Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics

In Michael Schumacher’s lively 2010 biography of Spirit creator Will Eisner, Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics, he tells of Eisner’s first visit to a comic book convention, in New York in 1971.

Eisner wanted to see what underground comix were all about and to meet some of those cartoonists. Imagine his shock when the 54-year-old child of the Great Depression happened to pick up a copy of Zap that featured an S. Clay Wilson story involving a character whose penis is cut off and eaten.

Kitchen Sink Press publisher Denis Kitchen tried to assure the visibly upset Eisner this wasn’t a typical underground story. But also present was a young cartoonist named Art Spiegelman, who decided to speak up in defense of Wilson’s work.

Eisner left and did not return, Schumacher writes.

Come forward 39 years, to this past month’s Festival of Cartoon Art at Ohio State University — a conference that over the years has brought many established and up-and-coming cartoonists (including Eisner himself in its early years).

Bizarro cartoonist Dan Piraro entertained the audience during his afternoon presentation with what easily could pass for a stand-up comedy routine. At one point, he told about his flight to Columbus from New York City, during which a male passenger some rows ahead got up while the seatbelt sign was still lit.

A flight attendant turned on the public-address system and ordered the passenger to sit down, which he reluctantly did, muttering something to the effect of, “All right, all right already.” The attendant then stormed over to the passenger’s seat and continued to berate him, according to Piraro.

After the attendant left, the indignant passenger, a la Rodney Dangerfield, looked around to the rest of passengers as if to say, “Did you see how she treated me?”

And that’s when Piraro realized, “Holy ****, that’s Art Spiegelman!”

Some things don’t change, apparently.

Spiegelman, who was in one of the front rows at the conference when Piraro told this anecdote, denied none of it.

See my earlier posts on the conference here, here, here and here. And on one of Eisner’s graphic novels, A Contract With God, here.

2010 Eisner Awards

Winners of 2010 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards of note — well, to me, at least, and readers of this blog — presented at this year’s Comic-Con in San Diego include:

• Best Adaptation from Another Work:
Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter, adapted by Darwyn Cooke (IDW)

• Best Comics-Related Book:
The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics, by Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle (Abrams ComicArts)

• And Vault of Midnight comic book store — I’ve followed it in its various locations around Ann Arbor, Michigan, over the years, and I stop in every time I’m in town — won the Will Eisner Spirit of Comics Retailer Award.

Eisner/Miller, Part 2

Eisner/Miller is a lot like Francois Truffaut’s famous 1967 book, Hitchcock, in which the two brilliant directors discuss everything from acting to camera angles. (Cameron Crowe tried to imitate that remarkable conversation in his 2001 book of interviews with Billy Wilder called, of all things, Conversations With Wilder.)

In Charles Brownstein’s insightful interviews, the two successful writer-illustrators range freely over the comic book landscape:

“To me, inking is sexy,” Will Eisner muses. “… It’s like downhill skiing.”

“Especially brush (sic),” Frank Miller adds. “… The brush is the most erotic tool you could work with. … It’s like alchemy.”

But, speaking of sexy, they never get around to what I’ve long wondered about: How the heck are you supposed to pronounce the name of P’Gell, the Spirit’s famous femme fatale? Pah-Gell? Pig-El? Pah-Jill? Or maybe like Place Pigalle in Paris, where late-19th century artists trolled for models? Je ne sais pas.

More to come: Eisner and Miller talk about the invention by you-know-who of the graphic novel. Find your way to my earlier post on this book by clicking here.

Eisner/Miller, Part 1

Last week CBS re-ran the Big Bang Theory episode featuring the gang meeting Stan Lee. The Marvel exec has a cameo toward the end of the story.

But the best touch, I think, occurred when one of the protagonists had to appear in traffic court, rather than going to the comic book store where Lee was signing books. The camera lingered on the judge’s nameplate long enough for us to get the point — his name was “Judge J. Kirby.”

