Will Eisner (37 page)

Will Eisner lauded
The Dark Knight
series as a significant breakthrough in superhero comics—a move toward satisfying readers who had grown up reading
Batman
and were still fond of the character but now insisted on more realistic, mature stories. “The superhero largely survived because big publishers had the courage to have other people do adaptations of the superheroes,” he stated. “They had the courage to let Frank Miller take Batman and carry him on into another dimension, so to speak.”

Watchmen
took superheroes another step forward. Like Frank Miller, Alan Moore was fascinated by the vigilante reputation of the superhero, and he too was intrigued by the possibilities of exploring the world as it would be without these costumed characters. Born in 1953, Moore had witnessed the clash between culture and counterculture, the evolving of the Beat Generation into the hippie movement, the mushrooming of radical politics, the growth of the music industry, the acceptance of science fiction and fantasy as serious literature, the use of psychedelic drugs as a means of expanding the mind, and the development and expansion of performance art. In short, he was far from the mainstream in his interests and work, and perhaps more than any comics writer, he was able to integrate a vast range of popular culture into his work. After gaining a lofty reputation in England, he began working on American comic books, bringing his esoteric ideas to DC Comics’
Swamp Thing
.

Four years older than Moore, Dave Gibbons took a more traditional route to his success in comics. The prolific artist contributed to the popular
Harlem Heroes
,
Dan Dare
,
Judge Dredd
, and
Doctor Who
series in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s, and for American comics, he illustrated
Green Lantern
and
Superman
stories for DC. He and Alan Moore teamed up on several issues of
Tharg’s Future Shocks
before jointly tackling Superman in “For the Man Who Has Everything” in the 1985
Superman Annual
, and they discovered that they worked well together.

Watchmen
was a culmination of their experiences and a compelling combination of diverse styles and influences. Comic books had certainly never seen anything like the nonlinear, episodic storytelling that Moore brought to the series, a sort of
Naked Lunch
world populated by ex-superheroes, in which superheroes have been banned (or employed by the government), cynical politics dominate, and the world, as always, seems to be on the verge of extinction. Gibbons’s exquisitely detailed artwork, set on a traditional nine-panel page, came across as order amid anarchy, while Moore’s new mythology, propped up by literary and cultural references, fragments from popular songs, and even long prose passages presented as memoir, gave
Watchmen
a complexity never before attempted in comics.

The arrival of these and other graphic novels didn’t usher in immediate acceptance in the larger cultural landscape, as a young British journalist and comics writer named Neil Gaiman discovered when he approached newspaper editors with a proposal to write an article on the phenomenon.

“I wanted to write about comics and graphic novels,” he recalled, “and I went to an editor of a major English newspaper and said, ‘Alan Moore is doing
Watchmen
, Art Spiegelman is doing
Maus
, Frank Miller is doing
The Dark Knight
. All of them will talk to me. I want to do an article on this thing that is happening right now.’ I was told, ‘Neil, it was English comics character Desperate Dan’s fiftieth anniversary six months ago. We wrote about it. Why would you write about this now?’ I went to the Sunday
Times
magazine in England, and I sold an editor on letting me do it. I talked to Alan and Art and Frank, and to the Hernandezes and Dave Sim, and wrote an article about this crazy thing that was happening right now. I handed it in and, not hearing anything back, I called the guy and said, ‘What did you think?’ He said, ‘Well, we have a problem with it. It’s not balanced.’ I said, ‘What do you mean it’s not balanced?’ He said, ‘You seem to think they’re a
good
thing’—meaning that in order to get proper balance, I needed to have somebody saying that comics led to juvenile delinquency or whatever.”

Gaiman was learning a lesson that Eisner had learned during the early days of comic books: Acceptance was going to be a long, tough process. Graphic novels would go through the same process of naysaying and skepticism, critical examination, opposition, and ridicule before the public eventually came around. But it was going to take some time.

Eisner adapted well to his new home in Florida, settling into a routine busy enough to rival any work period of his career. He complained to friends that he had too many ideas and not enough time to pursue them. Rather than tie up a year or a year and a half to create a lengthy graphic novel of the scope of
A Life Force
, he decided to develop smaller projects addressing some of his philosophical musings—books that would take much less time—and he would stay on this path for the better part of the next decade. His next book,
The Building
, was one such project.

