Will Eisner (20 page)

The Eisners—Fannie, Sam, Will, Rhoda, and Pete—pose for a family photo at Will’s wedding. (Courtesy of Ann Eisner)

Will and Ann Eisner dance at their wedding reception. (Courtesy of Ann Eisner)

And they never looked back.

Leaving their wedding, June 15, 1950. (Courtesy of Ann Eisner)

Eisner’s daily routine, sedate to begin with, became utterly domesticated. Weekdays could be long and grueling, but Ann insisted, then and always, that he reserve weekends for her. There would be an occasional exception, but Eisner made a point of trying to honor the arrangement.

The marriage—and, later, the arrivals of their two children—also appears to have had a subtle yet powerful effect on Eisner’s work. By the time of his wedding in mid-1950, Eisner was losing interest in
The Spirit
. The weekly installments were still creatively strong, but Eisner’s passion had been redirected to American Visuals and the prospects of discovering new venues for educational comics. The novelty of the newspaper comic book insert had worn off for Eisner, his newspaper clients, and readers. Eisner, who hoped to move out of his New York apartment and into a house, raise a family, and in general enjoy the rewards of all the hard work of his youth, was convinced that American Visuals, more than
The Spirit
, would take him down that path.

“I felt there was a whole new world to conquer,” he said later. “
The Spirit
was nice and safe, but at that point there was nowhere to go with it. I wanted to leave while the show was still a success.”

The project with the greatest potential for long-term business turned up unexpectedly when Eisner heard from Norman Colton, an old contact from his
Army Motors
days. Colton, along with another civilian named Bernard Miller, had worked on the publication from its early days as a mimeographed sheet, through its growing pains with Eisner, and on through its expansion in Detroit.
Army Motors
had ceased publication at the end of World War II, but with the United States becoming involved in a growing conflict in Korea, the army had approached Colton to edit a bigger, better preventive maintenance publication. Colton immediately thought of Eisner as the best choice to take charge of the new magazine’s artwork.

Eisner liked the idea. A long-running government contract could provide a solid annual base income for American Visuals, plus it would give him the opportunity to further extend his interests in educational comics.

“It was a very, very important adjunct to my business,” Eisner said, “because it made it possible to accumulate a fairly large staff of people, plus the fact that it allowed me to expand the operation into other areas of using comics as a teaching tool. [It] actually helped me build an enterprise, which is the way it often happens with companies that get military contracts … We began doing comics-related work at a rapidly growing rate.”

Eisner took charge of the project’s development as soon as he heard from Colton. He worked up a dummy copy of his proposed magazine, which brought back some of the popular characters from the old
Army Motors
. Remembering his previous problems with the adjutant general, who felt that
Army Motors
undermined the work in other instructional publications, Eisner named his magazine
P
*
S: The Preventive Maintenance Monthly
, intending it to be a postscript to existing army publications.

The army field-tested the dummy magazine that Eisner submitted, and it received positive feedback. Eisner’s first
P
*
S
contract called for six issues, after which there might or might not be a renewal. The arrangement might have had more to do with the army’s feelings about the Korean War than its confidence in the magazine: at the onset of the war, the military minds believed that it was going to be a brief conflict, perhaps measured in weeks or months. The United States would show its might, North Korea would capitulate, and that would be that. If that was the case, there would be no further need for
P
*
S
.

Paul E. Fitzgerald, who became the magazine’s first managing editor in 1953, attested to the urgent need for the publication in his book
Will Eisner and PS Magazine
:

Army personnel from privates to generals described the equipment used in the Korean War as “either too old or too new.” Anything left over from World War II was at least five years old, perhaps marginally maintained in the intervening years, and frequently outdated by advancing technology. When development and production schedules were accelerated in response to combat needs, the resulting products often were not totally de-bugged and sometimes arrived without normal accompanying items—manuals, special tools, and stocks of replacement parts.

From his experiences with
Army Motors
, Eisner knew something of the difficulties of working for the military, where the individual agenda sometimes overshadowed that of the whole; where interoffice bickering, all conducted in overly formal military lingo, could make an editor or artist feel as if he were trapped in an inescapable crossfire; where every higher-up seemed to demand a voice in the magazine’s content and the direction it was taking. During the war, Eisner had no choice but to deal as well as he could with the insanity. He was in the service, and even though he was a celebrity to some of the officers around him, he couldn’t have walked away from
Army Motors
if he’d been inclined to do so. It was different for Eisner the civilian. He was trying to follow his standards for art and commerce while dealing with people who had little regard for either. As Eisner later told Fitzgerald, “He felt as if he were in a cage, with his hands tied, surrounded by hungry tigers and suicidal maniacs.”

Eisner might have anticipated some of the problems. Once again, he found himself at the mercy of the Adjutant General’s Office, which controlled all publications issued by the army and was definitely not a member of the Will Eisner Admiration Society. The office’s opinion on using comics for instruction hadn’t changed since Eisner’s battles with the adjutant general during World War II, when he had reluctantly gone along with
Army Motors
. That magazine’s success had loosened the negativity somewhat, but Henry Aldridge, the office’s executive secretary, disliked the entire idea of
P
*
S
magazine. Comics, he felt, were inappropriate for the army; such Eisner characters as Joe Dope and Pvt. Fosgnoff came dangerously close to ridiculing the military. He wasn’t happy about the approval of the magazine, but the secretary of the army and the army’s chief of staff were among its fans, so the office had little choice but to go along with it. Still, he intended to keep an eye on Eisner.

