By Scott Tipton
January 4, 2004
And the world of comics just got a little darker.
We lost Will Eisner yesterday. For any of you out there unfortunate enough never to have heard of the man or his work, Mr. Eisner was a giant in the industry, one of comics’ true pioneers, who revolutionized the form in the 1940s with his landmark newspaper run of THE SPIRIT, formalized and popularized the graphic-novel form with his stunning work A CONTRACT WITH GOD and continued to create vital, exciting and cutting-edge comics to this day with his newest work, THE PLOT, scheduled for publication this spring.
If you’re unfamiliar with what Will Eisner meant to anyone who’s ever read and enjoyed a comic book, please take a look at the following column from 2003. While my paltry words can’t begin to convey the power and importance of Mr. Eisner’s work, it may at least give you a hint of what it was about, and there’s plenty of gorgeous Will Eisner art for you to admire. Then, after you read it, go down to your local comic shop and pick up some of Eisner’s comics.
Will may be gone, but he lives on through his work, and the work will be here forever. All the more fortunate for the rest of us.
May 21, 2003
THE SPIRIT OF COMICS
Those of you with more than a passing interest in comics may hear about this comic book or that artist being nominated for an “Eisner” Award. What’s an Eisner? Well, the Eisners are the comic-book equivalent of the Oscar or the Grammy: awards given to recognize superior achievement in the field of comics. Sure, there are other awards, but pretty much everyone considers the Eisners to be the big one: The Award. The Eisner Awards are held every year at the San Diego Comic Convention (or “Comic-Con International: San Diego,” as it currently calls itself), where a gala banquet is held and the winners receive their Eisner Awards from the man himself, the legend, the man whose name the awards bear: Will Eisner.
Who’s Will Eisner, you say? Actively writing, drawing and publishing comics since 1936, Will Eisner is the closest thing we have to the patron saint of comics. One of the founding fathers of the Golden Age, Eisner created and worked on characters and series from a variety of publishers. In 1940, Eisner created his trademark character, The Spirit, which was tremendously popular and saw an exposure unprecedented in today’s comics market, and which served as a venue for Eisner to develop and hone his craft, taking the standard adventure strip in countless new directions. When Eisner ended The Spirit in 1952, he turned to new ventures, for all intents and purposes creating the modern graphic novel with his landmark work A CONTRACT WITH GOD, beginning a series of intensely personal works that focus on the simplest of humanity’s pleasures and sins, and continue to be produced and published to this day. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First, the early days.
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A 19-year-old Will Eisner cut his teeth in the comics biz in 1936 just as things were starting out. In fact, one of his first jobs was at the now-forgotten Fox Comics, creating the thinly disguised Superman knockoff “Wonder Man” at the behest of Fox’s publisher, an assignment that soon found the young artist testifying at the lawsuit brought by National, alleging copyright infringement. When National prevailed, Eisner’s days at Fox were over.
Eisner had partnered with Jerry Iger to create the Eisner & Iger Studio, a production house which provided comics material to a number of publishers, most notably Quality Comics, producing such features as Uncle Sam and Doll Man, and later Blackhawk as well. Some of the all-time greats in comics art got their start at E & I, including Lou Fine, Jack Cole and Jack Kirby. Business was booming, but in 1939, Eisner got an offer he found hard to refuse.
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The 22-year-old Eisner was approached by Quality publisher Busy Arnold and a man named Henry Martin, who was the sales manager for the Register & Tribune Newspaper Syndicate. The men had a radical idea. Concerned about the growing competition they faced from comic books where young readers were concerned, the men proposed that Eisner produce for them a weekly 16-page comic book, which would be syndicated nationwide, appearing in Sunday papers across the country. Wise beyond his years, Eisner saw the artistic and financial potential this new venture brought, and negotiated a partnership agreement which granted him complete ownership of the characters and material, a move unheard of in the comics publishing of the time. Eisner thought that it was his artistic ability that gave him the extra leverage to gain this kind of agreement. As he later discovered, they were less concerned with quality than with reliability: after all, this would be appearing every week, come rain or shine, and Eisner was one of the few producers thought able to pull it off.
