Will Eisner (45 page)

The finished product,
Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist
was a tightly edited, quickly paced examination of Eisner’s life, covering all the essentials of more than eighty years, complete with footage of Depression-era New York, rare photos of Eisner and his family, clips from Eisner’s own home movies, sound bites from Eisner’s
Shop Talk
tapes, interviews with the Eisners and numerous industry notables, and lots of art, including paintings from Eisner’s youth.

The film debuted, to enthusiastic response, at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival in New York. Sadly, Eisner, who had passed away two years earlier, wasn’t around to see it.

One day, while researching a potential new project on the Internet, Eisner came across an English translation of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, a work of anti-Semitic propaganda long discredited and proven to be a fraud of hatred and literary thievery. Originally published in Russia as a means of implicating Jews as agitators in times of political turmoil and denying Jews their basic human, social, and political rights,
The Protocols
was a cooked-up account of a Jewish plot to take over and dominate the world. Eisner had heard of the book but had never read it, and he was under the impression that it had no current global influence. He read the translation, and aside from being angered by what he read, he was shocked to learn that
The Protocols
was still very much in print all around the world and that it was being used as propaganda in Middle Eastern countries to incite hatred and violence toward the Israelis.

“I was amazed that there were people who still believed
The Protocols
were real,” he said, “and I was disturbed to learn later that this site was just one of many that promoted these lies in the Muslim world. I decided something had to be done.”

Anger had moved Eisner to action in the past, but after reading
The Protocols
, he became obsessed with learning everything possible about the book’s origins, its publishing history, the efforts to use it as a tool to promote anti-Semitism, its exposure as a fraud, and where and why it was still in print. Hitler had cited
The Protocols
in
Mein Kampf
, making it one of his rallying points against the European Jews, and it had been effective enough to set into motion the fear and hatred that made the Holocaust possible. Three decades before that, in Russia, the document had been influential in launching the pogroms. It was the inaction and misguided beliefs of the masses that made possible such horrific actions against the Jews. Eisner had even seen signs of it at home when he was a boy, dealing with anti-Semitism in the streets and resignation to it at home. “I remember being angry at the shtetl attitude of my parents, who advised that we should be ‘quiet and not offend the goyim,’” he recalled. “To them the Holocaust was another, only much bigger, pogrom.”

Page from
The Plot
, a nonfiction graphic work especially close to Eisner’s heart. (Courtesy of Will Eisner Studios, Inc.)

The Protocols
, Eisner learned, had a long, winding, secretive history dating back to nineteenth-century France, where a satirist and political gadfly named Maurice Joly wrote a book entitled
The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu
. Published in 1864, the book attempted to present a similarity between the political philosophy of Machiavelli and Napoleon III’s dictatorial reign. Not much came of the book, and Joly died, a suicide, in 1878.

The book resurfaced three decades later, although not by its original title and authorship. In the pre-revolution turmoil under Czar Nicholas II, Russian traditionalists feared that the czar was leaning toward adopting modern, much more liberal government policies in the near future. Something had to be done to convince the czar that this would be harmful to the country. The traditionalist leadership proposed that a document be produced—a document that would serve two functions. First, it would show how modernization would be harmful; and second, it would distract the czar by producing a new enemy of the state. That enemy would be the Jews.

The document, a book called
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, outlined a plot by influential Jewish leaders, supposedly hatched at an international meeting, in which the Jews planned a way of achieving world domination. The major points of the plan—and the heart of
The Protocols
—written by Mathieu Golovinski, a Russian agent, propagandist, and forger living in Paris—were lifted, almost verbatim at times, from Joly’s now forgotten work. The Jews, the book insinuated, were behind the liberal reforms being proposed for Russia.
The Protocols
worked as intended: Czar Nicholas II dismissed his most trusted adviser, liberal factions fell out of favor, and ultimately, pogroms eliminated much of the Jewish population.

Years later, in 1921, Philip Graves, a correspondent for the
Times
of London, researched
The Protocols
and, by comparing
The Protocols
with
The Dialogue in Hell
, exposed the book as a fraud. This should have been the end of the book’s credibility, but as Eisner learned, it was a powerful propaganda tool, easily sold to the masses looking for a group to blame for its troubles. In 1920, automaker Henry Ford had published a series of articles in his newspaper, the
Dearborn Independent
, which used
The Protocols
as a source; he recanted six years later, well after the
Times
of London exposé. A suit in Switzerland, filed to prohibit the Nazis from distributing
The Protocols
, once again exposed the fraudulent nature of the book—to no avail. The book would not go away. The Ku Klux Klan had used the book in its campaign against the Jews, and it was used similarly in countries around the world.

While conducting his research, Eisner discovered that there was no shortage of books or newspaper and magazine pieces on
The Protocols
, but this was scholarly material aimed at the academic community—at people already interested in it and aware of the book’s history. To Eisner, these were worthy endeavors, but they were really a matter of preaching to the choir. Sequential art would reach a lot more readers. For Eisner, it had been an effective educational tool in the past, whether used to show a soldier how to maintain his equipment or to inform an inner-city kid about job possibilities, and it could work now to dispel the myths and misconceptions about a propagandistic book.

“Am I trespassing onto academic territory?” he wondered aloud in an interview with journalist and author David Hajdu. “I didn’t see the signs saying ‘No comics allowed.’ I refuse to acknowledge limitations in the art form. I say, ‘Don’t bother me with the formal details—we’ve got to climb a hill.’ At this point in my life, I feel, ‘What the hell.’ If I’m wrong, I won’t be around to find out about it anyway.”

