Will Eisner (23 page)

Eisner gritted his teeth and complied. Fosgnoff was immediately written out of the scripts, and a short time later, Joe Dope suffered serious facial injuries as the result of his ineptitude, and during cosmetic surgery, his buckteeth were straightened out. Eisner wasn’t through with Joe Dope, though. Years later, after his term with
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had ended, he tried to obtain legal rights to Joe Dope. Ironically, he had no claim to either the characters or the artwork, which the army destroyed almost immediately after it was used in
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. In a legal action, Eisner tried to wrestle the rights to Joe Dope from the army, with no luck. He claimed to have no bitterness about it, but his words said otherwise.

“Some bureaucrat in the Department of Defense with too much time on his hands saw the notice and decided that they should own the character, not me,” he said. “So I got into a legal battle with them, and the courts ultimately ruled that since I’d originally created Joe Dope during World War II, when I was in the full employ of the armed services, I didn’t own the character. It was a work-for-hire type of thing, as it turned out.”

Connie Rodd, a holdover from the
Army Motors
publication, was another point of contention, though for entirely different reasons.
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might have been circulating among young men thousands of miles from home, caught in combat zones, and far removed from their wives and girlfriends, but the magazine’s overseers, safe in warm, dry offices, constantly objected to material they judged to be too racy for soldiers. There was no question that Connie was intended to be a sexy, even provocative, character—a bit of eye candy even if she was a cartoon figure—but Eisner was continually skirting the border between what was good clean fun, delivered with a wink, and what the army considered to be inappropriate. The army nixed one cover for a Christmas issue that depicted Connie, discreetly covered with a man’s shirt but wearing only underwear, changing into a Santa Claus outfit. Any cover depicting Connie in a bathing suit, single or two-piece, was also subject to discussion. Eisner had no alternative but to comply, though he ridiculed his bosses in private, not only for their Victorian attitudes, but also for their moral judgments, delivered from the comfort of the Pentagon.

Eisner experienced some of those conditions firsthand. As part of his job, to ensure that he understood the equipment he was illustrating, he was required to travel to military posts overseas—an interesting irony given the fact that he never left the States during his active duty in the service. Beginning with his first trip to Seoul, South Korea, in 1954, Eisner found his Korean experiences to be unusual—and educational. An armistice had been established between North Korea and the United Nations a year earlier, on July 27, 1953, but the truce was uneasy, especially around the demilitarized zone dividing North and South Korea, and troops were to be combat-ready at all times.

“When I went to Korea, I visited the repair shops, mostly,” he recalled of the trips that usually lasted four to six weeks at a time. “I never saw direct combat; I wasn’t there to study that. I would take notes, make sketches, take photos. I would talk to the guys. I was always accompanied by an editor who was more of a reporter than I was, and he would take notes as well. We would talk to the GIs and discover any ‘field fixes’ they had worked out for emergency purposes, because they can be quite important.”

Eisner would joke that his ignorance of machinery acted as a positive influence on his drawings of machines, as well as his directions on how to maintain them; he was simply passing along what he himself was learning. What he
did
understand intuitively was human nature. He realized that in
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he could go only so far in his depictions of army life, but what he saw and sketched on these trips benefited him greatly later in his career, when he was working on a series of graphic narratives published as
Last Day in Vietnam
. “Hard Duty,” one of the book’s most moving stories, was the direct result of something Eisner had witnessed during a trip to Korea.

“I stayed with a particular unit,” he explained, “and on Saturdays, these big, tough, rugged guys would take time to go up to a local orphanage, where the kids who were the result of American soldiers and Korean women were kept.

The Koreans were particularly against mixed marriages; the taboo was very strong. And I met one young girl who kept hanging around the orphanage. I got to talking to her, and it turned out that she had a baby who was there, but she couldn’t tell anyone at the orphanage or they wouldn’t take care of her baby. She said she was hanging around, waiting for her husband to show up and gather the family together. She told me her husband lived in a place called Harlem, and that he was a sanitation engineer. Of course, I knew her husband was never going to show up to take her away from the orphanage, because a young black man bringing a Korean girl home to Harlem in 1952 wasn’t likely to get very far. It was a sad moment.

Eisner’s harshest critics would accuse him of selling out to commercial endeavors when he could have used his time and talent to produce the type of creative work that had defined his time with Eisner & Iger and the twelve-year run of
The Spirit
, when he was young and hungry and bursting with the types of ideas that made him a leader in the comics world. Eisner scoffed at such criticism. He openly admitted that he enjoyed the art of the deal, the bantering and negotiating that accompanied each new contract. He had a family to support. Besides, he’d point out, sometimes testily, the work he was doing in instructional comics was groundbreaking.

If nothing else, his résumé was impressive, covering an astonishing range of topics and clients. Besides the government contract for
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magazine, American Visuals produced materials for such corporate clients as General Motors, the American Red Cross, Fram Oil Filters, the Baltimore Colts professional football team, the American Medical Association, and RCA Victor. His
Job Scene
booklets (produced for the Department of Labor and designed to offer career guidance to people unaware of career opportunities) and his educational supplements used in grammar schools supported Eisner’s theory that comic art could be used in almost any kind of learning situation.

“I became far more interested in the use of comics as an instructional medium than I was as an entertainment medium,” he told the
Comics Journal
. “I felt that was a new channel for the use of comics. All my life, professionally, I’ve been really obsessed with the idea of trying something new. I’m in love with innovation and experimentation. It’s risky, but it’s really very exhilarating.”

