Will Eisner (2 page)

One incident, when Eisner was nine or ten years old, stayed with him his entire life. He’d talk about it in interviews and depicted it in
To the Heart of the Storm
. Sam Eisner had just started up his fur business and had relocated his family to a tough neighborhood in the Bronx. One day shortly after the move, Billy was taking his younger brother for a walk when they ran into several neighborhood bullies who asked Eisner for his name and demanded to know if he was a Jew. When Eisner told them that he was, they announced that they were Catholics and didn’t want any Jews around them. Eisner replied that there was nothing he could do about it, that his family had just moved into the neighborhood. The kids then asked about the little boy clutching Billy Eisner’s hand. What was his name?

“Julian,” Eisner responded.

The kids laughed. “Jew-leen,” they taunted. “A sissy name.”

Eisner launched himself, fists flying, into the group. The fight, of course, was entirely one-sided. Billy came away with torn clothing, cuts and bruises, and a black eye. He took little solace from his father’s usual suggestion that he use his head rather than his fists to deal with these kids.

Later that day, he took his father’s advice in a way that would permanently change Julian’s life. If Julian’s name sounded Jewish to the kids on the street, Billy reasoned, maybe it would be safer for all concerned if he had another name.

“From now on,” Billy told his younger brother, “your name is
Pete
.”

The name stuck.

Eventually, Will Eisner would be recognized for the way he addressed his Jewish heritage and the anti-Semitism he and others endured in his graphic novels, but his feelings on the subject were more complex and, at times, ambivalent than he let on. He never changed his name, as did many Jewish comic book writers and artists, and he never backed away from the pride he felt in his heritage or the anger he felt toward the slights he witnessed on a daily basis.

The religious elements of his Judaism were another matter.

The Eisner family was far from Orthodox, regardless of whether that meant kosher cooking or attendance at the local synagogue. The family went to temple sporadically, usually on the High Holy Days, and both Eisner boys were bar mitzvahed, but practicing religion was never a high priority in their household. This might have been simply a matter of convenience for Sam and Fannie Eisner, but it was a far more calculated decision on Will’s part.

It was one of their observances of the High Holy Days that set off his strong feelings on organized religion. As Eisner told the story, his father had taken his family to the synagogue for one of the holy days—he couldn’t remember which one—and as they attempted to enter the temple, Sam was mortified to learn that he didn’t have enough money for admission. As a result, he and his family were forced to sit on the steps leading to the synagogue and listen to the services. Billy stewed throughout the ordeal. It was one thing, he reasoned, to live at the edges of poverty and watch the effects
that
had on his father; but to see him denied his spirituality over a buck was more than he could take.

Eisner would never forgive or forget it.

One thing Billy Eisner’s parents could agree on was pulp fiction. The pulp magazines, they felt, were trash—cheap entertainment aimed at lower-class working people who couldn’t read more challenging literature. Billy read everything he could get his hands on, from Chekhov to Chandler, and he wasn’t discriminating about where his reading material came from. One of the tenants in his building read
Black Mask Detective
magazine, and he would slip Billy the latest issue as soon as he was finished with it. The young Eisner would read it on the sly, in his room with the door closed, and he hid it from his parents’ view, much the way teenagers would stash their girlie magazines several decades later. Pulp characters such as the Phantom and the Shadow not only kept him turning the pages, they had a tremendous influence on his creation of the Spirit, his best-known comic book character.

Billy’s parents were at least partially correct in their assessment of the pulps: the magazines
were
cheap entertainment. They were printed on wood pulp paper, cost a dime each at a time when magazines printed on slick paper were running a quarter, and had a way of falling apart almost as soon as they were read. Most ran about 128 pages and were genre based. There were detective pulps, science fiction and fantasy pulps, horror pulps, romance pulps, men’s adventure pulps—all sparsely illustrated, sensational, and filled with as many short stories as they could squeeze into an issue. Some serialized novels assured a continuing readership—assuming, of course, that the novels had any merit. The more popular ones sold in excess of a million copies per issue.

