Will Eisner (33 page)

When Denis Kitchen initially set up arrangements to publish
The Spirit Magazine
, it was with the hope that Eisner would be contributing new material to complement the reprinted
Spirit
stories. He had more than six hundred
Spirit
episodes to choose from—enough to sustain the magazine for years to come—but he was convinced that, for as much as collectors might want to see old episodes of the old comic, they would also clamor for something other than reprints. Since new Spirit adventures were out of the question, Kitchen depended on Eisner to come up with other supplemental material for the magazine.

Eisner more than held up his end of the bargain. The twenty-five Kitchen Sink
Spirit Magazine
issues, presented quarterly over the six-year stretch from 1977 to 1983, caught Eisner in one of his most creatively fertile periods. His new material, besides each issue’s wraparound cover and the
Signal from Space
graphic novel entries, was astonishing in its range and quality—enough to eventually make up his book
New York: The Big City
and form the foundation for the instructional book
Comics and Sequential Art
. Eisner’s “Shop Talk,” featuring his interviews with such comics legends as Gil Kane, Milton Caniff, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, and Joe Kubert, would also be gathered into a book. The centerpiece of
Spirit Magazine #30
was a “jam,” in which fifty comics artists contributed to a single new Spirit story. It was reaching the point where the Spirit was fighting for space in his own magazine.

The
Big City
project, years in the making, was particularly close to Eisner’s heart. Eisner had used New York City—renamed “Central City,” to satisfy editors in newspapers across the country—as the setting for
The Spirit
, and in interviews he spoke candidly about his passion for the city. He could live in a suburban setting, as he did now, or he could move away completely, as he would do in years to come when he and Ann moved to Florida, but New York would always be home. Writers, he’d say, were encouraged to write about what they knew best, and New York was where he grew up, where he learned the rules of the neighborhood, where he sold newspapers and opened his first studio. He’d seen countless dramas played out; he’d seen joy and despair. “I know it and understand it,” he said. “The city is my area, and I want to talk about it.”

“Just call me a Jewish Frank McCourt,” he said on another occasion. “I’m a city boy. I love New York. That’s what I know and that’s what I write.”

The project began in 1980, when Hollybrook Graphics published a limited-edition, six-plate portfolio called
City: A Narrative Portfolio
. Each plate focused on some element, good or bad, of city living and was accompanied by a brief Eisner poem. The portfolio had been very well received, including overseas in Europe. Eisner then began a book-length follow-up combining black-and-white work with color chapter lead-ins—a celebration of the city that had been his home for almost all of his life.

In the early stages of its development, Eisner entitled his New York book
The Big City Project
, and, as would be the case throughout his life, he spoke very little about his work in progress, even to Denis Kitchen. The book, he’d say, would be different from the usual perception of New York City. Rather than present the city on a grand scale, as it was usually depicted in the movies, Eisner preferred to portray New York through a “worm’s-eye view” perspective—which, he explained, is how the city is seen by its inhabitants.

“We’re used to seeing it from the skyscrapers, and generally with a symphony in blue playing in the background as the camera pans in across the city and you see the tops. But no one ever sees the city the way I see it—the way all of us who live in it [see it]—with the sewers, the fire hydrants, the stoops, the grills, the grates, the fire escapes.
That’s
what the city people who live in the city see all day. That’s the city.”

Eisner, however, was not interested in producing realistic, picture-perfect renderings. He didn’t use photographs, and any research he conducted for the project was accomplished during his walks through the city, when, for the sake of accuracy, he would make notes on such details as how many steps there were to the average apartment building’s stoop. It was important, he told Dave Schreiner, that he rely on his memory rather than extensive research when sketching New York.

“Once you get too accurate in your art,” he stated, “something gets lost. Artists in Europe tend to do accurate renderings of city scenes. It’s brilliant and beautiful, but somehow or other, the art gets so strong and powerful that the mood is lost. To me, the important thing is mood. Ultra realistic art tends to draw attention to itself. That’s exactly the point I want to avoid.”

