Will Eisner (25 page)

Alice and John Eisner. (Courtesy of Ann Eisner)

Eisner was overwhelmed, not as much by grief as by rage. Although he was not a religious man, he felt as if some kind of agreement had been broken, as if he had lived a decent, moral life only to be punished all the same—or, worse yet, that Alice had been punished.

“He said, ‘She didn’t get a chance to live! She didn’t have a life! She was given nothing! Why?’” Ann recalled.

Eisner’s anger peaked at Alice’s funeral, when a rabbi spoke of her as if he had known her when in fact he barely knew her name. He raged at the cemetery when Alice was laid to rest on a hillside a short drive from the Eisner home.

“He didn’t cry when Alice died,” Ann recalled. “He was just very, very angry. He would not talk about it to anybody—
anybody
. There were times when somebody in the shop would say that Will was different. Of course he was different. You never recover from something like that.”

Eisner internalized his daughter’s death to such an extent that some friends and business associates didn’t even know that he had a daughter who had passed away. Grief, he felt, was private—a family matter. His work was his therapy, and later, when the time was right, he would creatively combine his work and grief into a sequential art form that would help change the direction of comics.

chapter nine

B A C K   I N   T H E   G A M E

It’s a little bit like being Rip Van Winkle. I go to a convention now and I stand there and look around, like in San Diego, at thousands of people milling about and hundreds and hundreds of comics and comic book booths and I think to myself, “My God, in 1937, who would have dreamed that this could really happen?”

E
isner loved to tell the story about a day in June 1971, when his secretary took a call from a man named Phil Seuling.

“I want to invite him to a comic convention,” Seuling said when he asked to speak to Eisner. He went on to explain that he was running a convention that would take place on July 4 at the Commodore Hotel in New York City. Eisner, he mentioned, would be a most welcome guest.

The confused secretary paused for a moment, put her hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone, and called out to Eisner in his office:

“Mr. Eisner, were you once a cartoonist?”

That innocent question illustrates how far Eisner had withdrawn from the comics scene. His secretary knew nothing about
The Spirit
. Eisner had stored that past life in his home in White Plains, and he never spoke of it at the office.

Eisner had to be talked into attending the convention. He couldn’t imagine what relevance he might have in such a setting.
The Great Comic Book Heroes
had put his name back in the spotlight for a brief period, but Eisner felt no compelling reason to bring back the Spirit for a series of new adventures. Comic book heroes had been reinvented in the nearly two decades that had passed since the Spirit made his last appearance on a regular basis, and Eisner seriously doubted that young readers would be interested in a detective who wore a fedora, gloves, suit, tie, and mask—a hero without superpowers or, at the very least, a utility belt packed with cool gadgets.

Seuling, however, could be very persuasive. “Come on down,” he insisted.

Eisner finally agreed.

Meanwhile, half a country away, a tall, angular, long-haired Wisconsin comic book artist and publisher named Denis Kitchen was about to embark on his first trip to that same New York convention. Although only twenty-four, Kitchen had put a lot of mileage on his artistic odometer, as a cartoonist and publisher, co-founder of a college humor magazine and, shortly thereafter, an alternative newspaper. He’d “met” Phil Seuling about six months earlier, when Kitchen and fellow Wisconsin cartoonist Jim Mitchell, broke and hungry, decided to sell some of their original art to pay bills and buy groceries. They placed an ad in the
Bugle-American
, the Milwaukee paper that Kitchen had co-founded.
SAVE A STARVING ARTIST
, read the ad’s headline. The two received one response—from someone named Phil Seuling, who had somehow run across the ad even though he was out on the East Coast. In lieu of placing an order for artwork, Seuling sent Kitchen a Coney Island salami with an attached card that read, “Never let it be said that Phil Seuling let cartoonists starve.” The two corresponded, and in the months following the Great Salami Episode, Kitchen had drawn some comic strip advertisements for Seuling, repaying Seuling’s generosity and bartering some of his ads for original Al Capp artwork.

