Will Eisner (21 page)

Outer Space Spirit
, as the series eventually came to be known, while beautifully drawn and innovative for a time when the United States’ exploration of space was still nearly a decade away, was an ignominious curtain call for Denny Colt and
The Spirit
. For all his considerable gifts, Wally Wood could be unreliable when he was drinking, which was often enough, and he struggled with
Spirit
deadlines, missing one entirely and forcing Eisner to throw together a weak installment that didn’t fit into the series. Eisner pressed on, planning an unusual series called
Denny Colt: UFO Investigator
, but only one episode was ever published. As much as he would have liked to see
The Spirit
continue, Eisner realized it was impossible. Jules Feiffer was about to enter the service, Wally Wood was unpredictable, and Eisner had seen enough. The final
Spirit
entry appeared on October 5, 1952, ending a run that lasted 645 installments over a stretch of more than twelve years.

Eisner regretted his decision to let his groundbreaking series hang on for as long as it did: “Looking back I have to say that it’s a blemish on my career that I allowed
The Spirit
to continue through this period,” he confessed. “I compromised the character just because I was busy with other things. That’s not to say that these were all bad stories but they don’t have the consistent outlook they had when I was directly involved … I look at these stories and I want to cringe—again, not because they’re bad, but because only the merest essence of the character is retained.”

chapter eight

O U T   O F   T H E   M A I N S T R E A M

I have to tell you how my father used to refer to my publishing business. “What you have here,” he would say, “is a wheelbarrow. Sure, it’s a machine, but if you don’t push it, it won’t go.”

W
hen Will Eisner shelved
The Spirit
near the end of 1952, he vanished from public view. He would never again produce comics for newspapers, and two decades would pass before his familiar signature appeared in a comic book—and even then it would be in the form of
Spirit
reprints. For all his
Spirit
readers knew, he’d retired and moved to Florida. In reality, he was working as hard as ever, contributing art to
P
*
S
magazine and, through American Visuals, putting together a large variety of instructional and commercial comics for corporations and organizations. He was thirty-five years old, raising a family in upstate New York, traveling when his job required it, and conducting business as usual. The move to Florida would come later—much later.

His retirement of
The Spirit
came at an opportune moment, though he certainly hadn’t timed it that way. Comic book opponents were again stepping up their efforts to legislate against the medium, though they were finding it difficult to make significant headway. There had been studies, conferences, radio roundtable discussions, newspaper and magazine articles, editorials, church meetings, and public forums, all scrutinizing the popularity of comic books and influences they might bear on young readers. The New York State Legislature twice attempted to pass restrictive measures against comic book content, only to see the submitted bills thwarted by Governor Thomas Dewey’s veto. In 1950, the United States Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, chaired by Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee Democrat with presidential aspirations, included comic books in its investigation, with public hearings examining a possible link between comic books and juvenile delinquency. Exhaustive testimony poured in from all sides of the debate, including public officials, comic book publishers, psychologists, prison officials, and even FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. There was general consensus that the more extreme crime and horror titles stepped outside the bounds of good taste and acceptable reading material for children, but no one could agree on whether policing these publications and their creators was the duty of legislators or the comics industry. Lawmakers strongly suggested that the comic book companies exert peer pressure to discourage other publishers from issuing objectionable material. Not only was there resistance to this idea, but the major offenders, emboldened by the failed efforts to block or censor comic book content, published even gorier and more violent material. Their rationale was purely business: they were giving the people what they wanted.

Fredric Wertham, staging a ceaseless drive against comic books, added more combustible fuel to his campaign with the publication of
Seduction of the Innocent
, a bestselling polemic that bypassed what Wertham considered to be ineffective leaders and took his case directly to the public. Wertham was neither subtle nor scientific in his approach. Instead, he served up general but incendiary claims, which he then attempted to back with sketchy anecdotal examples that hit readers with the impact of a fist to the throat. Danger lurked everywhere. Comic books seduced young readers with depictions of violent crime, sadism, perverse sexuality, bondage and sadomasochism, cruelty, homosexuality, disrespect for the country and law enforcement officers, torture, and racism. Wertham claimed that his interest was in crime comics only, though his broad definition included virtually every comic book on the market, including the superhero comics, westerns, and romance comics. He assailed Superman as a sadistic figure who taught children all the wrong lessons about justice. He went after Batman and Robin, who in his judgment might have been sending out subliminal messages about homosexuality. Wonder Woman was a double threat—a closet lesbian with a bondage fetish. All in all, not a single type of comic book, aside from the Disneyesque titles featuring talking animals, was spared Wertham’s scrutiny and commentary.

