Will Eisner (14 page)

“What arguments do you use in the quest for voluntary cooperation?” Eisner asked rhetorically when trying to explain how he developed Joe Dope to fit the army’s new preventive maintenance program. “Well, you use the threat of death. Death or physical harm. You say to a guy, ‘If you don’t put air in your tires, one of these days you’ll be in combat and you’ll get a flat tire and you won’t be able to escape—and it’ll be your ass, buddy!’ That was the first step. Then, if you carry it on, you can create another image that people don’t want to face, another threat, and that is looking like a fool among their peers. That is how Joe Dope was created, on those grounds.”

Eisner concocted other characters to complement Joe Dope in the strip and in other sections of the magazine: Sergeant Half-Mast, a mechanic nearly as inept as Joe Dope, who also had an advice column; Private Fosgnoff, Dope’s closest buddy; and Connie Rodd, a shapely, irresistible mechanic who had her own column, “Connie’s Bulletin Board,” devoted to keeping readers informed on equipment changes and upgrades. The characters, although clever and serving specific functions, had to walk a tight line between being entertaining and informative. The army frowned upon material that made it look as if it couldn’t train its personnel, and it strictly forbade anything that ridiculed its policies or officers. The characters’ foibles had to be individual flaws that even the army, at its very best, couldn’t overcome.

Readers responded favorably to Eisner’s early efforts in
Army Motors
, and Eisner had barely settled in at Holabird before he was on the move again, this time to Washington D.C., to work under General Levin H. Campbell, the army’s chief of ordnance. Eisner had clearly impressed the army’s top brass: he was headed to the Pentagon.

The popularity of comic books reached an all-time high during the war years. They no longer appealed only to the adenoidal cretins of Kansas City; they also belonged to those kids’ older brothers or cousins or uncles, the ones donning uniforms and trying to win a war that, by the beginning of 1943, had no end in sight. GIs came from all over the United States, from different backgrounds and educational levels, and they loved comics—so much so that by the end of 1942, three out of every ten pieces of mail shipped overseas to soldiers were comics. Eisner guessed correctly when he predicted, during his discussions with his editors at
Army Motors
, that servicemen would connect to comics.

The producers of comics, on the lookout for new readers, adapted to this new, more mature readership. Bundles of superhero comics still rolled off the presses every month, but new comic books featuring solders, detectives, and, more popular yet, sexy, barely clothed women appeared almost overnight, hitting readers on a more visceral level. Competition among publishers was greater than ever. Genre comics featuring tales from outer space, shoot-outs in the Old West, accounts of gangsters and the men who hunted them—the direct descendants of the pulp magazines, now aimed at young people flooding the movie theaters and listening to radio serials—continued to turn up and, in most cases, just as quickly disappear. With the government rationing paper and zinc (used in making printing plates), publishers could ill afford to wait for readers to catch on to their latest offerings. Comic book publishers, like book publishers, preferred to shepherd their resources into surefire titles rather than risk limited supplies on experiments. As a result, the actual number of available monthly titles decreased over the war years, even though the overall number of printed comic books increased.

One new detective title,
Crime Does Not Pay
, a true-crime entry with more sex, violence, gore, and mayhem than ever seen in a comic book, made a huge splash during the war years. That America loved crime stories was hardly a revelation; the obsession with crime and punishment dated back to the Wild West and never abated. The country was fascinated by, and even glamorized, its outlaws, from Billy the Kid and the James brothers to Al Capone and Pretty Boy Floyd. That fascination had been exploited to great success in the cinema, through characters portrayed by Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, and others, and in books and pulp magazines. Comics, including
The Spirit
, had presented a wide range of stories not involving superheroes, but since the target audience of these comic books was the young reader, publishers and editors self-regulated their books’ content. It was permissible to have beginning-to-end, panel-to-panel, sock-’em-up action, and people (usually the bad guys) could die over the course of all the violence; but there were limits to blood and gore, depictions of shootings and stabbings, and close-ups of fallen bodies. Sex, of course, was strictly off-limits, and artists could strip down their characters only so far, usually to what amounted to little more than their underwear, but it had better stop at that point. Artists were always happy to push their limits, but they knew when they literally had to draw the line.