While living in the orbit of New York, Eisner had taken the changes in the urban landscape for granted. Stores and restaurants came and went, businesses failed and new ones started up. After moving to Florida, Eisner saw New York as a kind of expatriate, revisiting the scenes of an earlier life; and in revisiting those scenes, he couldn’t avoid noticing that the structures of the city, like living organisms, had a kind of life expectancy.

“I became obsessed by the fact that the buildings in New York City that I grew up with were being torn down,” he said. “Every time I came back to the city, another building was missing, and a new glass building was there instead. At first I was outraged and said that this was terrible, but then I asked myself: why? What happened? Can it be that when a building is torn down that nothing is left?”

Like
A Contract with God
,
The Building
was a grouping of four stories connected by location, in this case a Manhattan building modeled after the Flatiron Building on Twenty-third Street. And like
New York: The Big City
, the new book continued Eisner’s obsession with how human drama is played out in plain view, unnoticed by the public. Once again, the four stories’ main characters were dreamers whose lives are altered—and ultimately destroyed—by their pursuit of those dreams. Monroe Mensh is a man who keeps to himself and minds his own business until one day, when an innocent child is caught in the crossfire of a shooting in front of the building. Haunted by the fact that he might have saved the child if he’d pushed the boy to the sidewalk or even shielded him with his own body, Mensh devotes the rest of his life to making amends, working for a number of children’s organizations, never satisfied that he is making a difference. Gilda Greene, a beautiful woman, falls for an aspiring poet but marries a dentist for the security he will provide, however unsatisfying. Every Wednesday she meets the poet in front of the building, and they have a lifelong affair; but ultimately it is no more satisfying than her marriage. Antonio Tonatti is a talented violinist who’s not quite good enough to earn a living in music and eventually winds up in front of the building, busking for passersby. P. J. Hammond, the son of a real estate tycoon, obsessively schemes to purchase the building; eventually he succeeds, but at the cost of his business and ultimately his life.

Their stories are played out through extensive flashbacks. They now exist as spirits who gather in front of the building, invisible to those on the sidewalks, forgotten, anchored to their pasts. The building is replaced by a steel-and-glass high-rise, leaving the spirits in a kind of limbo until an accident—a window washer’s safety belt breaks and he falls onto a sign overhanging the building’s entrance, where he dangles precariously while a horrified crowd watches below—gives them a purpose, perhaps even an opportunity for redemption. The book’s happy ending negates what might otherwise have been an overwhelmingly cynical set of stories.

When he first saw the rough pencils for the book—which Eisner was then calling
City Ghosts
—Dave Schreiner projected a lot of work ahead. He liked the premise, which he called “thought provoking,” but Eisner’s execution of it was sloppy and not credible. “You’ve stressed to me before that you want a strong editor, or at least strong opinions,” Schreiner reminded Eisner in a letter expressing his first reaction to the rough pencils of the book. “With that in mind, I have to say there are some things I feel are not right with ‘City Ghosts’ in its present configuration.”

This was not what Eisner wanted to hear. He had hoped for a quick turnaround on the book, and in a phone call responding to Schreiner’s letter, he told Denis Kitchen that he would consider Schreiner’s suggestions but added that he had already lettered half the book—a sure indication that he would listen to positive criticism but probably wouldn’t be making a lot of changes.

In an effort to keep his message—that the building, like all buildings in the city, “somehow absorb[s] the radiation from human interaction”—front and center, Eisner intentionally kept his allegorical stories simply told and illustrated, which only highlighted the book’s inadequacy in character and plot; prose writers would have struggled to get any of these stories published. The theme of the book was sound, but the stories seemed to be filled with stock characters behaving in predictable ways. The element of surprise, a staple in Eisner’s best work, was absent, as was the sense of play that made
The Spirit
stories so entertaining. Eisner could only hope that his readers would be emotionally attached enough to his stories to accept these shortcomings.

Gary Groth, editor of the
Comics Journal
, was not one of those readers. Groth, who was born in 1954, had not grown up reading
The Spirit
, and when he was finally introduced to Eisner’s work, he was not inclined to lump Eisner in with Carl Barks, Harvey Kurtzman, or Jack Kirby, his favorites of the classic comic book artists. Although he had no personal issues with Eisner, Groth wasn’t terribly fond of his book-length work, which struck Groth as “frivolous and tepid compared to the underground comics I was also devouring at the time.” Nor was he pleased by what seemed like the free pass Eisner was given by the critics and comic book historians. When Eisner’s books were reviewed—usually by fanzines, since newspapers still weren’t reviewing graphic novels on a regular basis—they were treated as if they were stone tablets issued from on high, and Eisner was treated as if he were the man destined to deliver comicdom to the Promised Land. He even seemed immune to the criticism, now becoming very public, of editors and publishers who treated their artists like slaves, holding on to their works’ copyrights and keeping their artwork long after it had been published. As Groth saw it, despite Eisner’s benevolent reputation, he was really no different from the others. He’d run a comic book sweatshop, held on to copyrights and artwork, and denied artists their artistic identities when they were working for him at Eisner & Iger.