Norman Colton, the magazine’s single-minded editor, also presented a hurdle to contend with. Short, neatly groomed, and impeccably dressed, with a calm exterior that belied a scrappy personality, Colton could be a handful. He and Eisner had worked reasonably well together during the
Army Motors
days, first in Holabird, where Eisner saw him on an almost daily basis, and later, after Colton transferred to Detroit, when their working relationship was long-distance. Colton, Eisner determined, was a wheeler-dealer, capable of working all angles and, often enough, pitting one office against another.
Army Motors
had been Colton’s baby, and he wanted a better cut of
P
*
S
than just a position and salary. As it was set up, Eisner controlled the magazine’s cover art, the content in the middle of each issue, and other incidental art; Colton was responsible for the written material. Eisner got most of the attention and glory; Colton, for all his contributions, got very little.

Eisner didn’t trust him. As a civilian, Colton worked outside the military, and Eisner suspected that he had his own agenda, which turned out to be true enough when Colton approached Eisner and demanded part ownership in the magazine. A bitter debate ensued.
P
*
S
, Eisner pointed out, belonged to the army and wasn’t his to sell. Colton countered that Eisner could have set up an arrangement allowing him to hold stock in the publication, even though that wasn’t Eisner’s to sell, either. Colton insisted; Eisner refused. Finally, acting on his lawyer’s counsel, Eisner flatly refused to discuss it with him.

There were matters other than internal politics. Since the magazine was publicly funded, Eisner had to keep a close watch on a restricted budget—not the easiest task when you’re trying to print a color cover and a four-color, eight-page interior spread, which could be expensive. Any staff would have to be paid as well. Eisner, of course, was familiar with all this from his days of running a shop, but with so many people watching and demanding a say in the magazine’s production, he felt as if he were always under surveillance, with each issue being an audition for the magazine’s renewal.

Fortunately, he enjoyed a challenge.

Eisner’s private life was changing as well. He and Ann had a son, John, in April 1952; a daughter, Alice, was born a year and a half later, in October 1953. Ann Eisner would remember her husband as being a doting father—an easygoing, benevolent figure around the house, inclined to go along with his children’s wishes and leave the discipline to his wife. His work schedule, still very intense from Monday through Friday, kept him away from home much more than he would have liked, especially when he and Ann moved to suburban Westchester County, north of the city, first to a rented house in Harrison and then, a short time after John’s birth, to a large house that they bought at 8 Burling Avenue in White Plains. Eisner commuted to the city every day and often didn’t return home until late in the evening. Time with his children was precious.

It’s not coincidental that
The Spirit
was reaching its end during the period when Eisner was starting up
P
*
S
magazine, moving out of New York City, buying a house, and starting a family. His work for American Visuals had reached the point where he was delegating more of his
Spirit
duties to others, and it was beginning to show, not so much in the quality of stories and art as in the continuity of the feature. Eisner still had top-notch co-workers contributing to
The Spirit
, but the character seemed to be drifting away from the kind of development Eisner had given him in the early days. The stories seemed familiar—and, in some cases, for good reason: Eisner would rework old stories, reasoning that enough time had passed since their original appearances for readers to notice. He still took an active role in the weekly installments, doing the stories’ breakdowns and drawing the main characters’ heads, but he left almost everything else to others.

The market itself affected the stories. The cost of newsprint had risen substantially, which forced the comic book section to shrink to eight pages, with talk of reducing it to four. Newspapers were dropping the section, but when Eisner talked about abandoning the feature, editors asked him to reconsider. Eisner agonized over whether he should continue.
The Spirit
had been a part of his creative life for a long time, and even with papers dropping it, it still generated considerable income. As Eisner told Tom Heintjes, “It was a dilemma I often found myself in when I became a businessman and an artist.”

Subscribing newspapers complained about the falloff in quality. The art, they said, didn’t look like the Eisner style that readers were familiar with. Eisner had to agree. He felt that the scripts, largely written by Jules Feiffer, were still strong, but with his attention divided, Eisner found himself relying on artists unable to imitate his style. “The obvious was staring me in the face,” he wrote later. “Rather than allow the quality to disintegrate (which might hurt my professional reputation, not to mention pride) the better part of valor would dictate that I discontinue the feature. But I was not ready for that yet.”

In a “last gasp” effort to instill new life in
The Spirit
, Eisner hired Wally Wood, an exceptionally talented artist who had worked for Bill Gaines at EC (Entertaining Comics) and who would eventually work for
Mad
magazine. Wood joined Eisner as a freelancer after a blowup with EC, but he wasn’t interested in contributing only to the
Spirit
’s backgrounds, as Eisner hoped. Eisner worked out a system that found him discussing scripts with Feiffer, who would write dialogue for the installment. Eisner then did rough pencils and turned the art over to Wood. Given the talents of the three, this might have resulted in sensational work, but it didn’t happen, mainly because these stories, which placed the Spirit in outer space, confounded readers and the comic’s creators alike. Feiffer, no science fiction fan, hated the entire idea. Readers wondered what happened to the detective who walked the streets of the big city. The syndicate grumbled that the change was too radical, that the art was nothing at all like Eisner’s. Eisner pleaded for patience, to no avail.