Will Eisner (34 page)

Pizzo reported to the studio several days a week and was put to work on a variety of projects. He added stars to some of the panels in
Signal from Space
. He worked on some of the background revisions and color overlays for
The Spirit
comic book. Eisner, acting every bit the role of the studio head, would assign the activities and supervise his assistants’ work.

“We were surprised to find that he had another whole studio in his house,” Pizzo said. “He had a room set up with a drawing board and everything, and we found out that this was where he got the main work done. In the studio, he sat at his desk with his phones. He wasn’t at a drawing board that often, though there was one that was kind of reserved for him.”

The studio was a special place for Eisner. A few years earlier, in 1975, he and Ann had decided to downsize their living quarters. With Alice gone and John no longer living with them, they were alone in a fairly large house. A real estate agent had shown them several places in White Plains, but none had captured their fancy. Then one day the agent called Ann and asked if she could talk her husband into coming back early from his New York office. “I have a house I really want you and Will to see,” he said.

The house, at 51 Winslow Road in White Plains, not far from where the Eisners were currently living, was a modern wood-and-glass structure designed by an architect for his own residence and office. It sat on three quarters of an acre of land, much of it wooded, in semiseclusion near the end of a dead-end road. The architect had built a beautiful detached studio in back of the house.

“It’s absolutely beautiful,” Ann declared after taking a tour of the house and grounds, “but it’s too big for us.”

Eisner couldn’t argue that point. With five bedrooms on the second floor, the place was more house than the one they were thinking of leaving. Still, the detached studio, the woods …

“That house just spoke to me,” he said to his wife. “It said, ‘Buy me.’”

“He just fell in love with it,” Ann recalled. “It was just about perfect.”

John Walker was another School of Visual Arts student who wound up working for Eisner after taking his class. For Walker, the job was an extension of the classroom, a place for further learning, especially about the business aspects of comics art. Eisner, it seemed, was always passing on his knowledge to anyone willing to listen. Walker drew illustrations for one of Eisner’s Poorhouse Press joke books, which turned into an exercise of practical business.

“He’d say, ‘You are going to illustrate and I’m going to pay you to do that. What are you going to charge me for the rights to use your illustration?’ I’d say, ‘I’ll be happy with whatever you pay me.’ ‘Don’t be a schmuck,’ he’d say. ‘Let’s sit down and look at this contract. I’ll pay you x amount to do the drawings, but you have to come up with a number for me to own the rights to these illustrations forever. Do you want a thousand dollars? Fifteen hundred?’ I’d say, ‘I don’t know what I want,’ and he’d say, ‘Well, let’s do some research on it.’ He’d send you to the library and you’d research business law and contracts. He really opened my eyes that way, on my value as an artist. He would say, ‘Your art has value. Your art will have value decades from now, even after you’re dead. You don’t know, a Walker cartoon might be famous.’”

Walker, like other Eisner students, was constantly amazed by how Eisner could turn almost anything into a learning exercise. One Friday, Walker recalled, Eisner approached him and asked him what he was doing that upcoming weekend. When Walker replied that he had nothing special planned, Eisner pulled out an envelope with two tickets to the ballet. “I’m not using these,” he said. “You’re gonna go.”

“The ballet?” Walker responded, hoping not to disparage his boss’s generosity. “I’m not into the ballet, Will. But thanks.”

Eisner wasn’t taking no for an answer. “Go to this and bring a sketchbook. I want you to draw while you’re at the ballet. Just do it for me, please.”

What Walker didn’t realize was that Eisner had done his own sketching at the ballet, back when he was in the Art Students League and would head to the ballet on Fifty-ninth Street in Manhattan—a point that Eisner drove home when Walker, after attending the ballet and sketching some figures, showed him his work. Rather than spending a half hour or so in a life drawing class at the School of Visual Arts, sketching a model standing stock-still, Walker had drawn the human body in motion and enjoyed the ballet at the same time. “It’s amazing how quickly you can capture the human form and an appreciation for it by watching ballet,” Eisner observed.