The vignettes in
New York: The Big City
, many only a single page in length, presented under such chapter headings as “Subways,” “Windows,” Stoops,” and “Walls,” offered the humor, irony, heartbreak, frustration, hope, and small victories often seen but overlooked in day-to-day city life, the images of people and events that rush by city dwellers too preoccupied in their own daily routines to realize that this is the fabric of urban life. Eisner thought of himself as a social reporter, and these vignettes, when originally published alongside Spirit stories in
The Spirit Magazine
, proved that for four decades Eisner could use environment as a critical element in his storytelling. The city, and the demands it placed on its inhabitants, changed and shaped fortunes in subtle yet all-important ways.

The different aspects of
New York: The Big City
never quite coalesced the way Eisner intended. After its serialization in
The Spirit Magazine
, the book was published by Kitchen Sink Press, in black and white only, without the originally planned color paintings; Kitchen Sink simply couldn’t afford the additional expenses. Nevertheless, Eisner was pleased with the results. New York, as he’d always known, was a great environment to use in graphic works, and
The Big City
, as it turned out, was only the beginning of his explorations of it.

As 1982 drew to a close, Eisner and Denis Kitchen both realized that
The Spirit Magazine
had run its course, at least in its current format. Eisner was set to begin yet another major project, an ambitious graphic novel set in Depression-era New York, and this, along with his “Shop Talk” interviews, the occasional instructional pieces, and other work, amounted to more non-
Spirit
material than the magazine could possibly manage. As it was,
Spirit
fans were complaining that the new material was inappropriate for the magazine. After discussing their options, Eisner and Kitchen decided to suspend publication of
The Spirit Magazine
and create two separate publications, one a monthly comic book devoted exclusively to
Spirit
reprints and another a magazine entitled
Will Eisner’s Quarterly
, dedicated to the publication of Eisner’s new work. The comic book would present every post–World War II
Spirit
episode in chronological order.

The comic book was made possible largely through the efforts of Cat Yronwode (pronounced Ironwood), a fan and scholar who knew more about
The Spirit
than anyone other than Eisner himself. Eisner had hired Yronwode to sort through and catalog his work, and her “Spirit Checklist,” a detailed, comprehensive list of every
Spirit
appearance, in newspaper and reprint, ran in three consecutive issues of
The Spirit Magazine
and became the final word on the feature’s history. Yronwode spent weeks at the Eisners’ home, poring over an extensive archives that, although carefully preserved, had no sense of organization. “Will Eisner never threw anything away,” she recalled. “He lost a lot of things, and I went up there and I found things that he didn’t know he had.”

Strong-willed and intelligent, Yronwode was in parts an academician and a barefoot hippie, a solid writer and editor with an interest in esoterica, an obsessive comics historian, and an archivist with an instinctive feel for the importance of the tiniest scrap of prose or art. Born Catherine Manfredi, Yronwode was the daughter of a special collections librarian at UCLA, and she appears to have inherited his meticulous eye for detail and organization. At the time of her initial meeting with Will Eisner, she was living in a cabin in the Ozarks and freelance writing for a meager living. She’d hoped Eisner might have back issues of
The Spirit
newspaper sections to fill the holes in a friend’s collection, and she reasoned that the best way to approach him would be through an interview, where she could ask him face-to-face about the issues. Armed with an interview assignment for the
Comics Journal
, she set out for New York. Eisner not only gave her the interview, which ran in two parts in consecutive issues of the magazine, he saw how broke she was and also gave her the job of arranging and cataloging his archives as a means of helping her earn some money. Thus began an association that lasted nearly twenty years and found Yronwode working extensively with Eisner, assisting with the writing and editing of some of his books and comics, appearing with him at comics conventions, compiling the checklist of Eisner’s work from high school through
The Spirit
, and representing his art as an agent until their friendship evaporated after a bitter falling-out around the time of Eisner’s eightieth birthday.

