For celebrated comics and graphic novel artist Will Eisner, there was no end to his life's work.
By BOB ANDELMAN
Published January 24, 2005
[Photo: Will Eisner Studios Inc.]
Will Eisner works in his New York studio around 1941.
In May 1939, Will Eisner was hired to create an imitation of Superman called Wonder Man. He appeared in just one issue before National Comics (now DC) sued for copyright infringement and won. Copies of Issue 1 now sell for $20,000 in near mint condition.
[Courtesy of Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide]
[AP 1999]
Will Eisner created the masked comic book hero "The Spirit," behind him, in 1940, and it was distributed as an insert in Sunday newspapers, like Parade magazine. He is widely credited with pioneering the graphic novel, which combines elements of comic books and literary novels.
The front of a new membership card produced by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, released this week, honors Will Eisner.
The thing you must know about Will Eisner is that he worked all the time. And yet he never worked at all.
For the legendary comics and graphic novel artist, who died earlier this month in Fort Lauderdale at 87, work was a pure pleasure and a sustaining force. Though knowledgeable and articulate on everything from politics to baseball, he preferred thinking and talking about his next project, the next book, new presentation concepts - anything that represented productivity.
Will Eisner didn't create Superman, Batman, Spider-Man or even Archie and Jughead. Even some comic book fans may scratch their heads when asked to describe his work. But every artist and writer in comic books, as well as graphic artists across the spectrum of modern illustration, television and film, owe a debt to him. (Brad Bird, creator of The Incredibles and The Iron Giant , paid tribute to Eisner in both of his films.)
In 1940, Eisner created a goofball detective named Denny Colt who died (not really) and was reborn as "The Spirit," a cemetery-dwelling protector of the public - and pretty girls in particular. The Spirit possessed no superpowers. He couldn't see through his girlfriend's clothing the way a curious alien like the Man of Steel might investigate Lois Lane. And he wasn't a brilliant technologist like Batman, imagineering hokey gadgets and psychedelic compounds for all-night parties with the Joker.
The Spirit broke many molds:
-- Eisner was the strip's artist and writer, a feat still rare today.
-- The Spirit was published and distributed as an insert in Sunday newspapers, lik e Parade magazine. It was seen weekly by as many as 5-million people from 1940 to 1952.
-- No two Spirit sections looked alike. Although most commercial operations - from Superman to Pepsi-Cola - spend millions testing, proving and marketing their logos, Eisner thought it was more challenging to change The Spirit 's masthead every week - for 12 years .
-- The Spirit was a fun, mature read, aimed at adults but accessible to kids.
-- And Eisner maintained ownership of The Spirit , something not even Stan Lee, creator of Spider-Man and the X-Men, managed.
For all of these reasons, The Spirit was published and reissued in various forms almost uninterrupted for 60 years. Its look, feel and wiseacre humor are timeless - if you enjoyed the Bruce Willis-Cybill Shepherd TV banter in Moonlighting, you'd appreciate it - and that accounts for the countless revivals.
Eisner, who went to high school with Batman creator Bob Kane, provided first jobs in the comics business to everyone from Jack Kirby (co-creator of Captain America and the Fantastic Four) and Joe Kubert (Tarzan, Fax From Sarajevo , Yossel: April 19, 1943 ) to Pulitzer-winning writer and artist Jules Feiffer.
"What Will did, as did Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates )," said Feiffer, whose first professional job was working in Eisner's studio, "was create an atmosphere that no one had ever seen before, a world of light and shadow, darks and grim darks. Will was much more Warner Bros. and Caniff was RKO or Columbia.
"But the two were consummate storytellers who wrote their own stuff, knew how to tell a story, create action and characters with more depth than anyone else. They both used silent panels to build up tension. And they did it brilliantly."
If not for Eisner's influence, Pulitzer Prize winner Art Spiegelman might never have published his graphic nove l Maus: A Survivor's Tale . (Eisner is credited with popularizing - if not inventing - the medium of the graphic novel with the 1978 publication of his graphic story collection, A Contract With God .) And fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay would have been missing quite a few Eisner-inspired tales.
As Eisner's authorized biographer, I spent the last three years with him in his studio and his home (he spent the last two decades of his life in Tamarac, near Fort Lauderdale). I pored through his substantial archives at the Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library and interviewed dozens of his colleagues, friends and family.
His work invigorated him until the end. In May 2004, I spent a day in Sarasota with Eisner at the Ringling School of Art and Design, where he was the featured speaker at the Comics Summit on Diversity. After he spent a full day on his feet, lecturing students and reviewing and offering comments on dozens of art portfolios, I drove him back to Tampa International Airport. On the way, instead of taking a nap as many 87-year-olds might, he excitedly told me he was starting work on his next instructional book, Expressive Anatomy .
Not surprising; almost every student he met received a personal lecture on the importance of studying anatomy. The book was mostly complete at the time of his death.
* * *
After he shut down The Spirit in 1952, Eisner created an Army preventive maintenance manual, PS, and oversaw it for 20 years. In PS, Eisner used comics to teach generations of military men from Korea to Vietnam how to repair and maintain their equipment. He also gave art instruction - informally in his studios, formally at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where his students included Ray Billingsley (Curtis), Patrick McDonnell (Mutts) and current Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Joe Quesada, who failed his class.
