Will Eisner (43 page)

Eisner had begun the new book, tentatively entitled
A Good Marriage
but quickly changed to
The Name of the Game
, in 1998, when Kitchen Sink Press was in its death throes; but without a publisher, he’d set it down until after he’d secured a contract with DC and had marketed
Minor Miracles
and
Last Day in Vietnam
. It was a good move. He’d worked on the book in fits and starts, wrestling with how much he should say about Ann’s family and how much he should fictionalize. The first draft was a mess, and he wasn’t sure if he should even continue. As always, he sent a rough pencil dummy to Dave Schreiner, with a cautionary note expressing some of his misgivings about the project. “I’ve been concerned about its ‘validity’ and whether it has enough value for me to undertake its finish,” he admitted.

Schreiner responded with a positive, detailed report proposing changes to characters and the plot. He liked the book, he told Eisner, but he agreed that there was a lot of work ahead. “I know this will lead to many revisions for you, if you go ahead with them,” he said.

That had been July 1998. More than two years and numerous drafts later, Eisner was still at it, adjusting the plot to satisfy Schreiner and Denis Kitchen, double-checking the book’s timeline, adding depth to characters—trying to make it work. Eisner had to think back to
A Life Force
sixteen years earlier to find a book that had challenged him artistically to this extent.
The Name of the Game
was a multigenerational epic covering more than a century’s time, and Eisner not only had to present a multitude of characters in proper period costumes, he’d also decided to include more prose, aside from the usual dialogue balloons, than he’d ever attempted in a book, and he had to strike a balance between what to show and what to tell. Schreiner, convinced that Eisner had a “strong book” on his hands, cajoled and prodded, drawing up lengthy lists of suggestions, all with the hope that Eisner wouldn’t grow frustrated and give up. The narrative and pacing of this book were better than in Eisner’s other ambitious, multigenerational book,
Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood
, largely because of Eisner’s willingness to adopt Schreiner’s suggestions for expanding, cutting, or rewriting scenes. By fall 2000,
The Name of the Game
was nearing completion.

Since this is a story about how people marry (and stay married) for power and social position, Eisner opens the novel with lengthy accounts of how the Arnheim and Ober families acquired their wealth, the Arnheims through a successful corset company, the Obers through a dry goods business and, eventually, banking. Both families descended from German Jewish backgrounds, although, as Eisner carefully points out, the Arnheims were Ashkenazim, part of a wave of “crude and noisy” but “intelligent, resourceful and innovative” immigrants settling in East Coast seaport cities, and the Obers were part of a group of Jewish immigrants who headed west shortly after their arrival in America. As Eisner mentions in the book’s foreword, supposedly written by Abraham Kayn, whose son married into the Arnheim family, marriage was a game played out for social and financial security.

Pencil sketch for the cover of
A Good Marriage
, the working title of an early version of the graphic novel that would become
The Name of the Game
. (© Will Eisner Studios, Inc., courtesy of Denis Kitchen)

There were bad marriages and there were good marriages. Marrying beneath oneself was bad. Marrying outside of your religion or race was worse. However, marrying a rich girl (if you were a boy) or marrying a successful man (if you were a girl) was good. After all, the family into which one married was most important.

The Arnheim and Ober families become connected when Conrad Arnheim marries Lilli Ober in a marriage arranged by their successful fathers. Conrad, loosely modeled after Ann Eisner’s father, is the ultimate product of privilege: spoiled as a child, uninterested in the family business if it means work, self-centered and unfaithful to his wife, and occasionally violent; over the course of the story, he rapes one of his two wives, beats both, kidnaps a daughter from her grandparents, neglects the business to its demise before starting up a stockbrokerage firm. In general, he is one of the least sympathetic characters Eisner ever created. Lilli stays with him because she enjoys the life of wealth and privilege, as does Conrad’s second wife, Eva, who finds him repulsive but refuses to grant him a divorce because she will not give up the life to which she’s become accustomed.

Ann Eisner was the model for Conrad’s daughter, Rosie, and like Ann Eisner, Rosie is openly rebellious, uninterested in the family money, and even less interested in the kind of person her parents would like her to marry. She is more taken by Aron, a poet and the novel’s Eisner character. Their courtship and wedding strongly resemble Ann and Will’s own—including a touching scene depicting how out of place Sam and Fannie Eisner were in the Weingarten circle—and Conrad even pulls Aron aside and offers him a job, as Ann’s father did with Will.