Some of Eisner’s projects bordered on the bizarre and were nothing but manifestations of Eisner the businessman. Mike Ploog, an artist and Marine Corps veteran with a style so uncannily close to Eisner’s that it fooled even those close to the two, remembered the chaos he encountered when he joined American Visuals in 1970, late in the company’s existence. Ploog had been hired to work on
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, but as he quickly determined, there was a lot more going on in Eisner’s Park Avenue offices than the army publication. “There were all kinds of goofy things going on,” he said, referring to the piles of old
Spirit
plates stored at the facility, as well as Eisner’s other business interests, including a program he called “World Explorer,” which found him buying and selling trinkets from all over the world to school-age children subscribing to his newsletter and ordering these items from advertisements he placed in the newsletter.

“We used to get these strange boxes full of exotic bric-a-brac,” Ploog said.

He used to bring in goofy things like pipes from Peru, and silk worms from Japan. They used to be stored in boxes all over the place, and they used to be shipped out in these educational supplements. I remember we had silk worms in the basement that the rats got. We ended up with boxes and boxes of empty silk worms, and beads from South America that somebody realized were highly poisonous. If somebody even so much as put one around their neck, it would kill them. Goofy things like that.

For all the business pouring in, money could still be tight. Overhead and payroll rose in proportion to the company’s increasing number of artists, needed office equipment and supplies, telephone and postage costs, and insurance and other expenses, and Eisner often found himself scrambling to balance the books. Profit margins could be razor thin. Eisner never had trouble generating work; the issue, as it is with all small businesses, was to produce the work, bill the client, collect payment in a timely fashion, and move on to the next project before cash flow became problematic.

The challenge was apparent in the different permutations of American Visuals—and other Eisner companies—through the 1950s and 1960s. At one point, American Visuals filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and merged with the Koster-Dana Corporation. However, this turned out to be a big corporate headache for Eisner, who was unaccustomed to answering to stockholders. Koster-Dana was a media conglomerate with syndicated newspaper and radio companies to go along with its popular Good Reading Rack Service, which produced instructional pamphlets for schools and corporations; while he never admitted as much, it could be that as president of the company’s communications divisions, Eisner had spread himself too thin. The company thrived under his leadership, doubling the value of its stock, but Eisner clashed with its board of directors as much as he’d clashed with the army over
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. Ultimately, he broke with Koster-Dana and went back to running a small company.

The frenetic pace could be grueling. In addition to his obligatory travels for
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, there was other work-related travel that kept him on the road more than Ann would have liked—on top of the long days he spent at his Manhattan office before commuting home to White Plains.

Eisner’s career—or at least the public’s awareness of it—received an unexpected boost with the 1965 publication of
The Great Comic Book Heroes
, a book-length essay that was part memoir, part comics history, and part appreciation, written by Eisner’s onetime protégé Jules Feiffer. E. L. Doctorow, then working as an editor at Dial Press before embarking on his renowned career as a novelist, had contacted Feiffer about writing the book. Doctorow wanted a serious look at comics, something that went outside the usual comic-book-bashing screeds that popped up on publishers’ lists from time to time.
Superman
and
Batman
were now on their second generation of readers, comics had withstood stiff challenges from their opponents, and it seemed like a good time to revisit the past.

Feiffer was a good candidate to write the book. He had been creating
Sick, Sick, Sick
(later entitled
Feiffer
), some of the edgiest, most intelligent cartooning in the business, for the
Village Voice
since 1956. Besides being a recognizable name helpful in the marketing of the book, and a talent giving him a voice of authority in analyzing comics, Feiffer had a history in the business dating back to the early years.

The Great Comic Book Heroes
began with a brief description of Feiffer’s own childhood love of comic strips, and from there he took a workmanlike approach to dissecting comics history, detailing the development of early comic books and covering the births of Superman and Batman. Never one to withhold an opinion, Feiffer offered caustic commentary about the superheroes’ sidekicks, and he took a few potshots at Fredric Wertham and his theories about homosexuality and lesbianism in comics. His passage on the studios and sweatshops was as thorough as anything published to that point.

Will Eisner and
The Spirit
warranted a chapter, and Feiffer was generous in his appreciation of his former boss. He praised Eisner’s use of German expressionist cinematic techniques in
The Spirit
and of his use of humor—a rarity in superhero comics at the time. Feiffer’s wisecracking style, so prevalent when he worked with Eisner in the late forties and early fifties, seeped into his analysis and led to the airing of a long-standing point of contention regarding the Spirit’s clothing. After describing the Spirit’s suit, hat, and mask (“drawn as if it was a skin graft”), Feiffer joked about the Spirit’s socks: “For some reason, he rarely wore socks—or if he did they were flesh-colored. I often wondered about that.”

(“It was kind of a massive ten-year oversight,” Eisner said of the Spirit’s socks. “I never paid any attention to it. Still to this day I don’t know what color socks he should have. Jules picked it up because he was concerned, and it was always very funny with him, because he would say, ‘Gee, look, he’s got no socks on!’ and we would laugh and think it was very funny.”)

Feiffer’s greatest enthusiasm was for Eisner’ technique:

Eisner’s line had weight. Clothing sat on his characters heavily; when they bent an arm, deep folds sprang into action everywhere. When one Eisner character slugged another, a real fist hit real flesh. Violence was no externalized plot exercise; it was the gut of his style. Massive and indigestible, it curdled, lava-like, from the page.

This was the stuff guaranteed to catch the attention of readers too young to remember
The Spirit
or to even know Eisner’s name. The Spirit was a notable contrast to other figures—Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Sub-Mariner, Captain America—discussed in the essay, and when the book was excerpted in
Playboy
, a huge audience in the magazine’s eighteen-to-thirty-year-old readership was introduced to a character that had slipped into the past. As for Eisner’s importance and influence in comic book history, Feiffer pulled no punches in his assessment: “Alone among comic book men, Eisner was a cartoonist other cartoonists swiped from.”