Eisner divided his book project into three parts. The opening portion of the book would address the history of
The Protocols
and how the book came to be written. The second part would focus on the successful efforts to expose the book as a propagandistic sham. Finally, the book would examine the current state of
The Protocols
, how it was still in print and still being used as a weapon against the Jews despite all that was known and published about it. Eisner wrote a script, broke it down to the page, and penciled a rough draft of what he proposed to do. He showed it to Dave Schreiner, who deemed it a project worth pursuing.

Eisner enlisted the help of others with his research. Benjamin Herzberg, who acted as an adviser on
Fagin the Jew
, acted in a similar capacity on the new project, to the point of helping Eisner restructure the book when it seemed to be losing its compass. N. C. Christopher Couch, a former senior editor at Kitchen Sink Press, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, and coauthor (with Stephen Weiner) of
The Will Eisner Companion
, a book examining all of Eisner’s work from
The Spirit
through his graphic novels, translated the Joly book into English and charted a page-by-page comparison of
The Dialogue in Hell
and
The Protocols
. Upon receiving the comparison, Eisner took on the laborious task of committing the comparison to the printed page, devoting side-by-side illustrations of the text. For Eisner, it was utterly important that readers of his book see the extent of the plagiarism.

The more he worked on the book, the more he believed that this was one of the most important projects he had ever taken on. It was the ultimate marriage of subject matter and sequential art, a work that could influence the way people felt about a compelling topic. Finding the right publisher became critical, even more so than it had been with
Fagin the Jew
. Once again, he wanted to avoid publishing with a company specializing in comics. He wanted as large an audience as possible, but perhaps more important, it was crucial that the publishing house be highly respected, one certain to entice international sales, especially in the Middle East.

After reading the manuscript, Judith Hansen agreed that this was an important book and needed the right publishing house to market it properly.

“I submitted his book’s proposal to selected houses, held an auction, and two houses, Metropolitan Books and W. W. Norton wound up with matching bids,” Hansen recalled. “I was looking for a publishing house that would be interested in later picking up Eisner’s graphic novel backlist if the rights could be reverted from DC, and I advised Eisner to speak to the editors from both houses. After talking with them, Eisner settled on Norton, one of the most prestigious houses in the United States.”

Robert Weil, Eisner’s editor at Norton, said: “He told me that he was looking for someone who had a history background because he felt very passionate about the subject and knew his graphics, but he needed someone who knew history, and he was comfortable with my knowledge of history. He knew that I knew a lot about European history.

“We worked very, very closely on that, and I made him redo it many, many times. Part of my job was to vet it for him. I sent it to two experts, one on the West Coast and one on the East Coast, because I didn’t trust my judgment. We went over the language in those [dialogue] bubbles many, many times. There was this section where he compares the 1864 work by the French author to the false version, laid out page by page. I told him he had to cut it down. He said, ‘I have to show this. No one will believe it.’ And I said, ‘No one’s going to
read
it.
I
won’t read it, Will.’”

This section became a bone of contention between Eisner and those reading the different drafts of the book. In his past projects, Eisner preferred to maintain secrecy about what he was working on, showing drafts to Denis Kitchen and Dave Schreiner but no one else. This book was different. Eisner sent drafts to people whose opinions he trusted, hoping for feedback that would improve the book. No one seemed to agree, especially on the prickly issue of the comparisons.

“I need your opinion,” Eisner wrote Schreiner on August 21, 2003. “Denis K. feels that the 100 pages of comparison between Dialogues and Protocols is deadly dull and should not be where it is in the center of the book. He would see it as a ‘footnote’ in the end. Chris Couch does not agree. While I intend to leave the final decision to the publisher—I need your opinion.”

It was an opinion he would never receive. On August 27, six days after Eisner sent the letter off to his longtime editor, Dave Schreiner lost a lengthy battle with cancer, less than three months shy of his fifty-seventh birthday. His health had been in decline for several years, but Eisner had hoped that he would somehow beat this latest setback. He wept when he heard the news.

While Eisner worked on
The Plot
, Judith Hansen worked on brokering a deal that would place Eisner’s other graphic novels with the company. This, too, was extremely important to Eisner: He’d had no qualms about the way DC had re-issued his books, but DC was a comics publisher and Eisner was almost desperate to be published by a respected generalist house. After a meeting at DC in Paul Levitz’s office with Levitz, Eisner, Hansen, Denis Kitchen, and DC attorney, Jay Kogan, Hansen and Kogan had extensive negotiations over the reversion of copyrights to all of Eisner’s graphic novels except
Last Day in Vietnam
and
Fagin the Jew
. Part of the negotiations involved Hansen’s proposal of combining the various individual works into hardcover editions and publishing the individual titles in trade paperback format. Hansen had read a French edition of Eisner’s work that combined several of his graphic novels into one large volume, and she reasoned that this would be an interesting approach in the United States—presenting anthologies of the graphic novels with related stories or themes collected into attractive hardcover volumes. Hansen discussed this with Eisner and suggested that hardcover anthologies of the graphic novels, followed by trade paperback publication of the individual works, would be a way to keep the works in print, present them in a fresh way, and still allow for publication of each individual title.
*
Eisner was thrilled. With any luck, his books might finally escape the comics ghetto and find their way to the shelves of serious literature.