Will Eisner (28 page)

The Eisner-Kitchen Spirit reprint deal was short-lived. The first
Underground Spirit
sold out, proving that there was still a market for the Spirit stories. Kitchen went back to press to produce another batch of the first
Underground Spirit
while Eisner prepared a second issue. Eisner was pleased with the results of the first issue, and he might have stayed with Kitchen indefinitely had he not received a phone call from a bigger publisher with a better offer.

It might have been expected. Eisner’s reappearance in the comics world after such a long hiatus was big news.

At Marvel, Stan Lee, always on the lookout for emerging trends, heard about the sales figures for
Underground Spirit #1
. He loved the idea of having Will Eisner in the Marvel stable, but he wasn’t interested in reprints. Marvel specialized in superheroes tormented by personality flaws or foibles, and the Spirit seemed like a good fit. Lee called Eisner and asked if might be open to creating new Spirit adventures or, at the very least, writing new story lines that could be developed by other Marvel artists.

He wasn’t. Eisner thought the idea was wrongheaded for two basic reasons. First, he felt he had gone as far as he could with the Spirit during the character’s newspaper lifetime, and he wasn’t fond of the idea of updating the character or placing him in a more contemporary setting. Second, Marvel’s comic book readership was younger than the
Spirit
’s newspaper readership, and Eisner wanted to create more adult work.

With Stan Lee. (Courtesy of Denis Kitchen)

Marvel, Lee suggested, might have something along that line. Marvel had been developing a satire magazine aimed at college students and young adults, and Lee had writer/editor Roy Thomas meet with Eisner and sound him out about the idea.

“Stan wanted something in the
Mad
vein, only for a little older audience, because this was the time of
National Lampoon
,” Thomas recalled. “He had me go out to lunch with Will, but not much came out of it.”

What Lee really wanted was for Eisner to take over his duties at Marvel. Lee had been with the company since his teenage days, and he was anxious to move to the West Coast, to Hollywood, where in recent years a rebirth of the motion picture industry, led by a new wave of directors and such highly regarded films as
The Graduate
,
The Last Picture Show
,
Easy Rider
, and
The Godfather
, promised talented people the chance to earn big bucks and gain big exposure. Marvel, seeing the potential for huge earnings from movie adaptations from its comics and characters, was kicking around the idea of starting up a motion picture division within the company. Lee fancied himself to be a natural in this environment—which, as later years proved, turned out to be true enough—but he couldn’t leave his job as editor and publisher at Marvel before hiring a replacement. The comic book industry was brimming with young talent, but none with Eisner’s knowledge and background. Eisner seemed to know everyone in comics, which promised to be valuable in attracting new artists and writers to the company. Lee believed that Eisner was the ideal candidate to lead Marvel through the next decade or two of business. “I really wanted to make our company bigger than it was, and I thought he would be the greatest guy to get a handle on all these new things I wanted to do,” Lee said.

Although flattered by Lee’s proposal, Eisner wasn’t interested in overseeing a huge list of characters he hadn’t created. More important, he wanted no part of being another cog, albeit an important one, in the corporate world; he’d just escaped all that by signing on with Kitchen Sink Press. Marvel still did business the old-fashioned, work-for-hire way—the company paid by the page, maintained copyright ownership, and held on to the artists’ work—and Eisner wouldn’t work under those conditions. More than thirty years had passed since his initial dickering over copyright and character ownership with Busy Arnold and Henry Martin, and nothing had changed his opinion in the interim. To Eisner, it wasn’t an issue of rights or of proverbial white hats and black hats. Publishers had rights, as did writers and artists. It was an issue of negotiation, of the artist having the chance to make a choice and living with his decision.

And so it went with Marvel. The salary would have been lucrative, but money wasn’t the point. Eisner informed Lee that if he was put in charge at Marvel, he’d want to initiate changes that gave writers and artists ownership of their work. Lee was in no position to negotiate such changes.