At this point, Eisner breaks away from autobiography. Rather than refuse his father-in-law’s offer, as Eisner did in real life, Aron takes him up on it. He discovers that he is very good at the job, and by the end of the novel, he has taken on many of Conrad’s characteristics. He’s ruthless in business, cheats on his wife, and has settled into a loveless marriage of convenience. “We’ll pretend to be a happily married couple … just the way most of the others do in our set,” Rosie taunts when she confronts her husband at the end of the novel, after reminding him that it will be her family’s money that sustains them. “You can have the kind of life you wanted … with the
better
people … but on
my
terms.”

Visually,
The Name of the Game
might be the most theatrical of Eisner’s graphic novels. The characters’ gestures are exaggerated, as if the actors and actresses are playing to the cheap seats; there is nothing subtle about their movements. Some of the characters, such as Conrad’s drunken yet sensitive brother, Alex, seem gratuitous, but the major players are well-rounded and fully developed, owing mainly to the constant prodding of Dave Schreiner, who had little patience with the predictability of the characters as originally designed. Eisner always pushed for credibility, and Schreiner held him to it. When discussing Eva, Schreiner chided Eisner for creating what he felt was a stock character.

“You show that Conrad and Eva haven’t had sex before their marriage,” he wrote after seeing what Eisner hoped would be the final rough pencil draft. “I find this hard to believe after seeing Conrad trying to have sex with anything in a dress and being very aggressive about it … I think something is badly needed here. I don’t suggest that you delve into her childhood of abuse or something like that—avoid the pop psychology, please. But you have to show something about Eva that shows why sex is not an option with her. Good luck on this one, but I think you need to do it in order to convince the reader that this is a strong enough woman to keep Conrad at bay.”

Schreiner was even tougher on Eisner with Rosie. As written, she was rebellious but ultimately far too passive for Schreiner, who pushed Eisner to make her tougher. “If Aron cheats on her and beats her, the Rosie you have presented would walk. Or kill him,” he suggested. “I think you have to do something here.”

Eisner took these recommendations to heart and changed the characters, especially the women—an irony, given Eisner’s propensity for creating such intelligent, independent, and motivated female characters during his
Spirit
years. Perhaps Eisner held back in earlier drafts because he was modeling these characters after real people in his life. Perhaps he was in a rush to complete the book. Or perhaps he simply needed an editor’s input on how to strengthen his characters. Whatever his reasons, the strong women in
The Name of the Game
gave credibility to the upper hand they held with men of such wealth and position.

With the publication of
The Name of the Game
in 2001, Eisner finished his cycle of books about family on a high note. This was his strongest work since his 1991 autobiographical book,
To the Heart of the Storm
, but by the time it hit bookstores, Eisner was moving on.

*
Later editions of the book carried the title,
A Family Matter.

chapter sixteen

P O L E M I C S

Up until now, my books were essentially entertainment—or, perhaps, art, if you will. Now, I’m entering a whole new area, where I’m taking a stand on serious matters of injustice. I want to stimulate change—change the way people think. I’m standing on a soapbox.

W
hen Michael Chabon’s
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001, Eisner was as pleased as if he had won the award himself. Chabon had assigned some of Eisner’s characteristics to his Joe Kavalier character, and this novel about the early days of comics represented, in Eisner’s mind, yet another step forward in the quest for acceptance of comics as literature, not to mention one of the finest written accounts of the powerful connection between the Jewish immigrant experience and the establishment of the comic book.

When he’d first heard from Chabon in a 1995 letter, Eisner figured he had another fanboy on his hands—someone wanting to meet him, shake his hand, or, if he was as cheeky as some of the people he met, request a personalized drawing. He knew nothing about the highly acclaimed author of
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
and
Wonder Boys
, other than the fact that he was another writer. Nor was he aware of Chabon’s deep love for comics. Chabon’s grandfather had been a typographer for a company that printed comic books, and he’d brought them home by the bagful for his son, Michael’s father, to enjoy. Chabon had inherited his father’s interest in superhero comics. He had read Jules Feiffer’s
The Great Comic Book Heroes
when he was an eleven-year-old kid, and he’d managed to get his hands on an original April 17, 1949,
Spirit
insert from the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
, which, he told Eisner in his letter requesting an interview, was one of his “proudest possessions.”