For comic book professionals, the highest honors in the industry are the Eisner Award, given out every summer at Comic-Con International in San Diego, and the Harvey Award, named for Eisner's late friend Harvey Kurtzman, the creator of Mad magazine and Playboy's "Little Annie Fanny," given every April in Pittsburgh.
When Eisner handed the 2002 Eisner Award for Best Serialized Story (Amazing Spider-Man ) to writer J. Michael Straczynski (creator of TV's Babylon 5 ), Straczynski thrust the award in the air and remarked, "You know, you get the Emmy, you don't get it from "Emmy.' You win the Oscar, you don't get it from "Oscar.' How freakin' cool is this?"
* * *
I became Eisner's biographer after a chance meeting with his agent in 2002. After a string of business books, I was interested in writing something fun, combining my lifelong interest in comics with a professional interest in biography.
I was with Eisner at his Tamarac studio in May 2004 as he finished the last page of what would be his last complete book, The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He was extremely excited about getting it into print.
"There will be a lot of challenges to this book," he said, anticipating the debate.
The Plot represents a new dimension in Eisner's storytelling. Where his last book, Fagin the Jew, took a supporting character from Charles Dickens ' Oliver Twist and gave him a life and legend of his own, The Plot represents his first nonfiction attack on antisemitism. It stems from his research into the origins of a book called The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Amazon.com categorizes Protocols as "controversial," along with books on UFOs and conspiracies.
Protocols, an inflammatory, untrue representation of Judaism, has circulated in the Arab world for decades, inflaming contempt for Jews and Israel. The "plot," as referred to in the title of Eisner's work, is the perpetration of this hoax as truth.
"I think it really remarkable that Will is ready to tackle some of the most pernicious and monstrous propaganda directly and accessibly," said Eisner's friend Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods. " "The Plot is what the Spirit might have done, if he could draw."
"The people who I want to read this are the people for whom Protocols of Zion is being published," Eisner said. "The whole purpose of The Plot , the only justification for doing it, is that this medium has the chance of being read by the people for whom Protocols was written. There are 10 books condemning Protocols, all by academics for sophisticated readers. Those are not the people who need to be told this book is a fraud. But in a graphic novel, I have a chance of capturing readers who never heard of this before."
Eisner insisted that any resemblance to a crusader is strictly coincidence. This was a man whose last consistent attendance at shul was when he became a bar mitzvah . He wasn't particularly religious.
"I am not in the business of promoting Jewish culture," he said. "I write about the things I know. I know about Jews. I don't consider myself any different than Faulkner, who wrote about the things he knew. I write about Jewish life, Jewish culture. If I were Irish, I would write about Irish people and culture. I consider myself a Jewish Frank McCourt."
* * *
In the quarter century since publication of Eisner's landmark graphic novel A Contract With God , there has been renewed interest in his work. At least five U.S. publishers have his books in print; foreign editions are too numerous to count.
A Contract With God was the first work in which Eisner consciously identified himself as Jewish. It is also the seminal work that many credit with taking comics - what Eisner preferred to dignify as "sequential art" - to a higher, more respected plane.
Eisner's most recent books brought the prestige that this former resident of what he called "the comic book ghetto" had sought all his life. He took great pride that mainstream publishers Doubleday (Fagin the Jew ) and W.W. Norton (The Plot ) - and not comic book publishers - had acquired his later work.
"It's an affirmation," he said. "I'm not writing to the 18-year-old kid who reads superheroes. It's a way of saying that I'm allowed in the company of the people who we regard as the cultural aristocracy."
W.W. Norton prides itself on publishing many of America's greatest writers.
"I think Will belongs in the same group," said Robert Weil, the Norton editor who acquired The Plot . "We're very honored to be publishing Will. I think people will embrace it. It's a subject not given enough attention. I don't see this as a Jewish book necessarily. I see it as a book for humanity that talks about prejudice and hate."
* * *
Will Eisner wasn't perfect, of course. Many former employees tell stories of his legendary thrift; he made scratch pads out of discarded scraps of paper and used pencil extenders to get the last atom of lead out. Once, his staff collected pencil stubs and presented him with a belt made of them.
And he endured family tragedies that explained why his agents made me promise not to press him for personal details when we began. One late night, sitting at his kitchen table, already past his bedtime, Eisner started talking about his daughter, who died of cancer in 1969.
"I know you need to know," he said, opening up like never before. He appreciated that I had been patient on the subject. The next morning, when his wife, Ann, heard what happened, it was if a great weight was lifted off both of them.
With 70 years of extraordinary work to his credit - and so many acts in his multifaceted career - Eisner was fortunate to be recognized and appreciated for his accomplishments in his lifetime. He knew the high esteem with which he was held, although he would never acknowledge it with more than a smile and a shrug.
He was the wizard behind the curtain, except in his case, the magic was real.
Bob Andelman lives in St. Petersburg. His book "Will Eisner: A Spirited Life' will be published in May by Dark Horse Comics' new M Press imprint.
