The Amazing Adventures of Will Eisner

By Judy Cantor | Street Miami | 11/07/2003
Posted Friday, November 7, 2003

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THE COMICS PIONEER AND AUTHOR OF A NEW GRAPHIC NOVEL CONTINUES TO DRAW ATTENTION

Hundreds of volumes of comics, including dozens of his own in several languages, are neatly ordered in bookcases around Will Eisner's studio in Tamarac. On one crowded wall are plaques for his numerous honors, which range from four National Cartoonists Society's Best Artist awards to the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. From the swivel chair at his drawing table, Eisner can view a wall full of fan mail: comic strips and caricatures sent to him by students and fans representing several generations of comic artists from various countries. Just inside the door, in vibrant colors impossible to ignore, hang two vivid poster-size reproductions of illustrations from Eisner's fabled 1940s comic strip, The Spirit, the fedora-wearing hero surrounded by characters from a cast of curvy women, criminals, and urban everymen.

The pioneer of literate comics and the creator of the now-burgeoning genre he named the graphic novel, Eisner has been called ''The Leonardo of the Comic Book.'' He's long advocated for the recognition of comics as an art. ''I believe -- and I've always believed -- that comics are a literary form,'' he says. ``It's a combination of two of the most powerful means of communication we have, words and pictures, which accounts for the endurance of this medium and the progress it's making.''

Before anyone would have considered displaying comics alongside literature in a bookstore, Eisner saw potential. He's demonstrated the ability of the medium to narrate serious fiction in over a dozen graphic novels. He's also proved the usefulness of the comic medium in creating educational materials and in dealing with historical and social issues. He taught a course in comics for 17 years at the School of Visual Art in New York, and authored two instructional books which are widely used in many countries. Though not a household name, he's revered throughout the industry: the Eisner Awards, among the most important honors in comics, are named for him.

A nimble 86-year-old, Eisner welcomes visitors to his studio with the graciousness of another era, dressed in neat, tailored slacks and a button-down shirt, rather than the slack T-shirt and shorts uniform of a typical Florida retiree. But then, Eisner is not retired. Most days since he and his wife Anne moved to South Florida almost two decades ago, he's been in this studio, hidden inside a medical office building, putting in hours at his drawing table. At his side are trays filled with nibbed pens, charcoal and grease pencils and a plastic jar full of India ink.

Eisner's latest book is Fagin the Jew, which he'll present Sunday at the Miami International Book Fair. It's about the life of the fatherly Jewish criminal Fagin from Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. In repositioning the classic tale from Fagin's point of view, Eisner not only explores the history of Eastern European Jewish immigration to England, he examines the visual stereotypes that existed at the time, arguing succinctly that the illustrator of Dickens' book got it wrong. It's literary criticism in comic book form.

''My sense of value is built on the fact that I can continue to try new paths,'' Eisner says. ``I'd say my own history has always been doing things that nobody tried before.''

As a student at the progressive Dewitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, Eisner says he was ''part of the radical group that was going to change the world.'' He had inherited his drawing ability and surely some of the dreams from his immigrant father, a talented painter from Eastern Europe who decorated sets for New York's Yiddish theater, then turned to other endeavors to support his family. He struggled, and did not have the means to send his son to college.

But for the young Eisner, as for other young New York Jews during the Depression, there was an alternative: comics. It was a field that, like other popular forms of entertainment -- radio, sport, the movies -- was rapidly expanding, fueled in large part by the labor and creativity of people like Eisner, the children of European immigrants.

Although the newspaper comic strip had existed since the turn of the century, it was in the early 1930s that the comic book took form, produced by Jewish entrepreneurs looking for a way to make a living during the Depression. By 1941, 30 comic book publishers were selling 15 million copies of comic books a year and enjoyed a reading audience of about 60 million. ''I didn't originate comics, but I was there at the birth,'' says Eisner, who frequently compares the comic book industry's early days with the beginnings of American motion pictures.

''People got into comics because it was an easy way to make money, the standards were not very high, the work was steady and you learned while you worked, because the amount of artwork you did while you were creating a comic was enormous,'' he says. 'The idea was to make enough money to go `uptown,' which meant a job as an illustrator in an art agency or The Saturday Evening Post [a popular magazine of the era].''

Comic-book artists and writers of the period usually toiled for low wages, and no royalties; most never made it 'uptown.' Eisner was one of the few who valued his work enough to save the original drawings.

Still, Eisner says the comic books put out by Jewish publishers were the best bet for a Jewish kid trying to break into a career in illustration. No coincidence, then, that in 1938 the writer/artist team Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster created Superman, a character Eisner has described as a manifestation of the invincible hero that Jews needed a ''to protect us from an almost invincible force [the Nazis].'' Indeed, Superman and other comic books have long been considered to be a distinctly Jewish form of expression, with roots in the storytelling tradition of the culture, and even in its symbolic and mystical lore.

''Remember that Judaism is very rich in stories, and storytelling is a very big part of our culture,'' says Eisner, whose work throughout the years has often had Jewish themes and characters, and who describes himself as ``something like a Jewish Frank McCourt [the Brooklyn-born/Ireland-reared writer of the best-selling Angela's Ashes].''

Eisner had penned his first comic strip in the Dewitt newspaper and once out of high school, he and a friend founded a studio, a kind of agency where artists and writers turned out comics to keep up with the publishers' demand.

Before he reached age 20, a newspaper syndicate commissioned Eisner to create a weekly comics supplement that would appeal to adults -- such was the popularity of comic books that newspapers feared losing the audience for their Sunday magazines. ''I had writerly pretensions,'' recalls Eisner, who also took painting classes at the Arts Students League. He set out to create a comic strip whose plotlines were influenced by the short stories of O. Henry and other authors who wrote tales of the city that remarked on the human condition.