Eisner sold his half of E & I to Iger, and threw himself into the new project. The 16-page section would be split into three features: four pages for Chuck Mazoujian’s LADY LUCK, five pages for Bob Powell’s MR. MYSTIC, and seven pages for the feature Eisner himself would produce. Eisner had long thought that the comic-book medium was capable of work much more sophisticated than was commercially viable in the monthly magazines. With a syndicated weekly newspaper release, Eisner would have access to an older, more adult reader, and far more flexibility than was possible with a daily newspaper strip. Eisner truly had gained the best of both worlds: the length and format of comic books and the much larger and more mature audience of comic strips.
For the lead feature, Eisner wanted a detective strip, with a very vulnerable, human protagonist, miles away from the Supermen that were ruling over comics at the time. Eisner’s hero, Denny Colt, would wear no costume, sporting a blue suit, gloves and a fedora, with a domino mask and the flashier alias “The Spirit” added at the insistence of the syndicate, who wanted something a little closer to the mystery men of the day.
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In the premiere appearance, criminologist Denny Colt pays a visit to Central City Police Commissioner Dolan, letting him know that he’s on the trail of criminal scientist Dr. Cobra. Colt tracks down Dr. Cobra, and in attempting to apprehend him is drenched in a mysterious chemical, seemingly killing him. Dolan and the police arrive on the scene, and, assuming Colt dead, haul him away to a waiting grave in Wildwood Cemetery. However, it turns out the chemical only put Colt in a death-like state of suspended animation, which was a real bummer when he woke up the next night six feet under. Presumed dead by the world, Colt assumes the identity of “The Spirit,” to go after criminals beyond the reach of the police, taking up residence in a hidden HQ beneath Denny Colt’s crypt in Wildwood Cemetery, with only Commissioner Dolan and his daughter Ellen knowing who The Spirit is and where he can be found.
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Commercially the strip was an immediate success, with some newspapers citing a 10% gain in circulation as a result of the Sunday insert. Creatively, the strip was certainly entertaining, and head and shoulders above anything else in crime comics, but nowhere near the heights it would later reach. In 1942 Eisner was drafted, but THE SPIRIT, whose subscribing newspapers had tripled, continued right on schedule, with art by Lou Fine and scripts from Manley Wade Welman, Dick French and Jack Cole.
It wasn’t until Eisner returned to THE SPIRIT after World War II in 1946 that the strip really began to hit its stride. Eisner was revitalized in returning to the work, and began to alter his approach to the already innovative strip. He had already begun to vary his storytelling, not always utilizing the Spirit as the center of the story. In addition, with only eight pages to work with each week, Eisner couldn’t afford the luxury of a traditional cover. Instead, Eisner began to use his opening splash page to immediately set the mood and draw the reader into the story, while incorporating the “Spirit” logo somewhere in the background, often as part of the landscape.
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In the postwar years, Eisner really began to treat the Spirit as more of an anti-hero, becoming less and less the straight-shooting good guy he was at the series’ inception. More to the point, often the Spirit was only peripherally involved in his own adventures, as Eisner focused on telling a wide variety of stories, from comedy to tragedy, parable to suspense, with a brief appearance by the Spirit to keep the reader connected to the strip as a whole. Just as Eisner was experimenting with story, so was he experimenting with art as well.
The storytelling became wildly different from week to week, mixing traditional panel-to-panel storytelling with prose sections, utilizing layout in brand-new ways to convey sensations or sounds, at times breaking format entirely when the story called for it. Let’s take a look at a few examples:
In the December 8, 1946, Spirit Section entitled “The Killer,” Eisner introduces us to Henry, a henpecked nebbish who finds new validation and confidence once he’s drafted, until the day he’s discharged, and finds himself back in his miserable job with his harridan wife. Circumstances place a gun in his hand, and the viewpoint changes, as we now see the world literally through Henry’s eyes as he makes some drastic changes in his life, in the process rescuing the kidnapped Spirit.
