Will Eisner (15 page)

“During the war, I had continually been in a battle with the adjutant general who was in charge of all technical manuals,” Eisner would remember. “He regarded me as creating a kind of blasphemy because I was introducing comics into what he regarded as a very stabilized form of technical manual. Every time they tested what I produced, however, we came out way ahead of what they would produce.”

The testing was an important victory, affirming Eisner’s faith in comics as an educational tool. The adjutant general had sent copies of the standard technical manuals and of Eisner’s new versions to the University of Chicago, to be assessed by a group of actual readers. Eisner’s manuals, the study concluded, were easier to read, to understand, and, perhaps most important, to remember.

As rewarding as this victory was to Eisner personally, he still might not have pulled it off if he hadn’t used the diplomacy he’d learned in business. “I had to assure the adjutant general that what we were doing would not replace these technical manuals, only supplement and enhance them,” he said.

Eisner discovered that he enjoyed dividing his creative energy among the different kinds of duties and publications assigned him by the army, whether they involved designing a poster for general distribution, a
Joe Dope
strip for
Army Motors
, a technical manual for the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps, or illustrations for articles in
Firepower
. He easily adjusted to the requirements and demands of the different types of work, and the variety added depth to his art. Up until his entry into the service, in all the years he’d devoted to producing commercial comic book material, Eisner had been anchored to an assembly-line style of planning and production and to a broad target audience ranging in age from adolescent to adult, and despite his many innovations, this limited the range of his art; most notably, before the army he was responsible only for entertaining. His work in the army extended his range of style, point of view, and narrative—all of which served him well when he returned to commercial comics after the war and, later, when he worked extensively in educational comics.

But perhaps more significant than its broadening of his talent, Eisner’s time in the army broadened his life beyond comics. It was a badly needed escape from New York, his family, and his very limited social life. He still kept in close contact with his family—especially when his brother, Pete, was drafted and he tried to use his connections at the Pentagon to keep Pete out of harm’s way, or when a financial crisis demanded his help with the bills—but his physical removal from New York gave him room to grow. He had his own apartment, a new set of friends, and, toward the end of the war, his first serious relationship with a woman.

The woman’s name was Leona, and not surprisingly, Eisner met her through work.
Army Motors
had moved its offices to Detroit, ostensibly to be closer to the companies manufacturing the trucks, tanks, and other vehicles used in the war effort, and Eisner often traveled to Detroit to work on assignments or deliver artwork for the magazine. Leona worked as a staff writer for
Army Motors
, and she immediately caught Eisner’s eye because, as Eisner explained to biographer Bob Andelman, she was not only “blonde, slim, and attractive, a gung-ho girl,” she was also strong, independent, and intelligent. “She caught my eye because she was one of the staff writers who would go out to the testing field and drive two-ton trucks around.”

Like so many wartime romances, this one was doomed by time and geography. The two saw each other whenever Eisner was in Detroit, which was often enough, and while they fell in love and even spoke of marriage, both understood the reality of their situation: he was a Jewish comic book artist from New York, she a Gentile writer from Detroit, and the war was going to end sooner or later. It wasn’t going anywhere. But while they waited for the war to end, they went ballroom dancing and enjoyed going nowhere, together.

chapter six

F L I G H T

I want to get my reader by his lapels, and I want to make him think and I want to make him cry because of what I’m telling him.

T
he war
did
end, and Eisner was discharged from the army. He had reason to be both relieved and optimistic about the days ahead. His fears about the fate of his career had been unfounded, and
The Spirit
, in a holding pattern while he was away, awaited his attention.

Eisner had a new perspective that he was prepared to apply to
The Spirit
, and it was evident in the feature. Later, much would be made about the dramatic difference between the prewar and postwar
Spirit
s. Eisner felt, as did most critics and comics historians, that the postwar
Spirit
was more mature and experimental, better executed, and ultimately more fully realized, with stronger supporting characters and stories, than the work he’d done on the series before the war. The Spirit remained the same character that Eisner envisioned in the early months of 1940; it was Eisner who had changed.

“When I came out,” he explained, “I had seen the elephant and talked to the owl. I had my own life experience and I began to apply it to what I was doing. I was dealing with more realism after the war than I had dealt with before.”

But there was more—more than Eisner would care to admit. His drill sergeant might not have seen much of Denny Colt or the Spirit in the young draftee who stood in front of him in those dreary days of boot camp and practice on the firing range, but Eisner’s connection to his creation was intense. Indeed, there was no physical resemblance, but the two were identical in their point of view, outlook on their world, and sense of place in it—before and after the war. The prewar Spirit, like Eisner, saw the world in dualistic, black-and-white terms; a lot of gray had been added between Eisner’s bus trip to Fort Dix and his return to New York. If asked, Eisner would admit that there were many autobiographical touches to
The Spirit
. The Spirit’s mask, he’d state, had actually served as a buffer between the creator and his creation.