Billy Eisner loved the short story form. They didn’t take long to read, were filled with action and suspense, and often had surprise endings that Eisner would favor later when he was writing his own comics. “From those pulps, I learned how to write short story material,” he’d say. “I learned how to compress and structure a story. To this day, I choose the ending and write from the beginning to the end.”

The budding artist in him also appreciated the pulps’ cover artwork. Lurid, full-color paintings—done by some of the best illustrators in the business and rivaling the best B-movie posters, depicting damsels in distress barely contained in ripped dresses or handsome heroes, muscles bursting out of their shirts—all but leapt out at you from the newsstand racks. Pulp magazines paid more for the art, which sold the magazine, than they paid for their stories, and competition for these jobs was fierce. For a young, talented artist with no hope of breaking into slick magazine illustration, these covers promised a future.

Billy absorbed all this—and more. On those rare occasions when he had loose change in his pockets, he’d head to the movie theaters, where, like most boys his age, he reveled in the exploits of the heroes of the day. But for Billy Eisner, like other comic book artists of the future, movies were more than just entertainment: they served as informal templates for the medium, offering an education about ways to structure and pace narratives, develop character, and stage action sequences; equally important, they provided invaluable tutorials on how to use camera angles to heighten suspense and create mood—skills that would eventually distinguish Will Eisner as a leader in the field.

“I grew up on the movies—that was my thing, that’s what I lived on,” Eisner told comics journalist John Benson, speaking of an interest that began in his boyhood, when he watched the popular action feature of the day, and extended to his late teens and early adulthood, when he screened more mature, artsy productions, which left their own lasting impressions.

The movies always influenced me … The early Man Ray films interested me tremendously. I used to go down to the New School and spend hours looking at these old Man Ray experimental films; and it gradually dawned on me that these films were nothing but frames on a piece of celluloid, which is really no different than frames on a piece of paper. Pretty soon it became to me film on paper, and so obviously the influence was there. But timing, sequences—I think I was influenced by almost any film.

Young Billy, of course, wasn’t aware of how movies would influence him while he was sitting in a darkened theater and watching action stories of the Wild West or swashbuckling tales of pirates on the high seas, but readers would see evidence of his interests in his early work, just as journalists would later remark on the heavy influence of Orson Welles’s
Citizen Kane
on Eisner’s
Spirit
adventures. Billy only knew that he favored the stories, much the way he liked the ways stories were told in the pulp magazines. This interest in story would ultimately set him apart from most of his contemporaries when, as a young adult, he picked up a pen and brush and successfully found a way to work his narratives on paper.

Stickball was the popular street game in Billy’s neighborhood, and Eisner might have made friends more easily if he’d been any good it. He was a big kid, tall for his age and sturdily built, but he was a poor athlete, the kind of boy picked last when sides were chosen. His athletic prowess wasn’t going to make him a neighborhood hero. Instead, he relied on one skill that his schoolmates and the kids in the neighborhood envied: he could draw. He could take a stick of chalk and in no time make beautiful sketches on the sidewalk or in the street. Airplanes were his specialty. Charles Lindbergh was a national hero at the time, and Billy Eisner was able to draw a convincing likeness of the famous aviator’s
Spirit of St. Louis
, impressing his friends and making his life in the neighborhood easier.

Eisner had been exposed to art for as long as he could remember. Sam Eisner had artwork all over their many apartments, and as a very young boy, Billy occasionally accompanied him to work. Sam Eisner, self-taught and with no formal training in figure study, couldn’t paint people, but he could do just about anything else. Billy idolized his father, and it was only natural that he would try to emulate him, much to his mother’s mounting disapproval. Fannie Eisner had seen how little money an artist could earn and wasn’t about to stand by and watch one of her children take her husband’s wayward path. Sam, on the other hand, was pleased by Billy’s apparent talent, and he gave him art supplies and encouraged him to continue. Billy, at least early on, wasn’t thinking about a future career. He simply loved to draw, and he loved the attention that his artwork gained him.

