Will Eisner (24 page)

Despite his having no use for the work Eisner was doing for
P
*
S
magazine, or for his American Visuals productions, Feiffer felt that Eisner more than warranted inclusion in his book. “I knew Will had disappeared,” he said four and a half decades later, “and I felt this was a crime. He deserved the critical attention he’d never had. I wouldn’t have existed without him, without reading
The Spirit
, learning from
The Spirit
. He, along with Caniff, was an enormous presence in my life, long before I met him.”

The book pleased Eisner to no end. Over the years he and Feiffer had remained in touch, although only occasionally, and reading his analysis brought back fond memories of good work that somehow was accomplished under backbreaking deadlines. An entire
Spirit
story had been included in the book, leading to inquiries about the possibilities of reprinting some of the old stories. Eisner, who figured he’d put
The Spirit
to rest for good more than a decade earlier, entertained the idea and, in a surprise to the feature’s old fans, even produced a new story, a humorous swipe at New York City mayor John Lindsay for the January 9, 1966,
New York Herald Tribune
. Al Harvey of Harvey Publications saw the new
Spirit
and approached Eisner about issuing comic books with reprints and some new material. The first appeared in October 1966, with a new “origin story” for readers unfamiliar with the Spirit’s background. A second book arrived five months later, in March 1967, with a new story and several reprinted episodes.

Reception of the comic books was disappointing, and no further issues were published. Eisner, despite enjoying a new dip into
Spirit
adventures, retired the title again.

The Vietnam War assured Eisner of steady, if somewhat controversial, work on
P
*
S
. By the mid-1960s, with an antiwar movement springing up on college campuses across the United States, anyone over thirty and working for the military was a target for protesters. Eisner didn’t hear much directly from the antiwar factions, but as someone whose political views leaned left of center, he could understand how his work might be judged as contributing to the war effort. Nevertheless, he felt no internal conflicts over what he was doing.

I wasn’t training people to kill. I was training people to maintain and repair their equipment, and to save their lives. I had no way of preventing the war, or even getting involved in the morality of the war in Korea, or in Vietnam. While I was personally opposed to Vietnam, I also felt I was doing something good for the guy who was drafted and was there whether he wanted to be or not. So at no time did I feel I violated my principles in producing a technical manual for GIs.

According to Eisner, he heard more negative commentary about his work on
P
*
S
in Europe than in the States, and on those occasions when he was questioned about his involvement with the army during the unpopular war in Vietnam, he offered up a favorite memory of an incident in Korea that occurred during one of his visits to the country, an anecdote that illustrated his point about saving lives rather than taking them.

“One guy, a big guy with a dead cigar in his mouth, came up to me, poked his finger in my chest and asked, ‘Are you Will Eisner?’ I said I was, and he said, ‘You saved my ass.’ His tank had broken down in a combat situation, and he used material from one of my stories for a field fix, and it worked and he was able to drive to safety.”

The Vietnam War years presented challenges different from the ones Eisner had faced during the Korean conflict. The climate conditions, new equipment, draftee attitudes—all put a new spin on making preventive maintenance a voluntary part of a GI’s daily routine. Eisner continued to walk the line between being informative and entertaining. He’d set some of his scenes in past wars, going as far back as Caesar and moving forward, including entries involving the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and the world wars—anything to get his point across. Chariots needed to be maintained as much as tanks; uniforms changed, but the chain of command remained essentially the same.

The operations on Eisner’s end of the magazine had expanded enormously from the days when he was creating almost all the artwork himself, using a letterer as his only assistant. The many projects being undertaken by American Visuals called for expansion. Eisner hired his brother, Pete, to run the office, and over the years, a steady stream of talented artists contributed to
P
*
S
and other American Visuals projects. Ted Cabarga was hired as the magazine’s art director. Artists Chuck Kramer and Dan Zolne were brought on board for their ability to do technical illustrations. Murphy Anderson and Mike Ploog became steady contributors. The staff expanded to fifteen, making the shop the largest Eisner had had since his Tudor City studio days.

“We had other people running a Photostat machine and making film negatives, making color separations, things like that,” Eisner said.

One type of person we didn’t have on staff was a writer—the writers were effectively the Army people who sent us manuscripts, usually from Fort Knox. Then I would translate their writing into the comics script that would be used.

We ended up using 3,000 square feet of space on Park Avenue South, so it really turned into quite a big operation. We were turning out about three magazines at any given time: one was just beginning, one was in production and one was being finished. You can’t imagine how much work this type of operation is until you get into it.

The required travel for the magazine differed significantly from Eisner’s previous experiences. He’d made his earlier trips without worries about any danger involved. He would be shuffled by helicopter from site to site, and he never saw a combat situation. The Korean conflict was all but over when he made his first visit to the country. When he journeyed to Vietnam for the first time in 1967, there was serious fighting—or the potential for it—almost everywhere. Americans had endorsed the war in Korea; when Eisner traveled to Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson was under increasing pressure to stop the fighting and evacuate the country.

“The differences were like night and day,” Eisner recalled. “In Korea, we were all John Waynes. In Vietnam, there was a feeling of shame; you could tell something wasn’t right. You didn’t see the flag that much. During that trip, I was traveling under the rank of brigadier general, so I got briefed. The stories we were told, about body counts and so on, just didn’t jell. There was a sense of fear.”