I remembered this in-joke when I was reading Charles Brownstein’s Eisner/Miller: A One-on-One Interview. Amidst the discussions of problematic dialog balloons and color headaches, Will Eisner, creator of The Spirit and the graphic novel itself, among other things, notes in the section called “Talking Out of School” that he’s “delighted to see at long last that (Steve) Ditko’s getting credit …” for co-creating Spider-Man.

Frank Miller, author and artist of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Sin City, points out Lee wrote a New York Times article that finally gave tribute to the reclusive Ditko. Miller adds that Jack Kirby, too, was never “as exposed as Stan Lee was.”

The reason? Miller suggests “writers are often the ones who talk history the best. People who draw for a living tend to have less free time … and artists tend to be less articulate.”

Excelsior.

More on this book to come.

Backing Into Forward

In his new memoir, Backing Into Forward, cartoonist, author and playwright Jules Feiffer recalls how he landed a job, without pay for the longest time, right out of high school in the legendary Will Eisner’s studio. But, Feiffer says, while he remained a great admirer of his hero’s work, “… by mid-1947, (The Spirit comic strip) wasn’t what it had been. I found myself increasingly let down by Will’s story writing.”

Knowing no fear, Feiffer, now all of 18, mentioned this drop-off in quality to his boss. To his surprise, Eisner replied, “‘If you think you can do better, why don’t you try your hand at one?’”

So, channeling Eisner, he blended in other influences — his own Bronx childhood as well as then-popular radio dramas such as The Adventures of Sam Spade, Detective. Eisner perused Feiffer’s first eight-page layout, with its “crude sketches and dialogue,” then said, “‘This is good, we’re going to use this. Write more.’”

“And I wrote more.” Young Feiffer was off to the races.

The Creator

In the beginning, Will Eisner created The Contract With God, and he proclaimed it good. He called it a “graphic novel.”

Eisner was already famous for The Spirit, and he’d achieved success in both newspaper comic strips and comic books — he’d even created comic-book packages to bundle into newspapers. (See willeisner.com.) But in 1978, he wrote and drew The Contract With God, about the residents of a Bronx tenement at the fictional 55 Dropsie Avenue.

In the introduction to a later edition that also includes A Life Force and Dropsie Avenue, the rest of the trilogy, the artist recalls how he coined the phrase “graphic novel” in “a futile effort to entice the patronage of a mainstream publisher.” He figured “novel” sounded better than “comic book.” (Eisner also came up with the term sequential art.) The rest is history.

These stories, taken from Eisner’s childhood memories, are occasionally funny and almost universally sad. They relate the Great Depression-era woes of frustrated mothers and wives and cheating husbands, ungrateful children, out-of-work bankers, sinister gangsters, golddiggers, worn-down rabbis, anti-semitic building superintendents, faded divas and alcoholic singers, as well as that of Izzy the cock-a-roach, as they all try to get on and get along. (God figures in many of the tales, too.) Their comings and goings intertwine, sometimes to their benefit, but sometimes not. When it rains, it’s a deluge — water rises above ankle-deep, to the second or third step. Their challenges are heartbreaking.

The characters, for all their real-life troubles, remain drawn in Eisner’s cartoony style: The good looking women are dames, the handsome men are just this side of cads, the bad guys are weasels and the goons are, well, goony. Yet they are real. Look at the opening picture in the story “Shabbasgoy”: well-dressed Elton Shaftsbury II, who lost everything in the stock market crash, stands in the falling snow near a subway entrance. He’s cold — see his hunched shoulders — and he’s reduced to selling apples, at five cents apiece. The tall spire behind him highlights his isolation; he doesn’t touch the apples or the subway stair post. He is completely alone, and his body language shows us that is exactly how he feels.

I saw Eisner once, in the mid-1980s at a conference for comic strip artists as part of Ohio State University’s Cartoon Library and Museum. He was asked what advice he would give to those trying to succeed in newspaper comic-strip syndication. His answer essentially was, Ah, forget about syndicates, they’ll just break your heart. Do comic books instead. Then he smiled.

The man was brilliant and he knew his mind. Always, apparently.