“Those who are working in the medium with superheroes and so forth—we always hide behind the costume,” Eisner told an interviewer long after he’d quit working on
The Spirit
. “I was hiding behind the Spirit’s mask all those years. I was always saying, ‘Well, this isn’t me—it’s him!’”

For Eisner, regaining control of
The Spirit
was nothing less than a reclaiming of his own identity as a civilian, businessman, and commercial cartoonist. His break with these identities during World War II had been a clean one: when he returned to New York, he had no office, none of the familiar artists working under him, and only vestiges of the character he’d created half a decade ago for the Register & Tribune Syndicate. It was just as well. Eisner needed to rebuild
The Spirit
, and to accomplish this, he needed new people with new ideas around him.

His first order of business was finding a place to work, and the office that he leased at 37 Wall Street had a special feeling of familiarity. Just over a decade earlier, when he was trying to help pay bills Sam Eisner couldn’t cover, he had sold newspapers outside this very building. It was here that he’d begun seriously to study comics; now he was creating them in the very same place.

The Spirit
weekly section, as written by Bill Woolfolk and penciled and inked by Lou Fine in Eisner’s absence, was still being produced in Connecticut at the Quality Comics offices, and it continued that way while Eisner settled into his new office and hired a skeleton staff capable of assisting him with the feature. Martin DeMuth, who had been lettering
The Spirit
since December 1942, was retained in the same capacity; but Lou Fine, who wanted to go into commercial art, was out. He was replaced by John Spranger, who penciled over Eisner’s layouts and rough pencils while Eisner himself did most of the inking and coloring. Compared with the staff Eisner had been working with at his old Tudor City studio, this was a small group, but Eisner was comfortable with it—enough so that he’d never again employ so large a staff to work on
The Spirit
section.

His first postwar
Spirit
entry appeared in the papers on December 23, 1945—a Christmas entry that continued a
Spirit
tradition that Eisner had begun before the war but had been discontinued while he was in the service. When asked how he, as a Jew, felt about writing his annual Christmas installments, Eisner answered that he had no problem with it, that it wasn’t as much a business decision based on catering to a largely Christian readership as it was a matter of taking advantage of the goodwill generated during the season to deliver his own message.

“For some reason or another, that long-elusive aspiration for human goodness, which we share in all cultures, is present during the Christmas holidays,” he explained. “It’s not the kind of thing you discuss in a pool hall, but I really believe—at the risk of being laughed at—that there really is, deep in the psyches of all human beings, a desire to be—and I put this in italics—
good
.”

That goodness, Eisner went on, was part of the phenomenon of gift giving and goodwill so prevalent during the holiday season, and that informed his annual feel-good
Spirit
stories more than the Christians’ celebration of the birth of Christ.

“As far as I’m concerned, any celebration of Christmas on my part is not a celebration of Christ, or even a discussion of whether it happened. Rather, it’s a celebration of a cultural phenomenon, if you will, that is unique and deserves support. That’s why I, as a Jew, have no trouble with, in effect, celebrating Christmas.”

Eisner plunged into his
Spirit
stories with a newfound vigor. After reintroducing readers to the Spirit’s origins in a January 13, 1946, entry entitled “Dolan’s Origin of the Spirit,” Eisner took readers down a new path, adding new villains and revisiting some of the old ones, establishing a continuity from week to week that had been absent during the war years, refining and strengthening the character of Ebony, and turning in some of the best stories he’d ever written for the feature. Early in 1946, he hired a secretary, Marilyn Mercer, who turned out to be something of a scriptwriter herself. She couldn’t draw, but some of her suggestions found their way into
Spirit
stories.

Comics had changed since Eisner left for the war. Comic book circulation was better than ever—about forty million per month in 1946—but interests were shifting as publishers pushed to satisfy all age groups on the market. The mid- to late forties saw not only a glut of new titles, but also a shift in the type of material being picked up by consumers. Interest in superheroes had declined, but detective and true-crime comic sales were jumping.
Classics Illustrated
, a new line of comics adapting classic literature to this new, easy-to-read, highly visual medium, took off. Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, whose macho
Captain America
had been fueled by patriotism during the war, created
Young Romance
, a new genre aimed at women, a previously untapped audience.

The Spirit
waded through this building surf of new titles and comic book options, impervious to the changes and new interests. Eisner, while keeping his eye on the horizon for changes that might affect his work, never faltered in his belief that story, first and foremost, would direct his success. He saw signs of trouble ahead, from church and educational leaders who were beginning to complain that comics were corrupting the minds of young readers, protesting that the violence in comics had to be curtailed. But these issues didn’t yet affect
The Spirit
, which was still good family reading. For the time being, Eisner and his creation were safe.

One rainy afternoon in early 1946, a teenage kid named Jules Feiffer, carrying a portfolio of his work, arrived in Will Eisner’s office. The kid was thin, with a thick head of hair and glasses, and was barely out of high school. He’d looked up Eisner’s Wall Street studio address in the telephone book, and fearful that he might be rejected if he tried to make an appointment over the phone, he’d headed down to the studio without calling ahead. He wanted a job—
any
job.

Eisner, who’d been in a similar position a decade earlier, was sympathetic.

