Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands

THOUGHTS ON THE DEATH OF WILL EISNER

BACK WHEN I WAS learning to love comic books, Will Eisner was God. Not God as in Eric Clapton — to be bowed down before, forehead to the ground, in a haze of dry ice and laser light. Gustave Flaubert once wrote in a letter that “An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.” In 1975 Will Eisner was God like that to me. Some of the artists and writers of the day whose work I liked most — Neal Adams, Jim Steranko, Steve Gerber, Steve Ditko — had been directly influenced by Eisner, but I didn’t know that. All I knew about Will Eisner was what I had read in Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes. In that book, by one of Eisner’s protégés — a key work in the history of comics history — Feiffer passionately instructed the reader that Will Eisner was a genius and a pioneer, the one from whom all others stole and so forth. And I believed him. But I pretty-much had to take Jules Feiffer’s word for it. The eight-page Spirit story that Feiffer reprinted in his book—“The Jewel of Death”—remained for a long time the only full example of Eisner’s work that I had ever seen. Eisner was out of print, out of comics. As a publisher, a packager, a talent scout, an impresario, and as an artist and writer, Will Eisner had created the world of comics as I knew it. But until I saw some of the later Warren (or maybe it was the Kitchen Sink) reprints, I really had no idea who he was or what he had done.

By the time I sat down to interview Will, in 1996, I was better educated. I had just started to write the novel that became The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. A crucial part of my preparatory research was getting hold of all the Eisner I could find — the Spirit, the graphic novels, the books of comics theory — and the truth of Jules Feiffer’s claims was obvious. Eisner brought radical technical innovations to the comics page — some borrowed from the movies, some from the theater, some from the fine-art tradition — and that was impressive and important. But the amazing thing about his Spirit work — all of Eisner’s tricks and technical bravado, his wild angles and striking use of shadow — was how fresh and new it still looked, even after fifty years of constant imitation by peers, inferiors, and successors. A parallel can be drawn here to Citizen Kane, and to a certain extent Eisner and Welles stand as parallel figures in their respective media. Both of them were prodigiously gifted and managed at a young age to get their hands on a vehicle — a Hollywood studio, a newspaper syndicate — that would allow them to put on a dazzling display of those gifts. Both had a phenomenally sharp eye for talent in others, and the knack for yoking it to the service of their own schemes and ambitions. Both of them served as the secret and open inspiration, as touchstone and mark of comparison, for the generations of directors and comic-book artists who followed them. But Will Eisner had something — was something — that Orson Welles never quite managed, or permitted himself, or possessed a head hard enough to be: Will Eisner was a businessman. He was a Welles and a Selznick, a Brian Wilson and an Ahmet Ertegun. He was labor and management. He was the talent and the guy who had to fire the talent. Sometimes he signed the paychecks, and sometimes he was hanging on, himself, until the next one. He started companies, negotiated contracts, acquired rights, packaged material for sale. At the same time that he was practicing all that capitalism, he was dreaming and writing and drawing. He revolutionized an artistic medium, opened it up and theorized it and made it a superb vehicle for his memories, his emotions, his way of looking at the world. He had his failures, as an artist and as a businessman, because he took risks, as an artist and as a businessman.

Sometimes it’s hard, trying to make art you know you can sell without feeling that you are selling it out. And then sometimes it’s hard to sell the art that you have made honestly without regard to whether or not anyone will ever want to buy it. You hope to spend your life doing what you love and need and have been fitted by nature or God or your protein-package to do: write, draw, sing, tell stories. But you have to eat. Will Eisner knew that. He knew what it felt like to be hungry, to feel your foot graze against the cold hard bottom. He knew how lucky you were to be born with a talent that people would pay you to share. But he was also graced with the willingness (and, when he was lucky, the ability) to get people to pay a little bit more, to drive the price a little bit higher, to hold out for a better deal or a. lower price from his suppliers. Will Eisner was a great artist and a skilled businessman; inextricably both. I loved that about him. More than fifty years after the first issues of Blackhawk and Doll Man and the other titles that he and his partner Jerry Iger packaged for Quality Comics had hit the newsstands, he still remembered the sales figures, the distributors’ names, the dime-and-dollar details of hits and flops. And I sensed that all that stuff was every bit as interesting — every bit as important — to him as the nuance of an inked line, the meaning that could be compressed into and sprung from three square panels in a row. There may be many routes to happiness for a man; there may be only a few. But in his artistry and acumen — in the way he moved so comfortably through the world as an artist who worked for money and as a businessman who worked for art, I think that Will Eisner came awfully close to finding one of those routes. He was lucky like that.