Tuesday, February 24, 2004

Another Kind of Pictorial Journalism Will Eisner's The Spirit was my favorite comicbook hero, a masked detective who survived a lot of hard knocks and didn't need fancy long underwear to do his job. It's great to hear that the Spirit's 86-year-old creator is still at work, once again exploring a shadowy story of good and evil, truth and falsehood -- inspired by, of all things, some Web browsing. His new topic is more documentary than adventure-hero story, but it sounds like it will be a fascinating read. According to this story in The New York Times. Eisner's new graphic novel will tell the truth about the old anti-Semitic hoax, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," uncovered as a Czarist fraud by a British journalist more than 80 years ago, but still finding gullible readers. What put Eisner on the case? "I was surfing the Web one day when I came across this site promoting `The Protocols' to readers in the Mideast," he told The Times. "I was amazed that there were people who still believed `The Protocols' were real, and I was disturbed to learn later that this site was just one of many that promoted these lies in the Muslim world. I decided something had to be done." The book, to be titled "The Plot," is still in progress, but other samples of its creator's work can be found at WillEisner.com, along with his comments on his career, telling, "stories in words and sequential art about the human condition." 12:01:19 AM    comment []

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