Comics and Sequential Art

Will Eisner wrote this instructional textbook as an outgrowth of his course in sequential art at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Sequential art, as Eisner defines it, is the arrangement of pictures and words to narrate a story or dramatize an idea, studied primarily through comic books, comic strips, and graphic novels. Eisner's central premise is that this form constitutes a legitimate and complex discipline deserving serious critical and pedagogical attention. He notes that comics were long ignored by scholars due to perceptions about their audience, subject matter, and usage, and he places responsibility for this slow acceptance on practitioners as much as critics. Organizing his course syllabus forced him to dismantle the medium's components, and in doing so he discovered he was dealing with "an 'art of communication' more than simply an application of art" (xiv).

The book opens by establishing comics as a distinct form of reading. Eisner traces the evolution of comic books from random collections of short features around 1934 to complete graphic novels, citing a 1977 essay by Tom Wolf in the Harvard Educational Review that redefines reading beyond words to encompass symbol decoding and information integration. Comics, Eisner argues, require readers to exercise both visual and verbal interpretive skills simultaneously, superimposing the regimens of art (perspective, symmetry, line) upon those of literature (grammar, plot, syntax). Using examples from The Spirit, his long-running comic series, and his graphic novel A Contract With God, he demonstrates how a comic page can be diagrammed like a sentence and how graphically rendered text becomes an extension of imagery.

Chapter 2 examines imagery as comics' fundamental communicating device. Eisner establishes that comprehension of any image depends on shared experience between artist and reader, making the universality of the chosen form and the skill of its rendering essential. He tracks the evolution of visual symbols from Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese pictographs through calligraphy to modern comic strip imagery, arguing that in a skilled artist's hands, this codification becomes an alphabet capable of expressing complex emotional narratives. As proof, he presents the Spirit story "Hoagy the Yogi, Part 2" (1947), a pantomime narrative told entirely without dialogue, in which commonly recognized symbols such as postcards, footprints, and the moon convey narrative bridges, action, and time. A sidebar highlights Norwegian cartoonist Jason's wordless stories in SSHHHH!, illustrating how pantomime can communicate universal themes across languages.

Chapter 3 addresses timing as an essential structural element. Eisner distinguishes between "time" as the phenomenon of duration and "timing" as the deliberate manipulation of time elements to achieve a specific emotional effect, identifying panels as the critical device for conveying timing. Speech balloons attempt to capture the ethereal element of sound, with their arrangement contributing to time measurement while requiring readers to follow a prescribed sequence. Invoking Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, which holds that time is not absolute but relative to the observer's position, Eisner argues that the panel makes this postulate a reality for readers. A sidebar examines Alison Bechdel's memoir Fun Home, where five panels depicting a single scene at a funeral home demonstrate how time can be made to stand still. Through the Spirit story "Foul Play" (1949), Eisner shows how commonly experienced actions serve as informal clocks, with smaller panels compressing time into a staccato beat and larger panels stretching it for suspense.

Chapter 4, the book's longest, examines the frame (or panel) as a multifunctional device central to sequential art's grammar. Eisner defines the panel's fundamental function as encapsulation: the artist's act of selecting, freezing, and framing segments from a continuous flow of action. Unlike film or theater, comics cannot prevent a reader from glancing at the last panel first, so they rely on the tacit cooperation of the reader based on reading conventions. He explores panel borders as non-verbal language: Rectangular borders imply present tense, wavy borders indicate flashbacks, and jagged borders suggest explosiveness. The absence of a border implies unlimited space. Eisner also demonstrates how panel shapes can serve emotional functions; in the Spirit story "Fluid X" (1947), panels shaped like recovering eyes place the reader inside the protagonist's experience. The chapter introduces the splash page as an introductory device and develops the meta-panel concept, where the entire page rather than the individual panel becomes the primary frame. For parallel narratives, Eisner introduces the super-panel device, illustrated by the Spirit story "Two Lives" (1948), in which two storylines run side by side before merging. He addresses the tension between visual impact and storytelling integrity, demonstrating through the Spirit story "The Visitor" (1949) how disciplined perspective reinforces realism and makes a surprise ending believable.

Chapter 5 treats expressive anatomy as a primary vocabulary of sequential art. Eisner argues that the human form is the most universal image an artist must handle and distinguishes between gesture (subtle and idiomatic, with the final position as key to meaning) and posture (a movement frozen from a sequence). Body language, he asserts, occupies primacy over text in comics, and he demonstrates this with variations on the phrase "I am sorry" rendered with different body language to produce entirely different emotional meanings. The face functions as "a window to the mind," where movable elements register emotions that act as adverbs to the body's posture. As an extended example, Eisner presents "Hamlet on a Rooftop" (1981), in which Shakespeare's soliloquy is delivered by a modern urban character whose gestures derive from his specific background, demonstrating that the medium's emotional content can be universal even when the pairing of language and character is unconventional.

Chapter 6 examines writing for sequential art as a skill irrevocably interwoven with the visual dimension. In comics, words become welded to the image and no longer describe but instead provide sound, dialogue, and connective passages. Eisner addresses the historical separation of writer and artist roles and critiques the resulting problems: artists producing visually stunning pages with little story, and writers overwriting in allocated spaces. Through examples including a fish-in-a-bowl sequence and a fugitive-chase scenario rendered three ways, he demonstrates the interdependency of words and art and argues that writer and artist should ideally be the same person.

Chapter 7 divides sequential art's applications into instruction and entertainment. Eisner discusses the graphic novel as a rapidly growing literary medium, noting that prestigious awards are no longer off-limits to graphic novelists and citing works like A Contract With God (1978), Art Spiegelman's Maus (1973-1991), and Bechdel's Fun Home (2006). He describes Webcomics as a financially viable alternative to print, offering international audiences and creator-reader interaction. He distinguishes between technical instructional comics, which show procedures from the reader's viewpoint, and attitudinal instructional comics, which condition attitudes through dramatization, drawing on his own career producing military maintenance manuals. He also explains storyboards as bridging the gap between screenplay and filmed footage.

The final chapter addresses teaching and practical execution. Eisner outlines fundamental preparatory skills: understanding the human body as a mechanical device, mastering perspective, using light and shade as emotional tools, and applying the principles of cartooning as exaggeration versus realism's adherence to detail. He provides practical guidance on speech balloons, advising that dialogue should be mentally performed as sound and limited to roughly 30 words per balloon. He surveys reproduction technology from letterpress through offset to digital workflows, explaining how each method shaped artistic style. The book concludes by affirming that while digital tools expand a creator's range, they also challenge individuality: Since anyone with the same software can produce technically perfect results, personality must come from the generation of ideas and mastery of narrative style. Regardless of delivery method, the fundamental requirements of sequential art remain unchanged.