Some of Wertham’s criticism, such as his dismissal of comics as being poorly written and illustrated, leading to poor reading habits among youths, was old and tired, but that didn’t prohibit him from repeating these assertions. He stopped short of stating that comic books were the
cause
of juvenile delinquency, or that every comic book reader would go on to engage in bad behavior, but he viewed them as influential to impressionable minds. He listed the areas in which comic books could have ill effects on their readers:

1. The comic-book format is an invitation to illiteracy.

2. Crime comic books create an atmosphere of cruelty and deceit.

3. They create a readiness for temptation.

4. They stimulate unwholesome fantasies.

5. They suggest criminal or sexually abnormal ideas.

6. They furnish the rationalization for them, which may be ethically even more harmful than the impulse.

7. They suggest the forms a delinquent impulse may take and supply details of technique.

8. They may tip the scales toward maladjustment of delinquency.

Wertham had been waiting years for this moment. He’d given lectures, participated in panel discussions, written for scholarly and general interest publications, appeared before committees. His body of work on the subject, incontestably the most voluminous in the world, had made him, at least in the public eye,
the
final word on the topic of comics and a protector of children’s interests. A new electronic contraption called television, now finding its way into households across America, brought him even more of the national spotlight.

His timing couldn’t have been better. By spring 1954, within days of the appearance of
Seduction of the Innocent
, another Senate subcommittee, this one focusing on juvenile delinquency and chaired by Robert C. Hendrickson, was ready to reexamine the comic book business. Hendrickson had begun his work months earlier, in November 1953, with lengthy hearings in Washington, D.C., Boston, Denver, and Philadelphia, covering such issues as gangs and gang violence, pornography, and drugs. The examination of comics was slated for New York, home of the huge majority of comic book publishers and, to cynical observers, the location where the most political hay might be made from the televised hearings. Estes Kefauver, still stinging from an unsuccessful bid for the 1952 presidential nomination yet hopeful for another shot in 1956, was a committee member, and history would eventually attach his name, more than Hendrickson’s, to the proceedings.

The hearings opened on April 21, 1954, in the same Manhattan courthouse room that had housed the Kefauver committee four years earlier. As in the previous hearings, the roster of invited witnesses was impressive—twenty-two spoke and answered questions over a three-day period, including the usual assortment of comic book publishers and distributors, comic strip artists, child psychologists, law enforcement officials, and authorities on juvenile delinquency. Fredric Wertham, absent from the 1950 organized crime hearings, was on hand this time around, taking full advantage of an opportunity to continue his crusade and, not coincidentally, the opportunity to stand before television cameras and promote
Seduction of the Innocent
by referring to it continually.

Wertham’s testimony rehashed his old position, by now familiar to anyone with the slightest interest in the comic book controversy. As expected, he took aim at the horror and crime genre titles, holding forth at length on one example that he deemed to be particularly offensive, a seven-page story from
Shock SuperStories
entitled “The Whipping.” Published by EC Comics, it addressed small-town racial prejudice, in which a group of hooded Klan-like vigilantes went after a Mexican man attracted to one of the members’ daughters. To anyone paying attention, the story was a cautionary tale decrying bigotry, but all Wertham seemed to care about was the story’s use of the slur “spick,” uttered by one of the Klansmen. That the hateful term was used by a despicable character was beside the point.

“I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry,” Wertham told the committee. “They get the children much younger. They teach them race hatred at the age of four, before they can read.” Wertham didn’t bother to explain how a child might be influenced by offensive words published in a comic book he couldn’t read.

The highly anticipated clash between Wertham’s testimony and that of William Gaines, publisher of “The Whipping” and an aggressive opponent of what the EC publisher believed to be a witch hunt against comics, was memorable, but not because of the quality of the debate. Gaines had spent considerable time preparing a statement for the committee, but he grossly miscalculated the committee’s disposition. EC was indeed publishing some of the goriest work around, but its horror line featured some of the highest-quality writing and art in the industry, which Gaines arrogantly believed would be enough to win the day. He fully expected to enter the courtroom, sit down, calmly but firmly present his case before the committee, and, by the hearing’s end, squeeze Wertham and his case like a bothersome tick in the woods. After all, this was America, home of freedom and the First Amendment, and Wertham and his opinions were more of an annoyance than a real threat.

