In the last year, comics pioneer Will Eisner has enjoyed a career renaissance, with more than a dozen new or reprinted works hitting bookstore shelves. The latest installment in the reissue parade is Shop Talk, a collection of prose interviews Eisner conducted with a handful of his best-known contemporaries in the early '80s for The Spirit Magazine and Will Eisner's Quarterly. But, while his comics have withstood the test of time, not all of these interviews follow suit. Eisner is not a journalist, and doesn't pretend to be. He's a chummy but intrusive interviewer who frequently interrupts his subjects to describe his own perspective, history, work process, and opinions. At times, it's not clear who's interviewing whom. The "shop talk" title is accurate; typically, each interview includes several pages of intimate discussions about preferred pens, brushes, inks, and paper, as well as detailed descriptions of the process of assembling a comics page. Comics history and industry news, particularly from the '30s through the '50s, is another favorite topic. Comics historians and prospective artists may consider the collection a gold mine, exhaustively packed with nuggets of detail. The general reader, however, is likely to be at sea, especially as Eisner has a habit of turning his conversations away from any heated topic and back to the care of Japanese brushes. While he occasionally expresses a puckish desire for controversy and dispute, he cuts off his subjects when they begin to address topics of true personal feeling, as when Jack Kirby touches on his working relationship with Stan Lee, or "relevant comics" pioneer Neal Adams tries to address social issues and his loathing of work-for-hire. Eisner's subjects—including Gil Kane, Joe Kubert, Joe Simon, Mad pioneers Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Davis, and Terry And The Pirates creator Milton Caniff—are well-chosen and generally well-spoken, though Caniff seems most like Eisner's ideal conversation partner. Their brisk chat, which focuses on the nuts and bolts of comics creation, shared acquaintances, shared memories, and general agreement about everything, is everything Shop Talk most wants to be: an intimate, near-voyeuristic portrait of two peers comfortably chatting about narrow topics of mutual interest. Individual readers are going to have to decide for themselves whether they'd want to be flies on the wall for the meetings of these minds.