These thoughts were brought into fine focus when Groth read
The Dreamer
and
The Building
, both of which he judged to be subpar efforts but which were nevertheless getting strong notices in the comics fanzines. Groth reasoned that it was time
somebody
took Eisner to task, and his review of
The Dreamer
and
The Building
did just that.

“The review was harsh,” Groth admitted in a reflective overview of Eisner’s career published in the
Comics Journal
after Eisner’s death, “but it was honest, accurate, and, of course, utterly politically suicidal.”

Eisner was hurt and angry when he saw Groth’s review, which he felt was unfair and unnecessarily mean-spirited. Groth had the reputation of being esoteric in his tastes and of mincing no words when stating his opinions or his likes and dislikes, but in Eisner’s view, the review was nasty even by Groth’s standards. Worse yet, on a personal level, Eisner felt as if a professional friendship had been betrayed. He’d given the magazine numerous interviews over the years, supplied it with art, and, in his mind, done his part to see that the publication maintained high visibility on the market. In his heart, if he stepped back from the work and looked at it objectively, applying the same standards he used in judging the work of others, Eisner might have admitted that
The Dreamer
and
The Building
were substantially inferior to
A Contract with God
or
A Life Force
and that the two books might never have seen the light of day if not for his relationship with Dave Schreiner and Denis Kitchen and their efforts on his behalf.

Still, the review was too much. Eisner stewed over it for months and decided that he was finished with the magazine. In the years ahead, the
Comics Journal
tried to line up interviews with Eisner, but he rejected all requests. Eisner and Groth would eventually exchange pleasantries at the 2000 Comic Book Legal Defense Fund cruise, but as far as Eisner was concerned, his professional relationship with that magazine had ended.

chapter fourteen

W I N N E R S   A N D   L O S E R S

The big joke in my shop was that I always had one foot under the front office desk and one foot under the drawing board.

A
t the end of 1986, Eisner became involved, in a very limited way, with the creation of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, an organization founded by Denis Kitchen and dedicated to assisting artists and writers in a variety of legal issues, from copyright matters to freedom of speech court cases. As a rule, Eisner preferred to keep his life away from comics, including his political views, as private as possible. If asked in interviews, he would provide frank answers to questions regarding his opinions about censorship and the long abused rights of comics creators, but he was guarded about allowing his name to be attached to organizations that might eventually cause him grief at the marketplace.

Kitchen called to request a sheet of art to be included in a portfolio he was assembling to raise funds for Michael Correa, a Champaign, Illinois, comic book store employee who found himself in a storm of trouble when six police officers walked into the establishment, confiscated seven titles, and arrested him for having obscene books on display. One of the seized books had been
“Omaha” the Cat Dancer
, a Kitchen Sink title written by Kate Worley and illustrated by Reed Waller. Kitchen readily admitted that
Omaha
was sexually explicit, but he also pointed out that it was critically acclaimed internationally and that “it was also one of the very few comics in 1986 that could boast a high female readership.”

Kitchen might never have heard of the arrest had it not been for a call from Frank Mangiaracina, a comic book distributor who also owned a small chain of Illinois and Indiana comic book stores called Friendly Frank’s, which employed Correa. A short time after hearing from Mangiaracina, Kitchen attended a comics convention in Minneapolis, where he ran into comics artists Sergio Aragonés (
Mad
), Hilary Barta (
Plastic Man
), and Reed Waller. Kitchen told them about the bust, which was unsettling enough on principle alone—no minors had been sold any of the comics, and Kitchen was especially outraged when one of the officers suggested that these comics had a strong element of Satanism in them—but it also posed serious problems to Correa, who faced a prison term and/or a steep fine if convicted. The four came up with the portfolio idea, and Kitchen began contacting artists he felt might be sympathetic to the cause.