He withered under questioning, which he would later blame on the adverse combination of the lengthy testimony earlier in the day and the effects of the diet pills he was taking. “I felt that I was really going to fix those bastards,” he told biographer Frank Jacobs, “but as time went on I could feel myself fading away.”

The low point of his appearance arrived when Kefauver confronted Gaines with one of his own company’s publications, featuring a cover depicting a murderer holding a woman’s severed head in one hand and a bloody ax in the other. Only moments earlier, Gaines had stated that, in terms of what he would consider inappropriate, “my only limits are bounds of good taste, what I consider good taste.”

“Do you think that is in good taste?” Kefauver asked Gaines, indicating the cover with the beheading.

“Yes, sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic.”

Gaines attempted to explain his position—how that particular cover might have crossed his bounds of good taste had it been presented in another way—but there was no saving the moment, either at that point or when Gaines addressed “The Whipping.” The next day’s papers, including the
New York Times
, excoriated Gaines’s testimony, adding credibility to Fredric Wertham’s attacks earlier that same day. In the weeks to come, newspapers rushed comic book features and editorials to their pages. Senator Hendrickson, in the interest of obtaining information, tacked on an additional day of testimony nearly two months later, but it was anticlimactic. The same public that bought into Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red-baiting was now turning against comics.

Rather than face the full wrath of the anti-comics crusaders, complete with new legislation, more comic book bonfires, and additional bad press and plummeting sales figures, comic book publishers acted as swiftly as possible. William Gaines, soon to announce that EC was suspending publication of all its horror and crime comics, called for a banding together of publishers. On August 17, 1954, thirty-eight publishers, printers, and distributors gathered at New York’s Biltmore Hotel and, to Gaines’s consternation, rather than developing strategies to fight the forces of censorship, founded the Comics Magazine Association of America, an organization designed to self-regulate comic book art and content. The CMAA drew up a new set of guidelines—a Comics Code—that capitulated in almost every respect to the criticism directed against comics by Fredric Wertham and the different comics hearings and conferences. The adopted standards addressed subject matter, dialogue, religion, costume, marriage and sex, and advertising matter, and those standards all but eviscerated the crime and horror books on the market. They put large dents in the romance and superhero titles as well. Comic book publishers, for instance, were no longer allowed to use the words
horror
or
terror
in their titles, and these words could be used only sparingly—“judiciously,” as the Comics Code Authority called it—in the interior text. Criminals had to be punished for their deeds, with no exceptions. A stamp of approval would be placed on every comic book adhering to the new standards. Parents would know instantly if their children were looking at objectionable material.

Not every comic book publisher joined the CMAA or went along with its code. William Gaines and EC refused to have anything to do with them, for obvious reasons, and Dell, publisher of Disney and other innocuous comics, objected on principle. Gaines realized that he was all but finished as a comic book publisher, but he continued his new hit publication, a satirical magazine called
Mad
, which skirted the new code by coming out in an oversize format that distinguished it from comic books and exempted it from the code.

The Comics Code might have spared the industry from outright extinction, but it did irreparable damage to a business that had been expanding to reach an older, more mature readership. Will Eisner’s dream of presenting stories for adult readers had backslid to such a point that had he written
The Spirit
as a newsstand comic book, he would have had to tone down the feature to meet the Comics Code Authority’s standards. The violence would have been too intense, and his femmes fatales too sexually provocative, for the new guidelines.

Eisner kept up on all these developments, even though they didn’t directly affect his current work. Watching Wertham promote his book on television convinced him that he had been right to discontinue
The Spirit
. He was tired of the fight, of arguing on behalf of comics’ value as literature, of the constant reminders, now so prominent, that comic book artists were disdained by the public. He was disgusted by the efforts to connect comics with juvenile misbehavior. Aside from his general objections to censorship, Eisner was interested in how this criticism would apply to an industry that had evolved enormously in only a few decades. He’d watched with interest when Milton Caniff, his friend and early influence, eloquently addressed the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce. He’d followed the Kefauver hearings and the development of the Comics Code, which he judged to be well-meaning but ultimately misguided. “We are constantly forming committees to protect people in somebody else’s living room,” he’d grouse, noting that this was an American tradition. “We try to protect people from ideas that we think are bad.”