“We had a long lunch,” Eisner said of his meeting with Stan Lee, “and that was the end. I thanked him very much. And we were walking out to the elevator, and he said, ‘Why aren’t you interested?’ I said, ‘I think it’s a suicide mission.’ Really, it wasn’t for me.”

The two parted amicably, mutually respectful of each other, but Eisner would never work for Marvel. He would occasionally be offered one-shot opportunities to work on stories that featured the Spirit and Marvel superhero characters, but he found those offers easy to turn down. Denny Colt and Peter Parker were never going to meet.

Word of these inquiries bounced around the comics rumor mill, and Jim Warren, the colorful founder and publisher of Warren Publishing, eventually contacted Eisner and set up a meeting. Aggressive and competitive, Warren relished the thought of being able to stick it to Marvel and DC by signing Eisner to his company. Problem was, there was no way Warren could begin to offer Eisner the kind of money that Marvel or DC could wave at him. To have any chance of snagging Eisner, Warren had to appeal to the artist in him. He’d also have to hope that Eisner had forgiven him for hiring Mike Ploog away from
P
*
S
magazine a few years earlier.

Warren pitched his idea over lunch in a posh Manhattan restaurant. Eisner, no slouch as a salesman himself, listened closely to what Warren had to say. By the end of their lunch, he was convinced that Warren Publishing offered more than the other publishers he’d been dealing with, including Kitchen Sink. Warren’s distribution network easily surpassed Kitchen Sink’s, though it wasn’t as extensive as DC’s or Marvel’s. Kitchen Sink, Marvel, and DC published standard-sized comic books; Warren offered to publish
The Spirit
in a larger, magazine-sized edition. Warren wanted to publish reprints, where Marvel insisted on new material.

One other important issue tipped the scale in Warren’s favor. “I felt better dealing with a smaller publisher for very practical reasons,” Eisner later explained. “To Jim Warren, I was one of maybe four properties he had. To Marvel, I was just one of 400 properties they had. I felt I would get better care and attention from Jim Warren than from Marvel.”

Eisner and Warren discussed the terms of their agreement, and Eisner walked away with a sweetheart deal. Eisner would receive $1,000 per issue and royalties on sales, in return for onetime reprint rights. Eisner, of course, would own his properties.

One sticky problem remained: what to do about the small publisher Eisner was currently dealing with—the one already devoting great care and attention to his work. The second
Underground Spirit
had just hit the streets, which led to one final provision in Eisner’s arrangement with Warren. Eisner hated the notion that Kitchen might lose money on the new
Spirit
issue if it failed to sell as well as anticipated, so before the deal became final, Jim Warren had to promise to buy out Kitchen Sink’s inventory. Warren agreed without hesitation.

When breaking the news of his agreement with Warren, Eisner tried to appeal to Kitchen’s own business instincts. The Kitchen Sink experiment had been valuable, Eisner said, but Warren Publishing offered an opportunity he couldn’t ignore. The first
Underground Spirit
had sold in the twenty-thousand-copy range; Warren believed he could do much better. “He thinks he can sell a hundred thousand,” Eisner told Kitchen. “I hope you understand. It’s not personal, but I’m going to have to explore this other venue.”

The buyout arrangement with Warren blunted the blow to some extent, but the sudden and unexpected change of plans left Kitchen angry, frustrated—and “heartbroken,” as he later said.

He also knew better than to say or write anything that might jeopardize his chances of working with Eisner in the future, so as soon as he learned of Eisner’s buyout arrangement with Jim Warren, he sent a letter to Eisner intended to keep all business doors open.

“It is apparent that Warren ‘made an offer you couldn’t refuse,’” he wrote, paraphrasing Vito Corleone’s famous statement from Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel and Francis Ford Coppola’s movie,
The Godfather
, “and I am not at all resentful that you decided to go with him. THE SPIRIT certainly deserves a circulation and package which we could not deliver at this time. I am grateful that you gave us the opportunity to publish THE SPIRIT and I hope we will be able to take you up on your offer to produce some experimental, non-Spirit comix in the coming year.”