Walker stayed in touch with Eisner after his apprenticeship, leading to an informal collaboration on a famous television commercial that Eisner never spoke about in interviews. Walker, working for an advertising agency, needed to come up with a symbol to represent a fabric softener, something soft and fuzzy, representative of the product’s name: Snuggle. Walker designed a number of candidates—puppies, kittens, rabbits, a teddy bear—but he never came up with anything that jumped off the page and said, “This is it!” Finally, he called Eisner, told him what he was up to, and asked if he could show him some of the illustrations. Eisner looked over Walker’s samples and reached a quick decision. “It’s the bear,” he announced. “Tell them you like the bear.”

The two worked on Walker’s drawing, Eisner adding touches that made the bear more endearing, more squeezable. The drawings were turned over to Kermit Love, the master puppeteer and major influence to Jim Henson, and Love brought the bear to life. Snuggle the Bear became the fabric company’s longest-running symbol.

As soon as he saw his first Snuggle commercial, Eisner called Walker.

“They chose the goddamn bear,” he declared, clearly pleased with his role in seeing the idea through fruition. “I told you I was right, Johnny.”

He paused for a moment, then asked: “Do we get royalties on this?”

According to Ann Eisner, her husband showed very little interest in balancing his personal checkbook—she managed the household’s finances—but as a professional, from his earliest days with Eisner & Iger through his final day on earth, Eisner kept a close watch on where the money was coming from and how it was being spent. In the years following the Depression, when he was running his comics studios, he earned a reputation for pinching pennies—using scraps of discarded paper as notepaper or even using pencil extenders to prolong the lives of the nubs that passed as pencils. Employees such as Bob Powell, Lou Fine, and Jules Feiffer battled him over their salaries, and Feiffer referred to him as a “stingy boss.” Eisner never disputed his reputation. When reminded of the Feiffer quote, he laughed and admitted, “Oh, that’s true. Jules and I used to argue over nickels all the time.”

Because of his publisher-artist relationship with Eisner, Denis Kitchen had occasion to see Eisner in action, professionally and privately. Pete Eisner, Kitchen said, would calculate the royalty payment to the exact decimal point, rather than rounding off the numbers, which resulted in at least one almost surreal experience.

“His brother must have calculated it to twelve decimal points,” Kitchen remembered, “and when we sent a check and a statement, Pete compared it to the contract and said, ‘You’re thirty-seven cents short.’ I said, ‘You gotta be kidding me.’ I mean, I sent him a check for three thousand dollars, and he says it’s thirty-seven cents short. I said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ He said, ‘Send a check.’ He was punctilious when it came to that sort of thing. I learned to live with it.

“After I first met Will,” Kitchen continued, “I went to White Plains and was their houseguest for a weekend. They took me out to dinner to this very fancy, expensive place, and Ann was exceptionally generous. We got the menu and Ann said, ‘Do you like lobster?’ I said, ‘Well, I very, very rarely have it, Ann. It’s just too expensive. Where I live, it’s kind of a specialty.’ She said, ‘Order the lobster.’ I could see Will kind of raise his eyebrow. And then—and I’ll never forget this—she said, ‘You’re a growing boy. I bet you could eat two lobsters.’ I said, ‘Well, I probably could.’ She said, ‘Well, order two.’ This time I saw Will’s brow furrow, and there were serious wrinkles in the brow. It was subtle. He just thought it was excessive, and he was picking up the tab. I was paying him a lot of money then, and certainly a lobster, two lobsters, was a tiny fraction of what I’d been paying him. But nonetheless, it was the principle for him.”

Kitchen reasoned that much of Eisner’s frugality was the result of his Depression-era upbringing and the struggles his family had faced when Sam Eisner couldn’t find work. Kitchen noted, as did others, that Eisner could be as generous as he was frugal. He had supported his family, put his sister through college, and, through his shops, provided the livelihoods for numerous families.

Eliot Gordon, who married Eisner’s sister, Rhoda, recalled how a newly wed Eisner had continued in his generosity toward his family. “Despite being newly wed to Ann, Will insisted on continuing to pay Rhoda’s tuition. He had paid the first three years, while he was a bachelor, but after he was married, it could have been, ‘Do I really have to continue? I’m a married man now. Maybe enough is enough.’ It was a sign of character that he was able to assert himself and persuade Ann to understand.”