Knowing that his going to Vietnam would worry his wife, Eisner was less than forthcoming when he outlined his plans. He told Ann that he was going to Japan—which was true enough: he
was
going to Japan in the early part of his trip—but he said nothing about Vietnam. Ann boiled over when she heard from him after he reached the country.

“He lied to me about Vietnam,” she recalled. “When he got there and told me he was in Vietnam, I was so mad. I said, ‘Just wait until you get home …’”

Saigon, the destination for the first leg of Eisner’s visit to Vietnam, while safe, had an almost surreal quality to it. These were the days before the Tet Offensive, when the American troop presence still secured much of South Vietnam and the fighting was far enough away from Saigon to give the people in the city a feeling of safety. Eisner had never witnessed any heavy fighting when he traveled to Korea, but there was never a question of combat preparedness or of GIs being aware that fighting could break out at a moment’s notice. It was different in Vietnam.

“Saigon was like a stage set,” Eisner said. “U.S. soldiers dwarfed the native Vietnamese. Correspondents drank at the sidewalk cafés. Hotels were encased in wire screens to protect them from the occasional bomb-throwing civilian. The remnant of a French law office held hundreds of files belonging to plantation owners who had fled the country a decade before. Because the city was under military control, it all seemed relatively benign.”

All that changed when Eisner went out in the field, to the Mekong Delta, accompanied by a young officer at the tail end of his duty in-country. As Eisner would recall in the title story of
Last Day in Vietnam
, the major was edgy about being anywhere near a combat zone when he was about to be shipped home, and it only got worse when fighting broke out shortly after their helicopter landed. Eisner suddenly found himself in the middle of the war, with shells exploding all around him. He made a beeline to a helicopter, jumped in, and was whisked away, safe but shaken. The experience fortified his belief that he was performing a service with his work with
P
*
S
, but it was unnerving for someone who had spent his own years in the service tucked away in an office in Washington, D.C.

Throughout his stay in Vietnam, Eisner took notes and photographs, made sketches, and filed away impressions that he couldn’t use with
P
*
S
, but that three decades later would become part of
Last Day in Vietnam
. Before departing for Southeast Asia, Eisner had believed that the U.S. military would win the day in Vietnam. After seeing the war firsthand and witnessing the troops’ morale, he feared that this was a war that could not be won.

By all appearances, Eisner’s quiet suburban life away from work was designed by a man determined to avoid a repetition of his own childhood. White Plains, a short train ride from Manhattan, boasted tree-lined streets, one-family frame houses, good schools, and a feeling of order that was missing in the rushed foot traffic, honking cars, and twenty-four-hour neon lights of the city. Eisner loved both—the city and the suburb—but his wife was happy to escape the city of her youth and provide as idyllic a life as possible for their two children. Eisner reveled in New York’s energy, but he too was determined to see that his kids would never experience a hint of the life he’d known while he was growing up in the tenements.

According to Ann Eisner, this focus on providing for his family was the precise reason he had abandoned his career as a comic book writer and artist and picked up a far less exciting but more stable life of working on
P
*
S
and creating instructional and industrial comics. “He had a wife and children he was supporting,” she stated, stressing that he quit work on
The Spirit
at almost the same time their son, John, was born.

Will, Ann, and John Eisner in an undated professional family photograph. (Courtesy of Ann Eisner)

Will Eisner enjoyed fatherhood. His creativity spilled over into his domestic life, when he added artistic touches to his children’s lives, such as the time he brought home a rowboat and converted it into a sandbox or when he painted scenes and cartoon figures on the walls of his children’s bedrooms. John was bright, extroverted, and athletic, and he showed enough artistic promise that Eisner wondered if he might join him one day in the studio. Alice, the more introspective of the two, shared her father’s keen powers of observation and his sensitivity toward the less fortunate. Ann remembered a time when Alice was watching a television program or commercial about impoverished children and demanded that they send a donation. Eisner was the soft touch, slow to scold his children and easily amused by them, and Ann often found herself in the role of disciplinarian in the raising of their children.

Ann remembered a time when Alice was about fourteen. She wanted a pair of expensive, fashionable boots that Ann deemed to be a little excessive. Alice waited until that Saturday, when her father was home for the weekend, and talked him into taking her to the mall for the boots. Ann hadn’t discussed her prior refusal to get the boots with her husband, but she was fairly certain, in retrospect, that he knew the situation. “He did whatever the kids asked him to do,” she remarked, adding with a laugh, “He was a patsy.”

That incident, very insignificant in the grand scheme of a person’s lifetime, became a kind of photograph—one that Ann and Will Eisner preserved in their memories when life changed for all of them a year later, when Alice, now fifteen, began complaining of not feeling well. Ann took her to the family physician, and after the usual battery of tests, she and Will learned that Alice had leukemia and wasn’t expected to live. Ann and Will decided not to tell their daughter how gravely ill she was, and for the next year, they struggled with her declining health in their own ways. Will buried himself in work, unable to confront the horrific reality that he was about to lose his daughter; Ann spent almost all of her time with Alice, in and out of the hospital. When Alice passed away at age sixteen, it was on her mother’s birthday.