Sam Eisner’s money woes were worse than ever by the time Billy was finishing his elementary school education. He held a series of odd jobs, including housepainting; each evaporated, for one reason or another, until Sam became a fixture around the Eisner apartment, spending more time looking for employment than actually working. The Eisners cut corners to hang on to what little money they had. They bought day-old bread and milk on the margins of spoiling. Billy wore clothes handed down from an older cousin. Even with these economies, what little Sam Eisner had left disappeared when the stock market crashed, banks failed, and the Depression rolled in, uncompromising and by all appearances indefinite.

Billy Eisner was old enough to appreciate the gravity of his father’s plight. He would vividly remember the drama of the Depression, played out on the streets of his city, in the hallways of the tenements buildings, in his own living room—as clear as newspaper clippings saved for future reference.

“As always, my father seemed to be right in the eye of the disaster,” he’d say. “I recall a very sad scene at home one evening when he announced that he had just come from the bank, there was a big line, they had shut the doors, nobody could go in and get their money, and we were dead broke. Zero.”

Ever an observer of the city, Eisner took note of the desperation around him, amazed by how the fight for survival could destroy the old sense of order and dignity and replace it with something else, something more modest.

Later, he described it: “Seeing people in chesterfield coats with velvet collars and a nice bowler hat, good shoes, standing in Wall Street with an orange box selling apples at five cents each. These were weird, almost theatrical scenes. People who had a car in the yard, a very good car, which they couldn’t drive because they didn’t have the money for gasoline. They couldn’t sell it. And anyway they didn’t want to give it up. Some kind of times. They helped shape your outlook.”

A new work ethic took shape in America during the Depression years, forged by the loss of faith that the economy was strong enough to adapt; by the necessity of forced sacrifice; by the belief that in the years ahead, one could never take one’s status, however modest, for granted. Boys watched their fathers, out of work and on the prowl for any means of earning money, and they vowed that when they were grown and supporting a family, they would never take work for granted; if they had to be workaholics to eke out peace of mind, so be it.

Stan Lee, a comics creator, writer, editor, and figurehead at Marvel Comics, and a contemporary of Eisner’s who worked well into his eighties, maintaining a schedule that would have exhausted people half his age, traced his attitudes and work ethic back to the Depression years and his family’s grim circumstances.

“He had been a dress-cutter, and it was almost impossible for him to find work,” Lee said of his father. “My earliest memories were of him sitting in our tiny apartment, reading the want ads with great frustration, running out and trying to get something, and then coming back empty-handed. I felt that it must be the most awful thing in the world to be a man and not have a job, and not feel that you’re needed. I think it was the Depression and seeing my father that made me want to have a job and keep it. If I had a steady job, I was the success that I always wanted to be. My only thought, my only objective, was to have a steady job.”

Billy saw the same thing in his own household—the way the lack of work, coupled with his mother’s criticism, had become that “most awful thing in the world” for his father. It was an awkward position for someone like Billy, as he grew into his high school years, only a handful of years away from manhood himself. He needed the strength that a son hopes to gain from his father’s example; but to gain his own strength, he had to move beyond the pity felt for the man.

Whatever Billy’s conflicted feelings, all were set aside when he was approached by his mother and told that he had to find a way to contribute to the family’s income.

“Your father isn’t making a living,” she told him. “You’re the man of the house.”

It was 1930. Billy Eisner was all of thirteen years old.

To earn money, Billy sold newspapers in lower Manhattan, his favorite spot being a place in front of a building at 37 Wall Street. Years later, he would occupy an office in that very same building.

“I got there at three in the afternoon, every day, winter and summer,” he said. “I could then see daily the fire hydrant, which stuck out of the side of the building where I’d sit in cold weather. On those days, I hugged that hydrant so tight you could almost read its embossed lettering on the seat of my pants. Those little things are always an influence on you. I’d recall
The Little Match Girl
at times like that.”