The story closes with another prospective Henry back from the war, clearly also dreading a return to civilian life. Eisner’s innovative perspective places us physically inside Henry’s skull, showing us his point of view while at the same time distancing us from the world around him, allowing us to maintain a horrified detachment.
In “Two Lives,” (December 11, 1948) Eisner makes use of parallel storytelling to show us the similarities in the travails of two men, unknowingly identical, whose paths are about to cross. One man a henpecked husband, the other an escaped inmate, both are desperate to escape their respective fates. They switch identities, and we see in the final parallel panels, as Eisner quotes Gilbert and Sullivan, how the punishment fits the crime. The Spirit, by the way, appears in exactly two panels of the eight-page story. The reader never misses him.
Eisner plays with the reader’s conception of time in “Ten Minutes,” (September 11, 1949), which opens with a sensational hook:
With the clock ticking on every successive page, we watch as a desperate Freddy makes his first step down the wrong path when he murders a local merchant, then follow the desperate killer as he tries to get out of town, with first the police and then the Spirit on his heels. It all ends badly for Freddy, and the story ends with a bystander’s unknowing remark, bringing it full circle: “What’s ten minutes in a man’s life?”
Eisner created a number of femmes fatale for the Spirit to contend with. There was Sand Saref, a girl from Denny Colt’s youth turned smuggler and black marketer, who the Spirit could never bring himself to apprehend.
In “Wild Rice,” (April 4, 1948) the Spirit ran afoul of Rice Wilder, a spoiled rich girl who took up with the worst element in order to escape the trapped feeling that came with her family’s high-society life, and paid the ultimate price for it.
When local truckers were losing their cargo and their lives, the Spirit met up with “Lorelei Rox,” (September 19, 1948) a modern-day siren with a voice that could kill.
But when it came to femmes fatales, none could compete with P’Gell, the gorgeous international black widow who moved from husband to husband, from scheme to scheme, sometimes pausing in her plans to either try to tempt the Spirit away from the righteous path, or occasionally to warn him of some dire threat that was about to befall him. Eisner’s women were usually dangerous, sometimes tragic and always damned sexy.
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Eisner makes heavy uses of inks and blacks in “The Embezzler,” (November 27, 1949) which tells the story of Quadrant J. Stet, an accountant who finds himself going blind, and needs an expensive operation to save his vision. When an amount of money goes missing at his firm, Dolan and the Spirit are called in to interrogate Mr. Stet. As it turns out, it’s a frame-up job, and Stet finds himself at the mercy of his fading vision as his life is threatened by the real embezzler. Eisner uses a series of empty and distorted panels to put the reader in the shoes of the panicked Mr. Stet, to excellent effect.
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One of the most unusual of the Spirit sections is “The Story of Rat-Tat the Toy Machine Gun.” (September 4, 1949) Eisner uses the format of a children’s reading primer to tell the story of how a toy machine gun winds up involved in one of the Spirit’s cases, with explosive results. Stories like this one really show off Eisner’s range as an artist and designer, which combine his ability to draw both gritty action and cartoony fantasy, with neither feeling out of place or overpowered.
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Probably the most famous of the Spirit sections is “The Story of Gerhard Shnobble.” (September 5, 1948) Another of Eisner’s luckless schlubs, Gerhard Shnobble is a 35-year veteran bank guard who is fired when he’s unable to stop a robbery. Desperate to prove he is of value, Gerhard suddenly remembers that as a child, he discovered he could fly, until his parents forbade it, insisting he be normal. Determined to show the world, Gerhard heads to the top of a nearby building, where the Spirit is coincidentally headed to stop the same bank robbers. Gerhard leaps off the building and indeed can fly … at least for a moment or two.
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Eisner uses full-page spreads to express the feeling of height when Gerhard is in flight, and as he does in many of his later stories, utilizes the narrator’s voice to provide a bit of poetic irony. “The Story of Gerhard Shnobble” is everything that made THE SPIRIT great: funny, whimsical and tragic, with a spare but elegiac tone in the narration and breakthrough storytelling unlike any seen before.