Crime Does Not Pay
went beyond those customary boundaries. Characters were sprayed by machine-gun fire at point-blank range; the pools of blood looked like small lakes. The more realistic and detailed the better. The comic’s first cover depicted, in extreme close-up and full color, a knife blade driven through a hand, pinning it to a table. Only two rules seemed to apply: The stories had to be true, or at least within screaming distance of it; and the criminals had to be punished, by prison or death, by the end of the stories. But between the beginning and retribution, it was anything goes.

Crime, it turned out, paid by the boatload.
Crime Does Not Pay
flew off the newsstands and drugstore shelves, with a huge percentage of sales going to soldiers overseas. Over the next decade, imitators would pop up everywhere, and they, along with a line of horror comics offering increasingly gruesome tales, would lead to a showdown between publishers and citizen groups, church organizations, and lawmakers, with predictable but disturbing results

The war provided an ideal link among comic book readers of all ages and backgrounds. Patriotism—and the deep hatred for Germany and Japan—swept over the country, creating an urgent
need
—a need for involvement, a need for bravery, a need for victory over the forces of evil—and who better to offer a temporary gleam of security than heroic figures in comic books? Comic book publishers understood this, and before the war was over, it seemed as if every superhero in the business had brushed up against the enemy. New heroes with such names as Mr. Liberty, the Defender, the Liberator, the American Crusader, and the Fightin’ Yank sprang up.

Few characters—or names, for that matter—pounced on the patriotic fervor like Captain America, the red-white-and-blue-clad superhero created by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon.
Captain America Comics
, issued by Timely, turned up in early 1941, before Pearl Harbor but at a time when frustrated Americans were impatiently awaiting their country’s inevitable entry into the war.

“Captain America was created for a time that needed noble figures,” Kirby explained. “We weren’t at war yet, but everyone knew it was coming. That’s why Captain America was born; America needed a superpatriot.” The costume, Kirby went on, was carefully designed to plug into the patriotism. “Drape the flag on anything, and it looks great,” he said. “We gave him a chain mail shirt and shield, like a modern-day crusader. The wings on his helmet were from Mercury … He symbolized the American dream.”

Captain America could sock Hitler in the jaw or take on a platoon of Nazis and escape unscathed; in short, he was the fulfillment of many Americans’ aching fantasies.

“Here was the arch villain of all time,” Simon wrote of Hitler in his autobiography,
The Comic Book Makers
.

Adolf Hitler and his Gestapo bully-boys were real. There never had been a truly believable villain in comics. But Adolf was live, hated by more than half the world. What a natural foil he was, with his comical moustache, the ridiculous cowlick, his swaggering goose-stepping minions eager to jump off a plane if their mad little leader ordered it … I could smell a winner.

Unbeknownst to the producers of superhero comics, interest in the costumed crusaders had reached its peak and was about to decline. Older readers—the targets of this brand of comics only a few years earlier—were losing interest in muscle-bound men in tights, capes, masks and secret identities. Their fantasies were turning elsewhere, to more grown-up faire. Watching a grown man and his teenage sidekick wasn’t nearly as compelling as following the stories of well-proportioned young women squeezed into skimpy outfits and placed in harm’s way. It was a no-lose scenario: if the woman was strong and capable of taking care of herself, it tripped fantasy triggers everywhere; if the woman was a traditional damsel in distress, in need of a brave young man to save her and, ultimately, claim his reward … well, that was good, too. You didn’t have to hold a degree in psychology to figure this out or to appreciate how a reader, now in his early twenties, might find it a little unrealistic to see a virile young man so immersed in saving the world that he fails to notice (or at least interact seriously with) a world of beautiful young women surrounding him.