“I said, ‘What can you do?’” he recalled. “And he said, ‘I’ll do anything. I’ll do coloring, or clean-up, or anything, and I’d like to work for nothing.’”

This was an idea that Eisner, notorious for his frugality, could appreciate. Problem was, the kid wasn’t any good. He couldn’t draw; his lettering was poor. For the life of him, Eisner couldn’t think of anything he could do around the studio.

Eisner, in Feiffer’s words, was “quite casually and disarmingly frank. He told me I had no talent and that my work just stank. I found this to be an unacceptable way of leaving the artist I greatly admired, so I began to improvise. I started to talk to him, and if I couldn’t discuss
my
work in which he had no interest at all, I’d talk to him about
his
work. So Eisner found out, within thirty seconds, that I knew more about him than anybody who had ever lived.”

Now Eisner had two reasons to hire the kid: He would work for free, and he was Eisner’s biggest fan.

“He had no choice but to hire me as a groupie,” Feiffer cracked, “and that was my first job: to hang around the office.”

The law wouldn’t permit him to hire Feiffer for nothing, so Eisner paid him a pittance—between ten and twenty bucks a week, as Eisner remembered—to function as an office gofer, number pages, ink in blacks, and, every so often, attempt backgrounds. The results were a testament to Eisner’s patience.

As Feiffer recalled, “Every time they put a pen or brush in my hand, I screwed up, so they quickly learned not to do that, but I was useful as a loudmouth and cheerleader for the work, and as a kind of unofficial archivist and historian, because I knew everything about the art form.”

Eisner agreed with Feiffer’s assessment of his early contributions to the studio. Feiffer, he remembered, might have been a mediocre artist, but he liked the kid’s spunk, the “intensity” that he brought to his studio. Although they were nearly twelve years apart in age, they had come from the same background, the same part of the city, the same kinds of experiences. Feiffer’s father, like Eisner’s, had struggled to support the family, and his mother, like Eisner’s, was a strong figure, a pragmatist, the person who somehow managed to hold things together when the Depression threatened to yank everything in all directions. Feiffer grew up reading the comics, from Caniff and Segar to, later, Eisner and
The Spirit
, and in his youthful arrogance, he believed that he would grow up to be an important comics artist, even if he showed no evidence of artistic talent. He had a hunger for comics that Eisner rarely saw in the artists passing through his studio, and Eisner decided that there was something to this wisecracking kid.

Feiffer improved, and over the ensuing months, Eisner entrusted Feiffer with more work on
The Spirit
, including the coloring. Feiffer grew very comfortable talking to Eisner about his work, especially the writing end of it. In Feiffer’s opinion, Eisner’s best writing on
The Spirit
had occurred shortly after he began the feature in 1940. Feiffer preferred the art in the postwar
Spirit
issues, but he didn’t think all that much of the writing.

“If you think you can do better, write a story yourself,” Eisner challenged his young critic.

Feiffer did just that, and both came away surprised by the results, Eisner because the kid could really write, Feiffer because Eisner then gave him more story work. The resulting collaboration, the most productive during Eisner’s years of working on
The Spirit
, was one of those instances of two very different talents coming together at just the right time and producing work that neither could have accomplished as well individually.

The two worked well together, batting around ideas and editing each other to the benefit of
The Spirit
in general and their individual careers in particular. Eisner trusted Feiffer’s judgment. Feiffer had an uncanny knack for capturing the way people talked, and he had no patience for anything that seemed contrived. “He had a real ear for writing characters that lived and breathed,” Eisner said. “Jules was always attentive to nuances, such as sounds and expressions, that he could work into a story to make it seem more real,” he said.

But there were sore points and disagreements as well. Eisner, who liked to compare his shop style with that of a chef in charge of a kitchen—“I can’t keep my hands out of the pot”—could irritate Feiffer with some of his meddling on stories that Feiffer had written, and as Feiffer’s confidence grew, the mentor/protégé relationship, so strong in the beginning, began to erode. For all their teamwork on
The Spirit
, the feature still belonged to Eisner. Feiffer would go along with Eisner’s bottom-line decisions on the stories and the direction
The Spirit
was taking, but he didn’t always approve of them. Eisner was aware of this, of course, which led to a humorous
Spirit
entry, a parody written by Feiffer and published in 1950, in which both Eisner and Feiffer became characters in the story. The Eisner character is blocked and can’t meet a New Year’s deadline. The Feiffer character sneaks up behind him, shoots him at his drawing board, and substitutes one of his characters—a real-life Feiffer creation, a little boy named Clifford—for the Spirit.

“It made for an unusual story, and I was always after the unusual, anyway,” Eisner said of the entry, noting that the story had roots in an actual deadline problem.

When reflecting on the story nearly a quarter century after its appearance, Feiffer couldn’t remember whose idea it was to have a Feiffer look-alike shooting an Eisner look-alike. “Maybe I had me shooting Eisner, but my guess is I just had a guy shooting him, and Eisner turned it into me when he drew it. Or maybe I did have me killing him …