Art & Creativity Quote by Will Eisner

Eisner is doing two things at once: elevating comics and admitting the hustle required to do it. Calling his belief "almost fanatical" isn’t modesty; it’s a wink at how irrational you have to be to treat a commercial, deadline-choked medium as Literature with a capital L. In mid-century America, comics were routinely dismissed as disposable kid stuff, policed by moral panics and the Comics Code, and treated as industrial product rather than authored work. To insist it was a "literary art form" wasn’t just aesthetic preference; it was a strategy for survival.

The crucial phrase is "compounded out of ego and necessity". Ego is the engine of any artist who believes their form deserves a seat at the grown-ups’ table. Necessity is the darker twin: when the culture tells you what you make can’t matter, conviction becomes armor. Eisner frames his self-myth not as pure inspiration but as a calculated self-preservation tactic. He had to believe, because the alternative was accepting the world’s smallness for him.

There’s also a quiet redefinition of "literary". Eisner isn’t claiming comics should imitate novels; he’s arguing for narrative sophistication on the page, the idea that sequential art can carry voice, pacing, interiority, and theme. That’s the subtext behind his later role in legitimizing the graphic novel: not a plea for permission, but a demand that critics expand their categories.