Fourteen artists, including Eisner, donated plates for the portfolio, which was issued in a signed, numbered edition of 250 and in an unsigned edition of 1,250. The effort wound up raising more than $20,000, which turned out to be urgently needed when Correa was convicted in a lower court and funds were needed to hire a First Amendment attorney for the appeal. Correa was eventually exonerated, and with the money left over from the fund-raising, Kitchen founded the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, for which he would serve as president from 1986 to 2004.

Comic book creators’ legal rights had improved since the beginning of Eisner’s career, although at a painfully slow pace—and only then as the result of the efforts of a very few. Artists had fought for ownership of the characters they created, for copyright of the stories they wrote, for the return of their artwork after its publication, and for protection against censors who would impose their will on the creative process.

Neal Adams, one of the most highly regarded artists in comics, knew of these struggles. He’d leveraged his standing in the industry to advocate for the rights of others with less influence. He could recall a time when, as a young graduate from the School of Industrial Arts, he’d wanted to go into comics but had been advised that comic books were on the way out, that he should find another way to apply his considerable skills in the job market. He wasn’t one to surrender easily. He created shorts for
Archie Comics
, contributed to other titles, kicked around in advertising, earned his chops on the
Ben Casey
newspaper comic strip, and finally settled in at DC, where he became the company’s star artist by virtue of his cover art and, later, his groundbreaking team-up with writer Dennis O’Neil. He’d reluctantly gone along with some of the industry’s long-standing business practices until one day, while working for DC, he saw one of the company’s employees cutting up original art.

Eisner enjoyed appearing at comics conventions and sitting on panel discussions, where he was able to promote his lifelong agenda of seeing comics realized as entertainment for adults. (Courtesy of Denis Kitchen)

“I got up hypnotically and walked toward him,” Adams remembered. “He was slicing original art into three pieces. I stopped him. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘I’m cutting up the art and throwing it away.’ I said, ‘Hold on a second. Please stop. I really don’t know exactly how to say this, but you really shouldn’t be cutting up that artwork.’ He said, ‘Yeah, yeah. I’m the low man on the totem pole. I get the crap jobs. Every three months, we pull the art out of the cabinets and chop it up and throw it away.’ Once I got a hold of my soul, which had shriveled to the size of a peanut, I said, ‘Look, I don’t want you to cut up any of these pages anymore. I’m not kidding. I have to go talk to some people, but while I’m talking to them, I don’t want any of these pages cut up.’”

Adams’s journey was only beginning. After leaving the befuddled employee wondering why discarded art mattered to anyone, Adams visited his friend and DC art director, Carmine Infantino. Adams hoped that Infantino, an outstanding artist himself, would be sympathetic to his appeal. Infantino agreed in principle that the art shouldn’t be destroyed and that it belonged to the artists and not the company, but he also noted that this had been DC’s practice for as long as he’d been with the company.

“Okay, let me put it one more way,” an increasingly frustrated Adams told Infantino. “If another piece of artwork gets cut up, I’m going to be leaving here. I’m not going to work for DC.”

This caught Infantino’s attention. Adams was a huge presence at DC. Comic book readers bought certain titles just because Adams was illustrating them. Losing him would be disastrous.

Infantino, still sympathetic to Adams’s cause, told Adams to hang on until he’d talked to DC’s powers-that-be. He conferred with the company officials and, a half hour later, returned with the verdict. The company would store the art and quit destroying it.

This, however, only solved part of the problem.

“What about the idea of returning it to the artists?” Adams wondered.

“They’ll get back to us on that,” Infantino replied.

Seven years passed with no further movement. Adams would inquire about it on occasion, with nothing to show for his efforts. DC higher-ups, not entirely convinced that Adams was correct when he argued that the artwork had monetary value, decided to test the theory by auctioning one of Adams’s covers at a Detroit convention. The artwork, they determined, was worth money—a lot of money—which only created a new set of problems. They obviously couldn’t toss out valuable work, but could they return it to the artists, knowing that they, and not the company, would be benefiting from sale of the art?

This provided Adams with his game-winning strategy. The company had paid for a
service
, for the right to reproduce the art, not for the artwork itself. If DC had purchased the artwork, the company would have been required to pay a sales tax, and given the company’s decades-old policy of operating the way it had, there was no telling how much it would owe in back taxes if, say, a disgruntled employee contacted the tax people in Albany and briefed them on the situation. A few weeks after hearing Adams’s argument, DC decided to return the artwork to the artists. Not coincidentally, Marvel began doing the same, probably more out of fear of losing their artists to DC than out of the sudden realization that it was the upstanding thing to do.