It was, in fact, a Harvard-educated, middle-aged pop psychologist who created Wonder Woman, the most enduring female superheroine to rise out of comics’ Golden Age. Dr. William Moulton Marston, an eccentric pop psychologist and author, collected credentials the way others collected stamps or coins, and he was just marginally good enough at each of them to have credibility. He’d been instrumental in the development of the polygraph machine, and using his background in psychology, he’d written for
Family Circle
and sat on DC’s advisory board. Now, writing under the name of Charles Moulton, he joined with abandon a medium that, in the not-too-distant past, he himself had criticized as being too darkly violent. His Wonder Woman, who made her debut in DC’s
All Star Comics
in 1941, was as much dominatrix as superhero, using a golden lasso and bracelets of submission in her battle with evildoers while oozing a sensuality that appealed to teenagers and young adult readers alike. An Amazon of incredible strength and agility, Wonder Woman was also erotic and vulnerable. Her adventures, filled with tools of bondage ranging from her golden lasso to whips, chains, and ropes, bore a not-so-subtle S&M underpinning designed to hold older readers’ interest and had enough uncovered skin to keep young boys turning the pages as well. You could have your heroine and those closest to her bound and beaten, tortured and berated, you could open an industrial-sized can of heavy-duty whup-ass on her, and all was well if, by the final panel, the forces of good came away victorious. Or as Marston would have you believe, there was a lesson buried somewhere in all that mayhem that males of the species would do well to hold close to their hearts: “Only when the control of self by others is more pleasant than the unbound assertion of self in human relationships can we hope for a stable, peaceful human society.”

If Marston and DC believed they were issuing a superhero comic book geared to older male readers who might pick up this strange message, or to young female readers looking for an alternative to the male superheroes, they learned otherwise very quickly. According to the market numbers, nine out of ten buyers of comic books containing Wonder Woman stories were teenage boys.

Girls apparently wanted something more wholesome, featuring characters they could identify with rather than fantasize about, and they were rewarded with two such characters at almost the precise moment Wonder Woman was taking off. The two girls, named Betty and Veronica, while attractive enough, looked and dressed a lot like typical high schoolers, dealt with teenage problems like parents, teachers, and dating, and wouldn’t have known what to do with superpowers if they had them. The girls were the brainchild of cartoonist Bob Montana, who cast them as competing love interests for his main character, Archie Andrews, a redheaded teen who took his first comic book bow in December 1941 in MLJ’s
Pep Comics
. Archie, Betty, Veronica, and Archie’s bumbling friend, Jughead, caught on as soon as they were introduced to readers, and by the end of the war, Archie had his own eponymous comic book. If Robin, Bucky, and other teenage sidekicks to superheroes were the good-looking, athletically built, street-savvy teenagers that kids wished they could be, Archie and company were the teenagers they already
were
—and, increasingly, they were the success that some superhero comics wished they could be, too.

Will Eisner tracked these developments from his Washington, D.C., office. Even though he was nose down at work, producing a mass of material for the army, he made a point of checking out the daily strips and monthly comic books, watching for trends, trying to calculate the next big thing. This would become a personal trademark, a practice he would employ well into his eighties. While colleagues might be content to complete an assignment and move on to the next one, or stick with one character or style for decades, Eisner wanted to be nothing less than part of the cutting edge defining the direction of comics. His colleagues had laughed at him when he insisted that comics could serve a higher purpose than mere entertainment, that they could be a new form of literature, and he was determined to prove them wrong. To do this, he had to fully grasp both art and market, and the war couldn’t be a deterrent to his education. He’d be going home someday, and he wanted to be ready.

His work in
Army Motors
and, in Washington, D.C.,
Firepower
(a publication used to boost morale, issued by a citizen group, Army Ordnance Associates) prepared him for his return to civilian life in ways he never could have predicted. Before the war, from his experiences as a businessman, Eisner had learned how to work with customers with whom he didn’t always agree, with know-it-alls who knew very little about art but pretended they did. In civilian life, strangely enough, the chain of command was clearly defined, and Eisner worked well in it. The army was different. Personal ambition and politics could make dealing with different offices a challenge. No one knew a lick about art—or even wanted to know about art—but that didn’t prevent an officer from weighing in on how a new type of art—comics—could be applied to a new type of policy: preventive maintenance.