Will Eisner (10 page)

When they had formed their company, Bill Eisner and Jerry Iger had a formal buyout provision written into their partnership agreement. According to the contract, if one partner wished to opt out of the company, he was required to offer his partner the chance to buy him out at an agreed-upon price. Eisner and Iger talked it over and decided that Iger would keep the company at a $20,000 purchase price—a decent return on Eisner’s original investment by anyone’s standards. In addition, Eisner relinquished ownership of all the characters he had created at Eisner & Iger, including Sheena and the cast of
Hawks of the Seas
. When he left Eisner & Iger, he would truly be starting from scratch.

At first glance, it might appear that Eisner, who prided himself on his business acumen, might have been taken on the deal—and Iger would present it that way when he talked about the breakup in the future. The buyout price that Eisner received was undoubtedly lower than the company’s market value, and Iger now controlled all the characters that Eisner had created during his time with the company. Eisner, however, walked away with three invaluable assets when Jerry Iger agreed to let him take Lou Fine, Bob Powell, and Chuck Mazoujian with him. In effect, Eisner had raided the shop for its best artists.

It hadn’t been easy. Iger had an eye for talent, and at a time when comic book companies, shops and publishers alike, were making sport out of raiding each other’s bullpens, Iger was sensitive about losing his staff to Eisner or anyone else. When word spread about his leaving, Eisner was approached by most of the artists working for him, all wishing to be part of the new enterprise. Knowing that he’d be permitted to take only a few men with him, Eisner held hushed, confidential meetings with the ones he hoped to employ.

“There were a few tight-lipped moments then, because talent was very precious,” Eisner said. “Bodies were being traded back and forth. Some people wanted to go with me, but I had to say, ‘You can’t come with me because Iger will be mad.’”

Eisner moved quickly in setting up his new shop. He found a two-room, fifth-floor apartment at 5 Tudor City on Manhattan’s East Side and installed his bullpen in its large living room. He used the bedroom for his office. Quarters were tight, especially when Eisner began hiring other artists to complement the staff he’d brought over from Eisner & Iger, but nowhere near as cramped as the conditions when he and Jerry Iger had opened their first shop in what was little more than a large closet.

Eisner’s ideas for the Sunday comic book were starting to take shape. The format had already been determined in his earlier conversation with Busy Arnold and Henry Martin. The book would be sixteen pages long and have a self-contained cover. There would be three weekly features; Eisner figured the main story, which he would handle himself, would run eight pages, with the two other features sharing the remaining eight. All three entries would be detective stories, in one form or another, that would be appealing to both young and adult readers. Bob Powell and Chuck Mazoujian would handle the other two installments, while Lou Fine and the rest of the staff worked on the other books for Quality Comics.

At the drawing board in his Tudor City studio. (Will Eisner Collection, the Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum)

The character anchoring the comic book took months to develop, mainly because Eisner set the bar so high when he mapped out his goals for the feature. In his main character, he was trying to accommodate two conflicting ideas: since he wanted to concentrate on story rather than character, his hero should be able to blend almost unnoticed into each week’s story line, yet at the same time, that central figure had to be strong enough to make readers return week after week. He wanted an entirely human character, a hero operating without superpowers or even a weapon, a detective fallible enough to make mistakes and take a licking as he worked on solving a case. He would live outside the law, as adventurers often do, but honor it enough to devote his life to maintaining justice and order.

“When I decided upon [the character], I worked from the inside out, you might say,” Eisner explained. “That is, I thought first of his personality—the kind of man he was to be, how he would look at problems, how he would feel about life, the sort of mind he would have. When that was worked out, I didn’t have to imagine him as a person. I began to see him. Handsome, obviously, and powerfully built, but not one of those impossibly big, thick-legged brutes. He was to be the kind of man a child could conceive of seeing on the street.”

The character’s name—Denny Colt—was easy to come up with. It was an easy name to remember, and it had an All-American sports hero ring to it. To give him a personality, Eisner returned to the characters he enjoyed in his boyhood reading and to Hollywood leading men. In Sherlock Holmes, for example, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had created just the type of character that Eisner had in mind.

“You read Sherlock Holmes stories for the stories,” he explained years later. “The stories endure, not the idea of a super-detective.”

Holmes, however, was a little too stodgy, a little too invincible in his powers of deduction and detective work, to be the only basis for Eisner’s new hero. He hoped to inject a healthy dose of humor into his feature, an element so clearly absent in the superhero comics that Eisner saw every month on the stands.

“I didn’t want him to be a conventional hero,” he would insist. “I wanted him to be like James Garner in
Maverick
, which came much later. I wanted [Denny Colt] to have the appearance of a character who was strong and capable and yet very vulnerable, and even a little clownish.”

Cary Grant, who was rising in popularity with such movies as
Topper
,
Bringing Up Baby
,
Holiday
, and
Only Angels Have Wings
, seemed to be an ideal model for the combination of humor and drama that Eisner was seeking.

“I like using what I consider to be a Cary Grant type of humor, where the big, strong, masculine guy is clowning around,” he explained. “At the same time, he never lost a bit of his heroism. One of the wonderful things about doing [the book] is that I never had to say to myself, ‘Well, he really wouldn’t do this,’ because I know the only thing he wouldn’t do is take himself seriously.”

Eisner was pleased with the way his character was developing. Unfortunately, his partners were not. This was not the type of character they bargained for when they’d met for lunch. Denny Colt didn’t at all resemble the comic book heroes taking the country by storm. Where, for instance, was his costume?

