Wizard, of all places, gives you a peek into what is probably going to be this year’s best comic-related movie - the documentary “Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist”:

Where the power and attentive ear of the film really succeeds and sets itself apart is in capturing Eisner’s practical insight and necessity which propelled him at every turn and kept him creating. Whereas his military contributions were spawned by his chuckling assertion that his fellow draftees needed manuals to explain procedures in words they would understand and his Spirit splashes erupted from his do-or-die need to pull audiences into his comic books’ stories by the first page, so too was A Contract With God catapulted into existence by the strongest and most desperate of struggles from all dimensions of his professional and—probably more importantly—personal life.

Nowhere in “Portrait of a Sequential Artist” is Eisner’s candor more vivid than his up-close explanation of the dramatic role the death of his 16-year-old daughter Alice had on him—the emotional explosion, he asserts, behind A Contract With God, which Frank Miller designates as Eisner’s “most revolutionary act.” Though Eisner also outlines his structural ambitions to create a book for a market of adults who grew up reading comics and were ready to buy lengthy, mature-themed literature, his confession of the impact his daughter’s death had on him at that point in his life sends waves through the rest of the film and is brilliantly captured through a chillingly effective use of silence in the film as it pans over pages from the book and lets Eisner’s spoken words resonate.

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