By 1952, skyrocketing paper and printing costs made the Spirit section no longer profitable, and the syndicate pulled the plug. They asked Eisner to keep the character alive in a daily strip, but he refused. He continued to work for the United States Army, writing and illustrating P.S. MAGAZINE, a series of comic-style instruction manuals for the enlisted man. Eisner spent the next two decades applying the comics form to “education, instruction and other pragmatic directions,” as he himself put it. In 1978, Eisner was ready to return to storytelling, and did so in grand form with what most comics historians consider the first “graphic novel,” A CONTRACT WITH GOD.
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A CONTRACT WITH GOD was the first of Eisner’s autobiographical graphic novels, telling stories of life in the tenements of Bronx in the 1930s. CONTRACT is made up of four stories, tales of lost faith, lost hope, despair and coming of age, illustrated by a cartoonist at the height of his form, and with rough dialogue that rings true; the voices of immigrants not heard for fifty years speak out again through Eisner’s pen.
In 1986, Eisner published another of his autobiographical works with THE DREAMER, Eisner’s account of his early days trying to find work and success in the then-burgeoning comic-book industry. Here you can read Eisner’s own only slightly fictionalized telling of the founding of the E & I studio, the “Wonder Man” lawsuit and his decision to jump to the syndicate, as well as Eisner’s character studies of Jack Kirby, Lou Fine, Jack Cole and other Golden Age greats.
Eisner followed THE DREAMER with my favorite of his early graphic novels, THE BUILDING, published in 1987. In THE BUILDING, Eisner tells the stories of four different residents of a New York building, how their lives intermingle without ever knowing it and how, even after death, their spirits remain a part of the structure, even after it’s been demolished.
As Eisner puts it in his Introduction:
As I grew older and accumulated memories, I began to feel more keenly about the disappearance of people and landmarks. Especially troubling to me was the callous removal of buildings. I felt that, somehow, they had a kind of soul.
I know now that these structures, barnacled with laughter and stained by tears, are more than lifeless edifices. It cannot be that having been part of life, they did not somehow absorb the radiation from human interaction.
And I wonder what is left behind when a building is torn down.
Often overlooked by readers, THE BUILDING may be Will Eisner’s best single work, combining the authenticity and heart of his autobiographies with the unmatched plotting and storytelling skills he picked up on 12 years’ worth of THE SPIRIT. Highly recommended.
Though advancing in years, Will Eisner’s productivity continues unabated. In TO THE HEART OF THE STORM (1991), Eisner returned to autobiography with a much more ambitious work, devoting much attention to his father’s youth in Vienna and his own struggles growing up as a Jewish kid in a predominantly Italian and Irish neighborhood.
Since signing a long-term contract with DC Comics to keep all his works in print, including the entire run of THE SPIRIT, Eisner has produced three major works, putting to shame contemporaries one-third his age. Eisner’s LAST DAYS IN VIETNAM (2000) tells the small stories of military life in wartime, gleaned from Eisner’s own military experience, as well as field trips to Korea and Vietnam during his stint producing P.S. MAGAZINE.
Also published in 2000 was MINOR MIRACLES, Eisner’s retellings of the tales of modern folklore passed on to him by his family growing up.
Will Eisner’s most recent work is THE NAME OF THE GAME, (2002) a generational novel about a wealthy Jewish family and their attempts to gain social advantage through marrying “the right people.” THE NAME OF THE GAME expands on some of the themes touched upon by Eisner as early back as A CONTRACT WITH GOD, and does so with vitality, wit and Eisner’s ever-improving sense of draftsmanship and design.
So if you’re lucky enough to be attending the San Diego Comic-Con this year, do yourself a favor and pick up some of Will Eisner’s graphic novels. Doesn’t matter which ones; they’re all good. Then walk over to the DC Comics or Comic Book Legal Defense Fund booth and get your books signed by the master, the living legend, Will Eisner.
And tell the man thank you. He deserves it.
Got a question about comics? We live to serve. Send ‘em to stipton99x@movie poopshoot.com.
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