Will Eisner (12 page)

These kinds of disputes weren’t rare. The shop system, with the open exchange of ideas and the practice of having several people working on a single feature (often under one name, no matter who came up with the work’s ideas), invited such disagreements. As head of his studio and its main idea generator, Eisner would usually dream up a basic idea, do rough pencil sketches of the new feature’s main characters, discuss it with several artists in the shop, and, if he didn’t want to develop the feature himself, assign it to another artist. Cuidera did more work on
Blackhawk
than Eisner, and he felt cheated when he didn’t get the acknowledgment he felt he deserved for his contributions. As the years passed and Eisner’s fame grew, Cuidera became more insistent and louder about his claims that Eisner had stolen credit for Cuidera’s own creation.

Eisner refused to be pulled into the dispute. He remembered the ugly, drawn-out war between the paranoid Ham Fisher and his onetime assistant Al Capp, in which Fisher accused Capp of lifting some of his characters for his
Li’l Abner
strip while Capp worked for Fisher. The fight had severely damaged Fisher’s standing as a cartoonist. Eisner had nothing to gain by tangling with Cuidera, but after hearing some of the things Cuidera was saying about him and his shop, he wasn’t inclined to be generous in his assessment of the situation, either.

Their public tangle lasted for nearly six decades after
Blackhawk
made its first appearance on the stands. Finally, in 1999, Eisner and Cuidera sat together on a panel conceived and hosted by comics writer and historian Mark Evanier at the San Diego Comic-Con. Evanier, well versed on the history of the feud, had hoped that the panel would settle the issue once and for all.

“It always struck me that Will’s wording, whenever he talked about it, was ambiguous,” Evanier explained. “He never said he did; he never said he didn’t. On the panel I asked him four different times who created
Blackhawk
, and I never got an answer. Will was not going to say the words
Chuck created it
, nor was he going to say the words
I created it
. He chose to keep it ambiguous, to protect his future options, which I thought was a very savvy thing to do.”

The dispute appeared to be settled when Cuidera, seated next to Eisner and apparently in a conciliatory mood, said, point-blank to those attending the panel session: “He’s the guy who started it all, the guy next to me. Believe me.”

Eisner, who might have been forgiven if he’d chosen to bypass the convention panel in the first place, was relieved. “After the panel, Will came up to me and thanked me for organizing it,” Evanier recalled. “He felt he had some unresolved problems with Chuck, and he was very happy to have dealt with them.

“There is no universally accepted definition of the word
creator
in comics, and there are arguable claims, especially in cases where guys were working in a shop arrangement. What I think happened here was Chuck made a massive contribution which you could argue was creation, and Will made a massive contribution that you could argue was creation. If Will was not willing to concede the word
creator
to Chuck, I wasn’t going to drag it out of him. I thought Will was very smart about the way he handled it. He wasn’t endorsing what Chuck did. He praised Chuck and talked about how great he was, and he gave Chuck his dignity, because Chuck was a celebrity at the convention because of his association with Will. I was happy with how it came out.”

Despite the outward appearance of a reconciliation, Cuidera remained bitter for the rest of his life. Two days before his death in 2001, in an
Alter Ego
magazine interview with comics historian Jim Amash, Cuidera was still taking the offensive, attacking Eisner and holding firm to his previous statements about his role in comics history.

“I created
Blackhawk
before I met Will Eisner,” he declared. “Eisner had nothing to do with creating
Blackhawk
. When Bob Powell got me to come over to Eisner, I had already started creating
Blackhawk
. I finished creating it when Will Eisner was down South hunting. With the second or third
Blackhawk
story, the feature took off and even outsold
Batman
.”