Money had been tight in those early days. In later years, after he was well established and earning a good annual income, he was able to loosen up.

W. W. Norton editor Robert Weil, who later bundled Eisner’s graphic novels into attractive hardcover volumes, reissued his entire catalog of graphic novels and instructional books, and worked closely with Eisner on his final book, bristled when he heard stories accusing Eisner of being a tightwad.

“I’m still offended by this talk about how he was cheap, how he was penurious, how he saved things. Will was unfailingly generous, if not overgenerous, in my working relationship with him. I remember the first meal I ever had with him. He treated us to a meal at the Princeton Club.”

John Walker also disputed the idea that Eisner was overly tightfisted with his money.

“I wouldn’t say he was cheap,” Walker said. “One time, I needed a compressor and he lent me the money. He gave me an advance on my salary to get it. He was kind that way. I think people said he was cheap because he lived simply. He drove this beat-up old Dodge Dart. His house was a nice suburban home, but it wasn’t some McMansion kind of thing. But I wouldn’t say he was cheap. He paid us well when we worked for him. It wasn’t a sweatshop or anything.”

chapter thirteen

A   L I F E   F O R C E

I want my reader to feel that he is watching something real. I start everything I do with the words “believe me.” “Believe me,” I say, “let me tell you this story.”

E
isner’s sixty-fifth birthday found him in a reflective mood. Although he was in the autumn of his life and had no way of predicting how many more years lay ahead, he felt hopeful and ambitious: he had much left to do. His health was still very good. He played tennis almost every day, usually in the early afternoon, after his morning work session and lunch, and he still had great stamina. He and Ann enjoyed active social lives. This was encouraging, yet he couldn’t help but seriously ponder what he had accomplished and what he might do in the future. He worried that he wouldn’t accomplish everything that he hoped to do, that the “sands of the hourglass”—a phrase that he bandied about often with friends and business acquaintances—would run out when he was in the midst of his next great new idea.

What rose out of these ruminations was
A Life Force
, perhaps the most ambitious graphic novel he would ever create, which addressed issues that had gnawed at the edges of his imagination for the better part of half a century. In the preface to
The Contract with God Trilogy
, he explained:

The debate over Darwinism and Creationism continues over the decades, but the Meaning of life remains scientifically unanswerable. It is one thing to deal with How we got here. It is another to deal with Why. I undertook this book after my 65th birthday, a hallmark that seemed to arrive too soon. For someone who has always felt caught in a mortal struggle with time and who has an enormous number of yet undone projects ahead, this was a sobering event. Suddenly, enduring memories that were accumulations of the detritus of living seemed more ephemeral.

In
A Life Force
, Eisner created two characters to address his past and present selves, the aging process, and how simple lessons in life help form a much greater perspective: Jacob Shtarkah, an aging carpenter who suddenly finds himself unemployed and questioning the purpose of his life; and Willie, a politically active young artist who finds his youthful ideology challenged by the realities of the day. Both reside at 55 Dropsie Avenue, the Bronx tenement building that Eisner used as a setting in
A Contract with God
.

At the opening of the story, Jacob Shtarkah learns that the job he’s had for five years, building a library at his synagogue, has come to an end. This is Depression-era New York, and finding any kind of new employment is going to be difficult. Worse yet, in Shtarkah’s mind, is the knowledge that the library is going to be named after the men who funded its construction rather than the man who actually built it. A library bearing his name was Shtarkah’s one chance at immortality, a reward for a life that otherwise had very few rewards, and now it has been denied him.

On his way home from the synagogue, Shtarkah suffers a mild heart attack and collapses in the alleyway next to his tenement building. As he sits on the ground, waiting either to die or regain his strength, a cockroach, shaken out of a rug two floors above, plops down on the ground near him, prompting a one-sided conversation that encapsulates the essence of the book.

“You, being only a cockroach, just want to live!” Jacob declares. “For you it’s enough! But me … I have to ask, why!?”

The answer, Jacob believes, lies in whether man created God or vice versa. “If man created God, then the reason for life is only in the mind of man,” Jacob says. “If, on the other hand, God created man, then the reason for living is still only a guess! After all is said and done, who really knows the will of God? So, in either case, both man and cockroach are in serious trouble, because staying alive seems to be the only thing on which everybody agrees.”

