 Trade In this Item for up to £3.00
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Will Eisner's New York: Life in the Big City (Will Eisner Library) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £3.00, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
"The Plot (ISBN 978 0 393 32860 8), "a fitting, serious and well-drawn end to Eisner's illustrious career" (The Guardian), is also available along with "his masterwork" (Publishing News), The Contract with God Trilogy (ISBN 978 0 393 06105 5)."
Product Description
Will Eisner, the master and pioneer of American comics art, presents graphic fiction's greatest celebration of the Big Apple. No illustrator evoked the melancholy duskiness of New York City as expressively as Eisner, who knew the city from the bottom up. This new hardback presents a quartet of graphic works (New York, The Building, City People Notebook and Invisible People) and includes cameo appearances by the author himself; several new illustrations sketched by Eisner, posthumously inked by Peter Poplaski; and three previously unpublished "out-takes". Eisner's character, "The Spirit", has been optioned to be a major film. It contains an introduction by Neil Gaiman.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
It's a brilliant tale through drawings that give you that special New York feeling.
I have even decorated two rooms in my house with some of these pages.
One entire wall is an enlarged copy from this very book.
I love it
I have even decorated two rooms in my house with some of these pages.
One entire wall is an enlarged copy from this very book.
I love it
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This work is testament to Eisner's observational skills. He depiction of life in New York is witty and insightful, less plot driven than The Contract with God trilogy, but equally enjoyable.
Here there aren't recurring characters, and sometimes you even get pages without text or a single word, but the expressiveness of his art allows the drawings to do the talking.
Evocative, insightful, enjoyable. Nobody could ask for more.
Here there aren't recurring characters, and sometimes you even get pages without text or a single word, but the expressiveness of his art allows the drawings to do the talking.
Evocative, insightful, enjoyable. Nobody could ask for more.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
6 reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Start spreading the news.
5 Sep 2007
Format:Hardcover
This book collects four of Will Eisner's comic books. I hesitate to use the term "graphic novels" because these aren't novels, they are short stories. Some of them are very short, being one page vignettes. The books collected are New York: The Big City, The Building, City People Notebook and Invisible People. Will Eisner was truly one of the geniuses of the comic book artform. This book tells the stories of regular city dwellers. Some of their stories are funny, some of them are tragic. But they are all worth reading. Highly recommended.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
A comic masterpiece about a masterpiece city
12 Mar 2008
Format:Hardcover
Will Eisner (1917-2005) is considered one of the most influential writers establishing the graphic novel as an art form. This volume collects four of Eisner's major works about New York: New York: The Big City, The Building, City People Notebook, and Invisible People.
Neil Gaiman who wrote the very good Introduction calls Eisner a "remarkable observer of life in the Big Apple". Gaiman adds that this is by no means a Valentine to the city. "Eisner's eyes are wide open to the tragedies of city living -- just as they are to its glories. It's no Valentine, but it is, perhaps, a love-song to a city that he loves for its ups and downs, its terrors and its wonders."
This is a book that rewards looking more than reading (the text is sometimes quite leaden). But the images! Delinquent teenagers pulling a fire alarm for kicks are caught in a building fire on the very next page. Eisner's human characters play exaggerated roles, but they seem alive. The buildings also seem to have a life of their own.
Eisner writes: "The big city as it is seen by its inhabitants is the real thing. The true picture is in the crevices on its floors and around the smaller pieces of its architecture, where daily life swirls."
In "The Building", Eisner describes a landmark building that is torn down, and a new structure that is erected in its place. He tells the stories of four people whose lives were linked to the old building; its demolition leaves "an ugly cavity and a residue of psychic debris". But, of course, the new building will accumulate its own stories in time.
A happy ending in Eisner's world. And, for me, an entirely different way to understand one of my favorite cities.
Robert C. Ross 2008
Neil Gaiman who wrote the very good Introduction calls Eisner a "remarkable observer of life in the Big Apple". Gaiman adds that this is by no means a Valentine to the city. "Eisner's eyes are wide open to the tragedies of city living -- just as they are to its glories. It's no Valentine, but it is, perhaps, a love-song to a city that he loves for its ups and downs, its terrors and its wonders."
This is a book that rewards looking more than reading (the text is sometimes quite leaden). But the images! Delinquent teenagers pulling a fire alarm for kicks are caught in a building fire on the very next page. Eisner's human characters play exaggerated roles, but they seem alive. The buildings also seem to have a life of their own.
Eisner writes: "The big city as it is seen by its inhabitants is the real thing. The true picture is in the crevices on its floors and around the smaller pieces of its architecture, where daily life swirls."
In "The Building", Eisner describes a landmark building that is torn down, and a new structure that is erected in its place. He tells the stories of four people whose lives were linked to the old building; its demolition leaves "an ugly cavity and a residue of psychic debris". But, of course, the new building will accumulate its own stories in time.