“We’ll do something again in the future,” Eisner assured Kitchen.

At that time, neither could have estimated just how much they would be doing.

Jim Warren, like Jerry Iger, Busy Arnold, and other impresarios Eisner had dealt with throughout his career, was not a comics writer or artist. He operated by instinct and a strong understanding about his special niche in the comics market, and he could be very stubborn and assertive. He wasn’t often called diplomatic, but even those who disliked him had to admit that, in surviving in an extremely competitive business, he must have known what he was doing. Warren Publishing’s titles often sounded like knockoffs of what other publishers were producing, when in fact Warren was coming up with ideas that the bigger houses were imitating.

A comics aficionado since his youth, Warren started Warren Publishing in Philadelphia in 1957, fresh off the Senate hearings and the establishment of the Comics Code Authority. To circumvent the Comics Code Authority and its little corner cover stamp, Warren published in the standard 8
1
⁄
2
-by-11-inch magazine size, charged a magazine’s cover price, and declared his audience to be older than the kids picking up
Superman
or
Batman
. His early magazines specialized in horror or science fiction, but by the mid-sixties, he was well established, with titles that included
Creepy
,
Eerie
, and (with the Vietnam War heating up)
Blazing Combat
. By the time he and Eisner connected, Warren had worked with such notable editors and artists as Archie Goodwin, Harvey Kurtzman, Richard Corben, Alex Toth, Wally Wood, and Al Williamson. Frank Frazetta, who gained international acclaim for his work on the
Tarzan
and
Conan
books, created sexy, over-the-top covers for the Warren horror magazine
Vampirella
. As he’d hoped, Warren saw many of his publications stocked on magazine racks next to general interest periodicals, rather than languishing on drugstore spin racks or buried among the ever-increasing number of new comic book titles.

Warren had crossed paths with Eisner a decade before their
Spirit
deal, when one of his early publications,
Help!
, a humor magazine edited by Harvey Kurtzman and featuring reprints by some of the Golden Age artists whom Eisner admired, reprinted a
Spirit
story in its February 1962 issue. But like so many of Eisner’s reprints between 1953 and 1972, it was a one-shot deal. W. B. DuBay, one of Warren’s top editors, had once interviewed for a layout artist job at
P
*
S
, but he had lost the job to Mike Ploog. Now, coincidentally, he became Eisner’s editor at Warren.

Warren took an approach similar to that of Denis Kitchen in publishing
The Spirit
. Issued bimonthly beginning in April 1974, Warren’s
Spirit
magazine reprinted eight Spirit stories per issues, all but one entry in black and white. Eisner would have preferred to see the stories reprinted in chronological order, but the disorganized state of his files, along with Warren’s wishes, nixed the idea. Warren had projected lofty sales figures for the magazine, but since comics sales were volatile in the early seventies and he had no way of predicting how long interest in
The Spirit
might last, Warren hoped to present the very best of the character in each issue. To grab the attention of potential readers browsing through titles in the stores, Warren insisted on colorful, action-packed covers radically different from the inventive splash pages Eisner had used to introduce each newspaper supplement episode. The original splash pages were included with each story in the magazine, as they had to be, but the Warren covers, like the Kitchen Sink covers, gave the magazine a more standard comic book feel.

Eisner appreciated the care devoted to each issue of the magazine, although, true to his perfectionist nature, he was never totally satisfied with the final product. He tinkered with the stories before submitting them to Warren, redoing some of the panels that had been so hastily drawn and inked in the time-cramped, deadline-driven days of weekly publication, or fixing original art that needed touching up. Some of the stories were partially rewritten. Looking back over the old work, Eisner saw flaws and problems that he couldn’t correct the first time around and, as he admitted, he would have revised even more if he’d had the time. “Just think of how lucky I am,” he told an interviewer. “How many people had the chance to do it again?”