Chabon the novelist was interested in authenticity. As he noted in his letter, he could have written almost anything about the early days of comics and passed it off to the casual reader, but it would have seemed false to anyone who, like Eisner, had been around during the Golden Age. He had all kinds of information about New York City during that period, but nothing about the artists themselves. “I want to understand the marketing and production side of the business in those days,” he told Eisner. “I want to know where you all lived, what you ate, if you took the subway, what music you listened to, etc. Sure, I could make all that up, but I think my book, for all its eventual flights of fancy, will be great only insofar as it is rooted in the way things really were.”

Eisner consented to giving Chabon an hour of his time when he and Ann were attending the 1995 WonderCon in Oakland. In a relatively brief period of time, Chabon questioned Eisner about all aspects of comics, including the way they were when comic books were still in their infancy. As Chabon recalled:

I interviewed Will Eisner when I’d written very little of the book. About 60 pages or so was written. I went up to WonderCon and interviewed him. He gave me an hour of his time, in the middle of a very busy day full of things he had scheduled for him. And actually, his wife sat down with us, too. I just got them trying to reminisce about their life in the late ’30s, early 1940s. And it was great talking to him because he was not only an artist and writer of the period, but he was a businessman, too … I think that’s one of the unique things about Eisner [as a comics creator], is that he actually ran businesses, and yet at the same time he was also an artist and a writer.

Chabon’s Josef Kavalier and Sammy Klayman were a combination of the author’s imagination and a composite of the characteristics of the artists he interviewed—comics creators such as Eisner, Stan Lee, and Gil Kane. Reviewers and comic book fans detected Joe Kavalier to be particularly similar to Eisner, but Chabon denied modeling his characters after any one artist. He did admit that Kavalier’s faith in the potential for comics came directly from his conversation with Eisner.

“I gave him Eisner’s rather surprising and unshakable faith in the medium of comic books,” Chabon said. “That was rare at the time. In fact, I think Eisner was unique in feeling from the start that comic books were not necessarily this despised, bastard, crappy, low-brow kind of art form, and that there was a potential for real art. And he saw that from the very beginning, which was very unusual, and I took that quality and gave it to Joe Kavalier. I think that was the only direct borrowing I really did.”

After winning the Pulitzer Prize for
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
, his novel set in the early days of comics, Michael Chabon began
The Escapist
, a comic book based on his fictional characters’ creations. Eisner’s contribution to it was his last work. (© Will Eisner Studios, Inc., courtesy of Denis Kitchen)

Eisner’s happiness for Chabon when he won the Pulitzer Prize contrasted strongly with his feelings of nine years earlier, when Art Spiegelman won a special Pulitzer Prize for
Maus
. Eisner deeply and openly admired Spiegelman’s accomplishment, but he also harbored a resentment that after all his years of contributing to comics, he had never received such recognition. After hearing of Spiegelman’s Pulitzer, Eisner called Denis Kitchen and inquired about the award, and he was surprised to learn that these awards didn’t just materialize out of nowhere, out of a literary community’s purist affection for great literature; one had to submit the work for the formal nomination process. This bothered Eisner more than he let on in his gracious public statements praising Spiegelman and his accomplishments in comics. For all his outward modesty, Eisner possessed a competitive streak that demanded the kind of attention his peers received. Chabon, a prose writer, posed no threat. Spiegelman was another matter. Eisner could honestly state that he felt the Pulitzer for
Maus
was good for comics in general, but he could never overcome his ambivalent feelings about the fact that it was Spiegelman who won it and not him.

According to those who knew him, Spiegelman had a similar ambivalence about Eisner. He could appear with Eisner at comics functions, sing Eisner’s praises, and talk about his contributions to the medium, but out of the public view there was always an uneasiness between them, a feeling that neither could—or perhaps even cared to—overcome.

Jules Feiffer, another Pulitzer Prize–winning friend of Eisner’s, could understand how Eisner felt. “Everybody needs validation,” he pointed out. “Will was the transition between the comic books and their truly lowbrow approach to everything, and the comics he was doing, which were becoming an art form. By his own will he had turned comics into something else. When others ran off with the prizes and attention, Will was confused, befuddled, and irritated: ‘Wait a minute! I began this.’”

Florida had never taken the city out of Will Eisner. The September 11, 2001, destruction by terrorists of the World Trade Center had given him pause to consider, first, the boundless possibilities for inhumanity in a human world and, second, the temporary nature of cities themselves. So much of his identity was still connected to New York City, but the city, like his own life, was no longer youthful. Eisner had set graphic novels in the Bronx, in the tenement buildings on fictitious Dropsie Avenue, and by the end of 2002, he had decided to compose a graphic novel dedicated to the history of the neighborhood.

Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood
stretches out over a century, starting with a rural stretch of land that over the decades grew into the South Bronx. By Eisner’s own admission, a project of this nature posed daunting challenges.

“Writing with images so inherent to this form means dealing with reality within the limitations of the graphic narrative,” he stated in his introduction to the book. “On the other hand, portraying internal emotions and real human experiences is abetted by the impressionism of cartoon art. The demands of the task were enough to make the undertaking worthwhile.”

The book was ultimately visually stunning but dizzying from a narrative standpoint, as Eisner pulled his readers through tales of nepotism and corruption, greed, racism, and anti-Semitism, wealth and poverty, joy and despair, framed by four wars, the Depression, immigration, crime and violence, and a constantly changing society. Eisner had observed much of it when he was growing up in the Bronx; intense research provided the rest. The neighborhood provided a huge roster of characters, but precisely because of their number, only a few were fully developed. The rest pass through in a matter of a page or two, adding texture to an overarching story told through brief vignettes.

Eisner was in over his head, and—if one can judge by his remarks in the book’s introduction and interviews he gave after its publication—he knew it. Three decades earlier, in
The Spirit
, he’d struggled to tell a fully realized story within the limitations of seven or eight pages; now he was attempting to depict, in 170 pages, the rise and fall of a neighborhood. He had no choice but to compress time and narrative.

Ultimately, Eisner’s biggest accomplishment in
Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood
was his ability to present Dropsie Avenue as both a setting and a character. The neighborhood acted as a stage for all of Eisner’s dramas, yet in the greater scheme, it symbolized human life itself, from sturdy developing youth to deteriorating old age. “Neighborhoods have life spans,” Eisner explained. “They begin, evolve, mature and die. But while the evolution is displayed by the decline of its buildings, it seems to me that the lives of the inhabitants are the internal force which generates the decay. People, not buildings, are the heart of the matter.”

Seven decades of working in comics hadn’t dulled Eisner’s enthusiasm for learning about whatever was new in sequential art. He was buoyed by the fact that libraries across the country were routinely stocking graphic novels and that universities were now offering courses in comics history and art. Manga, a form of comic art from Japan, heavily influenced by cinema and appealing to young readers raised on the electronics revolution, was flying off the shelves of comic book and general bookstores, offering further evidence that young readers, even those addicted to video games and not inclined to read, were still letting their eyes travel from panel to panel of highly stylized art. Movies based on graphic novels drew long lines at the box office. At one time, comic books had been described as little movies on paper; motion picture producers and directors finally seemed to have taken notice.

“We’re in a visual era,” Eisner offered.

We have to communicate today with imagery, because there’s need for speed of communication. Comics—the comic medium, the idea of sequentially arranged images with some text to convey an idea and tell a story—have found the place between text and film. We deliver information at a very rapid rate of speed. Very often, our information is not as deep as a body of text, but a lot of people haven’t got time to read a large body of text any longer. So I would say the growth of our society, the conduct of our civilization, is on our side.

To create something new for this quick-paced society and readership, Eisner turned to straightforward social commentary—an area offering great potential but rarely explored in comics. Newspapers had a tradition of pushing the limits in one-panel editorial cartoons or in daily cartoon strips. Garry Trudeau had successfully skewered social and political issues in his Pulitzer Prize–winning
Doonesbury
, and before Trudeau, Walt Kelly (
Pogo
) and Al Capp (
Li’l Abner
) had issued stinging commentary in their newspaper strips. These had been satires, however, maintaining the comic in comics.

Eisner wanted to present commentary as serious as he had in his other graphic works, but in a bold, new way. In the past, he had been reluctant to assert his political beliefs on his work, other than his obvious stance against anti-Semitism or occasional references to social issues, both subtext to his stories. He was now prepared for a full-scale assault, to use his art as pamphleteers used prose in their polemics.

In the 1990s, while reading European fairy tales and classic literature for possible adaptations in his children’s book projects, he’d noticed that many modern stereotypes could trace their roots to these tales. Eisner had no quarrel with stereotypes per se: comic book writers and artists, like comedians, used stereotypes for the sake of brevity, as a type of shorthand not needed in prose but almost required in comics, where time and space were limited. What mattered, in Eisner’s view, were the
ways
in which stereotypes were used—the intentions of the writers and artists. The more Eisner pondered the use of stereotypes over the years, especially in books regarded as classics, the more concerned he became about racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and other poisonous ideas that could be planted in literature with damaging effects. When introduced to children, stereotypes wormed their way into a lifetime of thought and action.