Education Quote by Will Eisner

Eisner is doing something sly here: he’s not begging adults to stop sneering at comics, he’s drafting them into an economy. The line reads like a public service announcement, but the pitch is hard-nosed: you want better stories, you have to behave like a serious audience. Support is framed less as taste and more as leverage.

The context matters. Eisner spent decades watching comics treated as disposable kids’ stuff, then watched the culture panic about them (censorship, moral crusades, the Comics Code) while the industry narrowed its own ambitions to survive. By the time he’s making this appeal, he’s also helping invent a new lane for the form: the graphic novel, bookstore distribution, “comics for adults” as an actual category. He’s arguing that the medium isn’t the problem; the market expectations are.

The subtext is a rebuke to grown-up condescension. Adults love to congratulate themselves for “outgrowing” comics, then complain that comics are childish. Eisner flips that: if you only reward safe, lowest-common-denominator work, you’re effectively commissioning it. His repetition of “in this medium” sounds like an insistence on legitimacy, but it’s also protective: don’t treat comics as a genre with a single tone; treat it as a delivery system capable of reportage, memoir, romance, political argument.

It’s a democratic argument wrapped in consumer logic: cultural maturity isn’t just created by artists. It’s financed by readers willing to show up.