Eisner promised to work on it, but he’d reached a dead end. He’d come up with costumed—or, at least, exotically dressed—characters for the supplement’s other features:
Mr. Mystic
, little more than a knockoff of Eisner’s earlier
Yarko the Great
, and
Lady Luck
, a blond female answer to Denny Colt. Lady Luck wore a cursory costume (featuring an oversize green hat), had no superpowers, and seemed to stumble onto her adventures as much by accident as by design. The character’s looks, Chuck Mazoujian would remember, were “patterned after [his] wife.”

But Denny Colt, Eisner had to admit, was missing something. There was nothing unusual about him. As things stood, he was just another detective, which might have been great for the types of stories Eisner wanted to tell, but he also failed to distinguish himself from the pulp or comic characters of the past—characters that had made their run and disappeared. Eisner, unaccustomed to having to strain to come up with usable ideas, was stumped.

Busy Arnold’s calls to Eisner became increasingly concerned, but he didn’t offer any sage suggestions, either, until he called Eisner in the wee hours of one morning after a night in a bar.

“He suggested a kind of ghost or some kind of metaphysical character,” Eisner recalled. “He said, ‘How about a thing called The Ghost?’ and I said, ‘Naw, that’s not any good,’ and he said, ‘Well then call it The Spirit; there’s nothing like that around.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know what you mean,’ and he said, ‘Well, you can figure that out—I just like the words, ‘The Spirit.’”

Then, during another late night call, he inquired about the character’s costume. Eisner had been avoiding the topic whenever he discussed the feature with Arnold, but now he felt trapped into an answer. Fortunately, he was sitting at his drawing board when Arnold called, and he improvised while they talked.

“He’s got a mask,” he told Arnold, drawing a mask on the character’s face.

“That’s good.” Was there anything else?

“He’s got gloves and a blue suit.”

Eisner hated the idea even as he mentioned it to Busy Arnold. He didn’t want to create a character like Batman or Superman—a superhero with a secret identity—because the dual identities would shift the focus from story back to character. The Spirit’s dual lives would need to be explained. On top of that, there were bound to be credibility problems if the Spirit was seen only in his mask, as Eisner favored. “When you draw a character walking down the subway wearing a mask and a blue suit, and he’s being ignored or accepted by the people in the subway—that’s a little far-fetched.”

In the end, the Spirit’s origins, as Eisner presented them in his first installment, were more than a little far-fetched. Denny Colt, a detective friend of Police Commissioner Eustace Dolan, is seriously injured while battling Dr. Cobra, a demented scientist who’s designed a secret formula that he intends to use to poison New York’s water supply. During a struggle in Dr. Cobra’s lair, Colt is doused with the formula, which leaves him in a state of suspended animation. Everyone, including the coroner, mistakes him for dead. He’s interred in a vault in the Wildwood Cemetery on the outskirts of town. On the night after his burial, he awakens and somehow manages to dig himself out of his grave. He builds a secret underground hideout beneath his burial vault, devises his disguise, and pays Dolan a visit at the police station. Dolan sees through the disguise—for some reason, he’s the only person capable of doing so—and Colt tells him that as the Spirit, he will be able to work outside the law in his efforts to fight the bad guys.

The mysterious and unlikely origins, the mask, the very public crime fighter walking down the streets of New York, night and day, always in costume, unnoticed—all demanded a suspension of belief that worked against Eisner’s goal of writing for adults, who would have demanded something plausible. But somehow, despite his worries, he got away with it.

“It’s an interesting point to make about the medium,” he allowed. “Had this been done in film, there would have been hooting and hollering from the audience. There would be laughter. But through all the years, no one ever called me on it. No one ever wrote me a letter saying, ‘You expect me to believe this guy would do this wearing a mask?’”

Readers, Eisner learned, were not unlike audiences at a magic show: they would overlook sleight of hand if the trick was good enough. Readers were willing to suspend belief if they cared enough about the characters and the stories were strong. After a slow start, in which characters and stories weren’t that different from the others, Eisner began to build his readers’ trust. Commissioner Dolan, the father figure, was stern but fair, a man totally dedicated to the law but in need of help in maintaining it, a man who on occasion could get in the Spirit’s way and on other occasions became a strong ally. Dolan’s daughter, Ellen, a beautiful blond “girl next door,” became the Spirit’s love interest, but for Eisner she was a continual work in progress, intelligent enough to eventually run for mayor of Central City, flawed enough to find herself in trouble and in need of rescue. Ebony White, the Spirit’s African-American sidekick, started out as a bit player, a cabdriver who showed up to give the Spirit a ride; but Eisner developed him to the point of his becoming the Spirit’s most trusted assistant, an essential ingredient to many stories—and, in fact, the central character in a handful of them. All three characters began as little more than stereotypes, as figures that needed to be kept simple in order for readers to learn what they needed to know about the Spirit, but all evolved significantly during the Spirit’s newspaper run.

Setting became a vital component to the storytelling. Eisner devoted great care in setting his stories in an environment that his readers could identify with. There was standing water in the streets, paper and other refuse on the sidewalks, elevated tracks and subway cars that represented the constant motion of the city, and people everywhere, all looking as if their biggest accomplishment might be surviving from one day to the next. This was
Eisner’s
city, the city he had grown up in as well as the city he created for his stories, but it was also the city of his readers, whether they resided in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, or Chicago. Astonishing events could occur at any time, day or night, but readers knew to expect the unlikely in their cities. Since this was their reality, why wouldn’t they accept a masked hero coming to their aid?