Yronwode’s work on Eisner’s archives yielded an immediate harvest of publishable material:
Color Treasury
and
Spirit Color Album
, published in 1981, and
The Art of Will Eisner
and
Spirit Color Album Volume Two
, published a year later, all by Kitchen Sink Press, all in simultaneous hardcover and paperback editions.
The Art of Will Eisner
, edited and with written text by Yronwode, was a lavishly illustrated biography, with work dating back to Eisner’s DeWitt Clinton days and running through his early graphic novels. Some of Eisner’s earliest published work, including posters and comic strips, had been buried in his archives and never seen by the public, and the book gave Eisner fans the chance to see his development as an artist, as well as glimpses of such rarities as “Muss ’Em Up Donovan” and selections from
P
*
S
magazine. The
Color Treasury
published full-color reproductions of two of Eisner’s portfolios—
The Spirit Portfolio
and
The City Portfolio
—both previously issued in limited editions and never reprinted elsewhere.

The Spirit
comic book premiered in November 1983 and ran through December 1992, eighty-seven issues in all. Every month, Eisner designed a new cover related to one of the four stories in the issue, and as was his practice with
The Spirit Magazine
, he tinkered with the original artwork, revising and improving what had once been written under intense deadlines.

“Stage Settings,” one of the comic book’s regular monthly features, gave readers a close-up view of Eisner’s creative mind. Written by Dave Schreiner in an interview/article format, “Stage Settings” generally occupied two or three pages of the comic book, with Eisner commenting on the stories in that month’s issue, in effect creating a logbook detailing what inspired the stories, how they were drawn, who worked on such elements as the lettering and inking, and anything else that Eisner wished to address. Eisner clearly enjoyed talking shop.

“He was an amazing combination of artistic dreamer and hard-nosed pragmatist,” said Tom Heintjes, who took over “Stage Settings” for Dave Schreiner in 1989 and wrote the feature until the comic book ceased publication. Heintjes had worked for Fantagraphics, one of the leading publishers of graphic novels and comics studies, where he became acquainted with Denis Kitchen, and he inherited “Stage Settings” after Kitchen relocated his Kitchen Sink to Northampton, Massachusetts, and Schreiner, back in Wisconsin, became too busy with other work to continue it. Heintjes, a comics historian who created his own magazine called
Hogan’s Alley
, was impressed by how quickly Eisner thought on his feet.

“What was interesting to me,” he pointed out, “is how much of what we take now as standard comics storytelling devices was, to him, problem solving on the fly, because he was having to produce so furiously. I guess I went in with this impression that he sat at his drawing board, scratched his chin, and developed these genius ideas. I found out that it wasn’t like that at all. He was having to crank this stuff out and solve problems, because the form was so new in those years that there was no well to go to, really. He was digging the well.”

Eisner had plenty of help on the comic book and other projects. Some of his assistants, like Robert Pizzo, were former students hired to help around the studio. Pizzo had studied at the School of Visual Arts from 1978 to 1980, and the circumstances behind his hiring had to have seemed like a case of déjà vu to Eisner, a parallel to his initial meeting with Jerry Iger.

“I saw him on the train one day and found out that he lived near my neighborhood,” Pizzo remembered. “On the last day of school, I asked him, ‘Would you mind if I took a ride out to the studio one day?’ And he said, ‘By all means, come up.’ I went up the next week, and when I got there, it was really like one of those movie moments. The place was crowded and busy, with people running all around. One panel of an illustration was bad, and Will was complaining about how they had to fix it and couldn’t get a hold of the guy to do it. I literally heard myself saying, ‘I could do that.’ He put me down at a drawing board and said, ‘All right, this is what I need. Take a shot at it.’ I did it, and he said, ‘That’s perfect.’ Then, as I was leaving, he followed me outside and said, ‘Listen, do you want to come up here and work a little bit?’”