A happy ending in Eisner's world. And, for me, an entirely different way to understand one of my favorite cities.
Robert C. Ross 2008
Will Eisner's New York: Life in the Big City
10 Nov 2010
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Will Eisner's opus of modern and urban existence in New York possesses a certain thematic and also, in the simplest essence, artistic quality not present in his former work. While his more prominent cartoons (it would seem, the entire Spirit comic strip narrative) focuses more on the kinetic energy of an action movie-style plot, where there are overt heroes and villains. New York falls into more emotional territory, and in many ways possesses a higher polish, making this sprawling narrative about city life in New York a fresh new breath of creative genius.
That's not to say Eisner doesn't employ his brilliant mastery of sequential movement or doesn't bring forth pure storytelling dynamism into this book. Oh, no, he does bring those in a big way. New York quite simply is the epitome of how people tick in the Big Apple, and Eisner does not, if ever, hold back on the effort and drive to tell a sublime story.
Split into numerous vignettes and compiled from four previously published collections, one doesn't so much as read this book but get pulled into so many facets of the New York experience that it's not a laughing matter anymore. The treasure of Avenue C, the starting vignette of sorts, is a perfect example of how even a simple, unassuming thing like a gutter drain can be the basis for a recurring narrative. Eisner achieves this sweeping piece of adventure, told in bite-sized episodes (one especially poignant one involves a mugger who sees the convenience of disposing his knife into the drain) with such simplicity and greatness, that one would be amazed when the resultant panel, depicting the thorough search of the scene by the police, delivers the punch. And one doesn't even realize that The Weapon works on the New-York-has-a-high-crime-rate level, while still functioning as a perfect, almost to a science, standalone story.
A street band, The Pearly Buzzards, finds joy in playing at different locations, a young, attractive New York female experiences a mild bout of uncertainty as she takes a little too long to place an important letter into the mailbox, a metaphor of citizens within windowed apartments aptly named Prisons, and then the true meat of the collections appears with the latter material. The most interesting of the lot would be Mortal Combat, an unprecedented take on the prevalent invisibility of one's existence in the huge city. If you have not one, but a series of tightly wrought vignettes like this, complete with creative commentaries at some points, and each one as intriguing and professional as the last, it becomes a `museum' of how sequential art should be done.
Which is how Eisner establishes his legacy. The Spirit is how you should do a continuous mystery epic. Comics and Sequential Art is a How-To book for comics, perfected. New York, however, is the culmination, of storytelling in the sequential form. It is very much like weary Eisner waking up one morning and deciding to impose his craft upon the short story format. One can almost imagine him saying these imaginary words, "Lets see if I can create something that's never been done before...and thus create history."
That's not to say Eisner doesn't employ his brilliant mastery of sequential movement or doesn't bring forth pure storytelling dynamism into this book. Oh, no, he does bring those in a big way. New York quite simply is the epitome of how people tick in the Big Apple, and Eisner does not, if ever, hold back on the effort and drive to tell a sublime story.
Split into numerous vignettes and compiled from four previously published collections, one doesn't so much as read this book but get pulled into so many facets of the New York experience that it's not a laughing matter anymore. The treasure of Avenue C, the starting vignette of sorts, is a perfect example of how even a simple, unassuming thing like a gutter drain can be the basis for a recurring narrative. Eisner achieves this sweeping piece of adventure, told in bite-sized episodes (one especially poignant one involves a mugger who sees the convenience of disposing his knife into the drain) with such simplicity and greatness, that one would be amazed when the resultant panel, depicting the thorough search of the scene by the police, delivers the punch. And one doesn't even realize that The Weapon works on the New-York-has-a-high-crime-rate level, while still functioning as a perfect, almost to a science, standalone story.
A street band, The Pearly Buzzards, finds joy in playing at different locations, a young, attractive New York female experiences a mild bout of uncertainty as she takes a little too long to place an important letter into the mailbox, a metaphor of citizens within windowed apartments aptly named Prisons, and then the true meat of the collections appears with the latter material. The most interesting of the lot would be Mortal Combat, an unprecedented take on the prevalent invisibility of one's existence in the huge city. If you have not one, but a series of tightly wrought vignettes like this, complete with creative commentaries at some points, and each one as intriguing and professional as the last, it becomes a `museum' of how sequential art should be done.
Which is how Eisner establishes his legacy. The Spirit is how you should do a continuous mystery epic. Comics and Sequential Art is a How-To book for comics, perfected. New York, however, is the culmination, of storytelling in the sequential form. It is very much like weary Eisner waking up one morning and deciding to impose his craft upon the short story format. One can almost imagine him saying these imaginary words, "Lets see if I can create something that's never been done before...and thus create history."
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