Blackhawk
was but one of many new titles issued from Eisner’s shop.
Doll Man
,
Uncle Sam
,
The Ray
,
Black Condor
—in almost every case, Eisner came up with the idea, sketched out characters, wrote the first episode or two, and even did early covers. Tacked on to his duties on
The Spirit
, which required him to produce more than a page of new material per day, plan new episodes, and oversee the work on the weekly comic book’s other two stories, the workload drained him of his prodigious energy and pulled his creative mind in every imaginable direction. Producing a weekly sixteen-page comic book and a couple of monthly newsstand books might have seemed well within reach when an ambitious young Will Eisner formed his partnership with Busy Arnold, but after trying to hold up under the continual production demands, he was so overwhelmed that by late 1940, he actually started rerouting work to Jerry Iger’s shop.

But there was always more.
Superman
had been so successful as a monthly entry in
Action Comics
(and, not long thereafter, in its own self-titled book as well) that it was now appearing as a daily newspaper strip. When presented with the same opportunity for
The Spirit
, Eisner jumped at the chance. In hindsight, it proved to be a questionable decision. The weekly newspaper installments required a short story writer’s thought process; each eight-page story had a beginning, middle, and end, with an entirely different type of pacing from that which Eisner faced with a daily strip. Eisner, quite naturally, coveted the respect garnered the daily newspaper comic strip artists, but as soon as his first
Spirit
daily started up on Monday, October 13, 1941, he began second-guessing himself.

“I wasn’t ready to do dailies, because I had never done a big-time daily before,” he recalled. “To me it’s like trying to conduct an orchestra in a telephone booth.” The syndicate, he explained, believed that the daily strip would be a natural extension of the Sunday comic, but the experimentation Eisner was attempting on Sunday didn’t translate well into the daily installments. “The dailies weren’t doing all that well, because I was trying all these weird ideas, like a whole daily strip with nothing but footprints in the snow and so forth.”

Eisner also learned that the daily strip left him little room to develop his characters.
The Spirit
had been a work in progress all along, with Eisner tinkering with his title character and supporting cast on a week-to-week basis, fine-tuning as he learned more about them. Daily strips discouraged this. Readers demanded consistency.

“I discovered that daily strips would not allow the artist to experiment and grow, necessarily,” Eisner told Danny Fingeroth in 2003 when reflecting on the daily. “If you look at the daily strips over the years, the ones that have survived for 50 years, they’re pretty much the same as they were when they started.”

In the beginning, the daily strip needed a promotional boost, and Eisner often found himself on the road with a salesman, hawking the merits of the new feature. As Eisner later recalled, the salesman valued his presence during meetings with an editor.

“It gave him something to pitch—he could have a dog-and-pony act,” Eisner said. “Salesmen would use something like that as a way to see the editors who might not want to see a salesman, but might want to meet an artist.”

The ploy backfired on at least one occasion, when Eisner and a salesman were visiting the editor of a New Jersey newspaper. The editor looked at a sample of the daily strip, listened to the salesman’s pitch, and agreed that it would be a suitable feature for his paper.

The editor opened up the paper to his comics page, looked down at it, then looked at the salesman and me, and said, “Well, which one should I drop? I’ve got to drop one to carry
The Spirit
.” The salesman and the editor both looked at me and said, “What do you think?” I was dismayed, thinking, “My God, they’ve asking me to stab another cartoonist in the back.” Here I am, a kid of 23 with all these ideals, and I’m being introduced to the harsh realities of the world. It never occurred to me that to take my strip he’d have to sink another strip. I shifted from foot to foot, and finally my eye lit on
Buck Rogers
, which, as far as I was concerned, was an old strip, so I pointed it out and said, “Here’s a strip that’s old hat. The idea of science fiction is kind of passé now, because we’re in the ’40s and there’s a war on.”

The editor said, “Yeah! That space-travel business is for yesterday. Let’s drop that and put
The Spirit
in.” I’ve always felt guilty about doing that to
Buck Rogers
, but that was my introduction into the business world of comics.

The daily strip’s appearance gave Eisner his first big splash of publicity when one of the subscribing newspapers, the
Philadelphia Record
, published a full-page profile that ran the opening day of the strip. Eisner traveled to Philadelphia for the interview and to pose for photographs, including a photo of him sitting at a drawing board, inking a large head shot of the Spirit, and another with Eisner, one of the
Record
’s editors, and Busy Arnold, also in the city for the unveiling of the strip, in which Eisner is seated at a drawing board and the editor stands behind him, threatening to smack him with a yardstick, while Arnold stands by in bemusement. The profile, standard fare for newspapers, was exceptional in one respect: Eisner became perhaps the first comics artist to publicly state (although he was not quoted directly) that he thought comics could be more than just entertainment.

