record — I don’t remember which one — that was graced by a version of Frank Frazetta’s iconic “Death Dealer,” a grim, apocalyptic image of a shadowy warrior on horseback against a flaming sky. Another favorite was the cover of Queen’s News of the World, which depicted a giant robot holding the crushed bodies of the band in its hand. That’s an image that has stayed with me for years… and it was painted by Kelly Freas.
(Interestingly enough, I have learned from reading the various Freas obituaries that this album cover was a modified version of an earlier Freas painting that appeared on the cover of Astounding Science Fiction in 1953. The members of Queen loved the earlier version so much, they asked Freas to redo it for their purposes.)
As usual, the New York Times obituary of Freas seems to be the most detailed, if you don’t mind the registration thing. If you do, the Seattle Times published a pretty decent article as well. And, of course, Evanier has an anecdote to tell about what a decent human being he was.