“When Jacob talked to the cockroach in the alley, he is speaking my thoughts,” Eisner stated in an interview published shortly after the completion of
A Life Force
. “I wanted to draw some parallels between man’s and the roach’s survival. My objective was to present this debate Jacob has with himself to the reader. All of the things expressed in this novel are for readers to decide. It’s in the nature of an intellectual exercise.”

Page from
A Life Force
. (Courtesy of Will Eisner Studios, Inc.)

Willie, like Eisner in his own youth, is politically left of center, a union sympathizer, and a true believer in society’s potential for social justice. The Communist Party, a mainstay in the intellectual circles of New York’s Greenwich Village during the Depression, has caught the attention of the union organizers, and a rally, guaranteed to attract the news media, is planned. Willie, an aspiring artist, along with one of his friends, volunteers to make signs for it.

While Willie busies himself designing ways to save the workers of the world through social and economic revolution, his father, owner of a tiny fur factory (similar to the one once owned by Sam Eisner), is visited by a couple of union strong-arms trying to muscle their way into the shop. Willie’s father and the plant foreman attempt to explain that theirs is a small shop employing only three workers, and that those workers are currently earning union wages, but the thugs won’t listen to reason. During an ensuing scuffle, the shop foreman is beaten on the head and sustains wounds that will leave permanent brain damage. When Willie’s father returns home to find his son working on pro-union, pro-Communist signs, he flies into a rage and throws Willie’s friend out of the house, forcing Willie to make an immediate decision: the cause or his family. Willie chooses family, ending his brief life as a revolutionary.

Eisner worked other autobiographical details into
A Life Force
. Elton Shaftsbury, a young stock market player ruined in the crash and pondering suicide, shared some of the characteristics of Ann Eisner’s father. A rabbi offering cut-rate bar mitzvah lessons in the tenement gave Eisner opportunity for subtle commentary on the relationship between God and money—a lesson he and his father were taught on the steps of the synagogue many years earlier during the High Holy Days, when Sam Eisner couldn’t afford the standard donation necessary for entry. A brilliant but mentally disturbed young man named Aaron, isolated from the world and tormented by his own raging thoughts, bore a resemblance to Eisner’s son, John, who began to display signs of psychological trauma following his sister’s death and would struggle with mental illness from that point on.

With the exception of the novel’s villains, who are largely caricatures motivated by greed or a lust for power, Eisner’s characters in
A Life Force
are complex individuals trapped in a harsh world of daily survival, forced to make decisions that under other circumstances they might never have faced. They are the victims of
life
—not the one they were raised to believe was possible, but the one they are forced to live. The Depression and the European immigration to New York City brought on by Hitler’s persecution of the Jews brings into fine focus the way otherwise decent human beings discover sometimes shady ways of surviving. People find ways to rationalize their behavior and overlook the behavior of others, all for the sake of survival. They are no different from the cockroaches scurrying around the dark corners of the city, struggling to stay alive.

Lengthy installments of
A Life Force
appeared in the first five issues of
Will Eisner’s Quarterly
, but unlike
Signal from Space
, which Eisner essentially wrote on the fly to accommodate each individual installment’s deadline, this new graphic novel was carefully plotted in its entirety before the first installment’s publication. At 139 pages, the story was easily the longest Eisner had yet created; and with a demanding historical setting that covered the Depression and the origins of World War II, Eisner had to make use of every storytelling device in his arsenal—including newspaper clippings, handwritten letters, weather reports, and lengthy passages of prose—to construct his narrative. Images weren’t enough. He had employed some of these devices in
Signal from Space
with mixed results. Comic book readers, he was learning, weren’t interested in reading long passages of prose. The images were the main attraction. “We have two mediums which are not necessarily meant to replace each other,” he concluded. “Visuals can’t entirely replace words; they can replace descriptions and actions, often in exciting ways.”