“It was a little bit of a game,” Adams said of his back-and-forth with DC. “I tried to keep it light as much as possible. I wasn’t aggravating, and I wasn’t angry or yelling at them. I tried to be sensible and logical and practical. I said, ‘Look, if the artwork is returned to the artist and he discovers, God forbid, that it’s worth something if he could sell it, isn’t he going to put more effort into making a piece of artwork? Isn’t it in his behalf to do that for you? Doesn’t it then fall to you to profit by this sincere effort to do a better piece of artwork?’ Sometimes it’s very hard to convince people that things are in their best interests, which is shocking to me, but in the end, we did it.”

His work as an advocate was even tougher when he tried to help get Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster their due for the creation of
Superman
. The two former kids from Cleveland had grown older, much older, and had been on the outs with DC, National Periodical, and most recently Warner Communications for longer than either cared to remember. Much of their misfortune had been their own doing. They’d voluntarily signed away ownership rights to
Superman
shortly after they’d created the character, and later, they’d really buried themselves when they sued for money they felt they had coming to them for having created arguably the biggest character in comics history. Their advancing years weren’t being kind. Shuster was nearly blind and living with his brother in a small New York apartment, while Siegel, living with his wife in Southern California, was in declining health. Neither had any money to speak of.

Adams and Jerry Robinson, a Golden Age artist responsible for the creation of the Robin and Joker characters in
Batman
, mobilized the comic book community, distributed petitions, gave television and radio interviews, and in general tried to shame corporate minds into offering Siegel and Shuster at least a minimal annual stipend, along with health insurance benefits, in return for all the money Superman had earned for the company over the years. A film adaptation of
Superman
, starring Marlon Brando and Christopher Reeve, was in the works, and the huge sums of money being sunk into that project were widely publicized. By this point, the creators of
Superman
had all but given up on the idea of remuneration for their character, though both, particularly Siegel, wanted their names attached to the movie, Superman merchandising, and other Superman-related books, magazines, and products. This, they felt, was only fair, and the movie adaptation gave them another shot. “The first
Superman
movie was the big leverage we had,” recalled Robinson, a past president of the National Cartoonists Society. “They didn’t want any bad press at that time.”

While Adams worked on the comic book organizations, Robinson contacted board members and artists in the National Cartoonists Society as well as members of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, Writers Guild of America, the Screen Cartoonists Guild, and the Overseas Press Club. He even managed to secure the involvement of Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer, two of his Cape Cod summer home neighbors. Warner Communications felt the pressure but also believed that the company faced a problematic legal bind: If it agreed to the terms of the Siegel and Shuster case, it might be up against other legal turmoil.

As Robinson remembered, the battle took its toll on the two artists.

“It was terrible, the state they were in,” he said. “They had no self-confidence. Their identity was lost. Imagine creating one of the biggest properties of the twentieth century and not having your name on it. My argument was you didn’t take the author’s name off Sherlock Holmes because Arthur Conan Doyle died. Or Shakespeare. It was a tenuous negotiation. The big sticking point was getting their name restored to the property as creators. That was the last thing we had to settle.

“The night before we settled, I got a phone call from Jerry [Siegel]. He was in bad health at the time. He had already had a heart attack. He called and said we had to settle the next day because he was worried he wouldn’t survive the negotiations, and if he didn’t, he wouldn’t have anything to leave to his wife. So I knew we had to settle the next day.”

The two sides did reach an agreement the next day, on December 19, 1975. Siegel and Shuster would receive $20,000 annually, with cost-of-living allowances added. Their heirs would also receive benefits. Their names would be attached to all Superman products—comic books and books, television programs, and motion pictures—but not toys.

Robinson lauded it as a landmark decision. “It established the protocol of restoring the creators’ names,” he said.

All this had happened in the 1970s, before neoconservatism, when unions were still strong, strikes and work stoppages could bring a company to its knees, and the residual effects of the 1960s kept people suspicious of “the Man,” of big corporations that would screw the daylights out of the little guy if there was a dollar to be earned or quietly stolen. Evening network news programs still wielded tremendous clout, and a news item such as the television and newspaper reports on the Siegel/Shuster battles over Superman could trigger a wave of activity. But now, in the 1980s, a scene like the one in the Illinois comic book store, while perhaps not encouraged by the public in the same way comic book burning had been several decades earlier, was tolerated or overlooked.