Will died a year ago today, and I still miss him. He was modest and wise and, above all, interested.

“What keeps you working?” I asked Will Eisner in 2001 at the Chicago Humanities Festival, where he, and I, and Art Spiegelman and Scott McCloud were guests—something unthinkable in the 1930s, when Will began to draw comics. I was interviewing him. I wanted to know why he kept going, why he kept making comics when his contemporaries (and his contemporaries were people like Bob Kane—before he did Batman, remember) had long ago retired and stopped making art and telling stories, and are gone.

He told me about a film he had seen once, in which a jazz musician kept playing because he was still in search of the Note. That it was out there somewhere, and he kept going to reach it. And that was why Will kept going: in the hopes that he’d one day do something that satisfied him. He was still looking for the Note . . .

My introduction to Will Eisner’s New York: Life in the Big City, 2006.

The Keynote Speech for the 2003 Eisner Awards

Being the Eisner keynote speaker is a huge honor. Not just because they’re the Eisner Awards, our industry and our art form’s Oscars and Pulitzers and Tonys, but because it’s a rare opportunity to speak, without being interrupted, to thousands of people who actually create comics, who sell comics, who care about comics—and because it’s still early in the evening, and the awards have not yet been handed over, people have to pretend to listen to what I say.

I thought I’d talk about awards, and why they matter, and comics and why they matter and making art and why it matters.

I don’t have anything huge and controversial to say. The last time I had anything controversial to say was ten years ago, when I told retailers not to get caught up in a speculator bubble that would, I predicted, soon pop like the Dutch Tulip Bubble. Creators, publishers and retailers were bathing, Uncle Scrooge–like, in money, and I got up and told them that there were bad times just around the corner, and what mattered was selling stories that people cared about and wanted to read.

And most of my predictions, bizarrely, came true.

Ten years on, I think it’s a good time to take stock of where we are. A state of the comics nation, if you will . . .

And we aren’t doing badly at all.

I started working professionally in comics about seventeen years ago. I was writing about comics as a journalist, whenever anyone would let me, for two or three years before that.

In my dreams, back then, I would think about a comics utopia. A future golden age.

So let’s look back and remember what that comics utopia would be.

First and foremost, I wanted comics to be taken seriously.

That didn’t mean that I wanted all comics to be serious. I wanted all kinds of comics. And I wanted them to be able to stand beside theater, cinema, books, TV, grand opera, as a valid and unique way of telling stories. A fairly young medium, perhaps, in which a lot of great work was still to come, but a medium that shouldn’t be sneered at for simply existing: a medium whose name can be used as a put-down has a long way to go.