The comic strip, [Eisner] explains, is no longer a comic strip but, in reality, an illustrated novel. It is new and raw in form just now, but material for limitless intelligent development. And eventually and inevitably it will be a legitimate medium for the best of writers and artists.

“There was no precedent for that interview with the
Philadelphia Record
,” David Hajdu remarked more than a half century later, long after Eisner’s words proved to be prophetic. “He not only believed in comics as a legitimate art form as early as the 1940s, but he had the guts, the
chutzpah
, to say so publicly, in print, on the record. He was utterly unique in his eagerness to champion this art in public.”

Eisner’s statements would have been bold predictions for a well-established comic book artist with clout in the industry, but coming from a twenty-four-year-old, virtually unknown to anyone but his peers in the business, they came across as brash and a tad highbrow. Rube Goldberg would confront Eisner at a National Cartoonists Society meeting in New York, dismissing Eisner’s beliefs in the literary potential of comics as so much hogwash. “We’re vaudevillians,” Goldberg admonished Eisner. “Never forget that. We tell jokes!”

As Eisner recalled, his colleagues found the statements funny: “I got back into New York and the kids in the shops kept laughing and saying, ‘We read that, are you trying to be uppity?’ Nobody really believed that this was what it later on seemed to prove itself to be, which is a true means of expression, story, and idea.”

He would never waver from these beliefs.

Eisner’s relationship with Busy Arnold deteriorated in the wake of the Bob Powell dustup. The two remained cordial, but Eisner found Arnold’s meddling almost intolerable. A day didn’t pass without the arrival of a piece of mail, a memo, or a call from Arnold’s office in Stamford. Eisner had no choice but to take whatever Arnold dished out when he complained about misspellings and typos and inconsistencies in the comics—and there were enough of these to raise the hackles of the most even-tempered editor.

“Here is a terrible example of the terrible work your staff is doing,” Arnold scolded in his usual overstated style. “In one panel of ‘Lady Luck,’ Lady Luck and another man are in a rowboat. In the next panel, there are two men in the boat with Lady Luck. How about checking more carefully?”

Six days later, Arnold was on Eisner again, this time for the sloppy proofreading in the first issue of
Uncle Sam
: “There are at least 200 mistakes in spelling in the entire book and the same applies to
Doll Man Quarterly
. In this book your boys didn’t even spell a word the same way twice in a row.”

How much of this is true and how much exaggerated is impossible to tell, since the original art no longer exists. In interviews, Eisner acknowledged that such problems did occur and that he had no choice but to hear out Arnold’s criticism and pass it along to the responsible parties. Arnold, he’d concede, was the first to hear from disgruntled newspaper editors who in less than subtle terms pointed out problems that could have easily been avoided.

“Whenever anyone complained about
The Spirit
,” Eisner said, “Busy took the brunt of the criticism and then he passed it along to me. It was his idea to ‘shake Bill up,’ as he put it. He was like the fight manager and I was his boxer, his creation. That’s what it was like.”

Eisner was less agreeable when Arnold attacked the artwork in the different publications. He wasn’t happy to hear Arnold’s familiar complaints about less than perfect borders—one of Arnold’s pet peeves—but statements such as “I can get good second- and third-rate independent artists who are superior to the ones you hired,” or “Nick [Cardy] has too many far shots and not enough close-ups,” or on a more personal level, “The last eight pages of
The Spirit
looked like they had been hammered out in no time and the job looked second-rate,” did nothing to improve Eisner’s disregard for Arnold’s lack of knowledge of comics art. He respected Arnold’s business experience, as he had Jerry Iger’s, but, as he liked to point out, Arnold’s appreciation of art was linked directly to how much it sold.