''But the newspaper syndicate insisted on a costumed character, what we know as a superhero today,'' says Eisner, remembering a conversation with his employers after he had sketched out a detective named Denny Colt. 'They said `We can't sell it without a costume.' So I drew a mask on him and said 'Well, he's got a mask, how about a mask?' They said 'A mask. OK, that's pretty good. How about some gloves?' `Gloves? OK, gloves.'''

The Spirit, as the crime-fighting alias of Denny Colt came to be known, had a blue imprint around his eyes and blue gloves, but no superpowers. He was, in Eisner's words, ''a middle-class crime fighter.'' It was precisely the humanness of the character, and the strength of Eisner's creative storytelling, that made The Spirit successful. At its peak, the strip had a readership of five million people.

Eisner didn't shy away from heavy themes like loneliness, heartbreak, and despair, subjects with which many Americans who lived through the Depression could identify. And he was daring in other ways. The Nazis -- sweeping across Europe years before America's entry into World War II -- provided the perfect evil foes for comic book artists and writers at the time, but Eisner's treatment of the subject was, typically, more provocative than most. In one 1941 issue of The Spirit, Hitler comes to New York, becomes enlightened and even repents for his crimes against humanity, before he is assassinated by one of his own.

Other artists worked on The Spirit after Eisner went into the army in 1942; the last installment was published in 1952. The comic has since been reprinted in anthologies, and it has lived on in other ways: In Eisner's studio, above a shelf holding a Spirit lunch box and other memorabilia, is a photo that preserves the image of The Spirit that someone painted on the Berlin Wall. And all those original drawings Eisner hung onto? A profitable bit of foresight: Original illustrations from The Spirit now sell for $1000-$5000.

In the Army Air Corps, Eisner was charged with creating instructional materials for soldiers. It was his idea to create comics, which were published in PS Magazine, ''The Preventive Maintenance Monthly.'' While some might consider this tedious, for Eisner it was another groundbreaking phase in his career, and another milestone for the comic medium. ''Through comics, we'd talk to [young recruits] in their own language,'' says the artist, who, though he's lost the wavy hair of his army days, maintains his soldier's posture. He chuckles. 'Instead of `Remove the residue from the vehicle,' we'd write `Get the crud off your jeep.'''

As a civilian, Eisner continued to do contract work for the government for the next 26 years. Meanwhile, U.S. Senate hearings on comics held in the 1950s threatened to destroy the comic book industry after German psychologist Dr. Fredric Wertham wrote a book claiming they corrupted children, turning them into juvenile delinquents.

''Comics were regarded as trash,'' remembers Eisner. And not just trash, but evil. The Marilyn Manson of the day. Still, Eisner persevered. ''During the '60s, I built a company selling comics in schools, or trying to sell comics in schools,'' he says. 'I remember being at a teachers' convention in Ohio. I felt like a drug dealer in the schoolyard. One teacher came over to me and shook her finger. She said I was destroying [the children's] imagination.''

Eisner later found encouragement in the underground ''comix'' he discovered were coming out of San Francisco in the '70s, books by the likes of Robert Crumb. ''It really shook me up,'' Eisner recalls. ``They were using comics to address social mores at the time -- they were talking about drugs and sex. This struck me as being a revolutionary occurrence because [previously] comics were devoted to pure storytelling and not to making a social case of any kind.''

Eisner felt the time was right to set to work on a project he'd long had in mind: a book of four interconnected short stories in comic form. ''I was looking for a publisher, so I called one of the largest publishers in New York,'' says Eisner, recalling his first attempt to sell a publisher on the idea. 'I said, `Look I've got an interesting thing here.' Then a little voice inside me said, 'Stupid, don't tell him its comics, he'll hang up on you.' So I said, 'It's a graphic novel' and he said, 'How interesting. I've never heard of that; bring it up here.' So I took it to him, and he looked at it and said, `These are comics. We don't publish stuff like that.'''

Eisner remained convinced of the appeal of the genre. ''So I found a small publisher who was willing to do it,'' he says. ''And that's how the graphic novel began.'' Published in 1978, Eisner's novel in four parts was titled Contract With God. Drawn in what has since become known as Eisner's trademark expressionist style, the stories centered on life in a New York tenement building. It was familiar territory, since Eisner had lived in more than a few such buildings as a boy.

These days, Eisner can walk into a bookstore like Books and Books or Borders and find a whole section of graphic novels by international authors. He's heard comics are being used in schools as a tool for reluctant readers, and even public libraries stock comics in book form. (15 titles by Eisner are in the Miami-Dade Public Library catalog.)

''The year 2003 I regard as a watershed year,'' Eisner says, breaking into a boyish grin. ``I think this is the year comics have come of age. It's almost like a Bar Mitzvah. The broad content of this material is greater than ever. The superheroes remain and they're satisfying on a certain level. And then you have horror comics, which are satisfying another level, and then you have the more sophisticated comics, which are trying to deal with life itself and addressing themselves to adults.

''I believe this medium is the new literacy in this country,'' he adds. ``Words themselves are not able to keep up with the speed of information. This combination of words and images will continue to grow and it will dominate.''

As Eisner sees it, comics have found their true golden age in the information era. Or maybe the world has finally caught up with Will Eisner.

Will Eisner presents his book, Fagin the Jew, Sunday, November 9, at Miami Book Fair International, in Building One, Room 1101, of the Miami-Dade College's Wolfson Campus, 300 NE Second Ave., Downtown Miami.