After reading
A Life Force
, Robert Crumb contacted Denis Kitchen, first by telephone and then by mail, to tell Kitchen the profound effect the book had on him. Kitchen made a habit of sending Crumb regular samplings of new Kitchen Sink publications, though he never bothered with Spirit magazines or comic books, since Crumb had no interest in superheroes or adventure stories. He did send Crumb Eisner’s graphic novels, however, but Crumb had never commented on them.
A Life Force
was the exception.

“Robert told me on the phone that, at that point in his life, he was very depressed and contemplating suicide,” Kitchen recalled. “He said, ‘I got the package and it really motivated me to continue in the business.’ Then he followed up with a postcard.”

The postcard, reprinted in its entirety in
Kitchen Sink Press: The First 25 Years
and excerpted in Kitchen Sink ads, didn’t repeat Crumb’s feelings of depression. Crumb did admit that he hadn’t expected much when he started
A Life Force.
“It’s really an uplifting book!!” he wrote, calling it the best work recently produced by an artist of Eisner’s generation. “You can tell ’im I said so!! Sort of a masterpiece!!”

Certain that Eisner would appreciate Crumb’s compliments, Kitchen photocopied the postcard and forwarded it to him. Eisner and Crumb had met on one previous occasion, at a restaurant in New York, but they found then that they didn’t have much to talk about. According to Kitchen, Crumb spoke directly to Eisner only once, after the two had been together for some time in silence, when a beautiful young woman passed their outdoor table. “Look at those gams,” Crumb remarked, pointing at the young woman. Eisner didn’t know what to make of him.

Crumb’s postcard was different.

“He knew that Crumb didn’t hold him in particular regard,” Kitchen recalled, “so for Crumb, the leading guy in his generation, to go out of his way to compliment him was very meaningful to him.”

Three years would pass between the appearance of the last installment of
A Life Force
in
Will Eisner’s Quarterly
and its publication in book form—an unfortunate time lapse. The book fit better as a follow-up to
A Contract with God
than in the order in which it was presented, but the timing was a necessity given the large volume of his work being published by Kitchen Sink Press. Besides
Will Eisner’s Quarterly
and
The Spirit
comic book, which demanded a chunk of his time and assured him of regular appearances in the Kitchen Sink catalog, Eisner was busy preparing
Life on Another Planet
, which he was now calling
Signal from Space
, for publication in book form.

Signal from Space
was more than just a recycling job. Two of the book’s eight installments in
The Spirit Magazine
had been published in a sideways, pull-out format, with smaller panels and less background than the other six installments, which were presented in the standard
Spirit Magazine
size and format. So before it could be bound together, Eisner had to overhaul one fourth of the book. As long as this was the case, Eisner decided to revise the rest of his story by reworking parts that, in retrospect, he deemed weak. On top of that,
Life on Another Planet
had been black and white, but the book was to be in color. Eisner was far too preoccupied with other projects to color it himself, so he brought in his old colleague André LeBlanc for the job.
Life on Another Planet
became the only Eisner graphic novel ever published in color.

Although she had been born and raised in New York, Ann Eisner did not share her husband’s enthusiasm for the city. She enjoyed much of what the city had to offer, particularly the arts scene, but she preferred the tranquillity of White Plains to the energy of Manhattan. She hated the New York winters, and now that she was ready to retire from her job at a hospital, she yearned to move somewhere warm, as far away from the snow and blustery winds as possible. Will’s brother, Pete, and his wife, Lila, had relocated to Florida when Pete had taken a job with Dannon yogurt—a job that Will had lined up for Pete when he could no longer afford to keep him as an employee—and Ann reasoned that Will might be happy living in Florida and reuniting with his Pete and his family.

Eisner, as Ann expected, initially opposed the idea. He felt Florida was a place where people retired and vegetated, where people went to finish out their lives. He was still very active, producing more art than ever, teaching at the School of Visual Arts, and keeping a busy social calendar. New York City was his home, not some godforsaken town in Florida, where he’d be as far removed from his business as he could imagine. His relationship with Pete, while loving, was complex, built largely on a lifetime of looking out for his younger brother. Pete had worked for him for a long time, and he’d been a loyal, outstanding employee. Still, having a brother as an employee had built-in complications that others didn’t have to face, and Eisner was happy for Pete’s success outside of his sphere of influence.