What Kitchen lacked in money he compensated for in ambition, chutzpah, hard work, talent, good timing, resourcefulness, and luck—the ideal recipe for a successful artist (or at least a constantly working one) in any field. Born August 27, 1946, Kitchen had been raised in the state known for its political extremes, for Fightin’ Bob La Follette and Joe McCarthy, whose political ideologies were debated on the University of Wisconsin campus and in smoky corner taverns, where Friday night fish fries were treated like sacraments and the Milwaukee Braves and Green Bay Packers like seasonal deities. Like every kid growing up in the fifties, Kitchen loved comics, but unlike other kids at the time, he wanted to create them. Since art school wasn’t an option, he’d taught himself to draw. He loved
Mad
magazine, particularly the work of Harvey Kurtzman, whom he tried to emulate when, as an undergrad, he started up
Snide
, the first (and only) humor magazine ever to come out of the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. According to Kitchen, the magazine failed after one of its editors, a New Yorker with some street smarts, took the magazine’s profits and tried to invest them in pot, only to find himself arrested in Mexico.

Kitchen’s gift for satire, along with his presence on a progressive college campus at the height of the Vietnam War, might have seemed like the perfect combination for his work as an underground comix
*
artist and publisher, but only a strange turn of events spared him from a much different fate. By his own description, he was as “straight as they come” when he enrolled as a freshman at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. His father was a World War II veteran, and as a result of his upbringing, Denis felt a sense of patriotism not shared by some of his friends, who were appalled when he joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, donned a uniform, and marched around the campus twice a week. As Kitchen tells it, he might have enlisted in the service if not for one minor issue: he was allergic to wool, and his uniform pants itched like hell. He dropped ROTC and started hanging out at a coffeehouse called the Avant Garde, where UWM’s hippies whiled away their hours and argued the finer points of the escalating war in Southeast Asia. Kitchen’s friends praised him for finally coming to his senses about the war. He didn’t have the nerve to tell them that his decision was based on itchy trousers. “Had the pants been made out of cotton, I might have been a lieutenant colonel today,” he quipped decades later. “It astonishes me how we pick these paths.”

Fate also played a role in Kitchen’s choice of academic pursuits. Since UWM didn’t offer art courses conducive to a comics career, Kitchen went into journalism, which, he reasoned, would prepare him for a career in cartooning. Thanks to the time he spent in his classes and at the coffeehouse, Kitchen’s thinking changed radically. He joined the Socialist Labor Party, and besides his work on the ill-fated
Snide
, he drew cartoons for the
Post
, UWM’s student newspaper. More significant, he began assembling his own comic book, a work called
Mom’s Homemade Comics
. The undergrounds were making a splash on the West Coast, where they fit nicely into the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll milieu of Haight-Ashbury and, by extension, appealed to hippies all across the nation who were listening to the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, or Janis Joplin. Kitchen didn’t aspire to reach a national audience with
Mom’s
; he was happy loading his comic book with inside jokes and references to Wisconsin. When
Mom’s #1
came out in 1969, Kitchen distributed it himself, hoofing it around Milwaukee’s east side and setting up sales arrangements with drugstores, head shops, used-book stores, and anyone else willing to take a handful of the comics and sell them for a slice of the profits. Kitchen made a little money, but nowhere near enough to pay bills
and
self-publish a follow-up edition of
Mom’s
.

At this point, his ambitions were sprinting far ahead of the returns he was earning for his efforts. In 1970, Kitchen partnered with four friends and co-founded the
Bugle-American
, an alternative weekly newspaper initially issued from Madison before settling a short time later in Milwaukee. As the paper’s art director, Kitchen was responsible for many of the
Bugle
’s covers as well as a regular strip running in the comics section. The position put him in touch with all sorts of area cartoonists, and if he still wasn’t earning any real money for all the work, at least he was becoming well connected. Kitchen was an easy name to remember, and his work, although not nearly as polished as it would become over the next year or two, caught the attention of artists throughout the region.

Two of these artists, Jay Lynch and Skip Williamson, hailed from Chicago and published
Bijou
, one of the earliest underground comix and by far the finest to come out of the Midwest. The two enjoyed
Mom’s
, and they contacted Kitchen shortly after its publication. When Kitchen complained about how he was being worked to death yet starving at the same time, and about how he needed to find someone to publish and distribute his work if he ever hoped to birth another issue of
Mom’s
, he learned that
Bijou
was being published by the Print Mint, a California outfit specializing in rock posters. Kitchen revised
Mom’s #1
and submitted it, along with a follow-up issue, to Print Mint.

As a businessman, Kitchen was caught somewhere between the traditional and the hippie-dippy, which became very evident while he was dealing with Print Mint and its lax royalty reporting. The company was sporadic about reporting its sales, and defensive about it to boot, as Kitchen discovered when he inquired about the sales figures for
Mom’s #1.
He learned that Lynch and Williamson were similarly dissatisfied with the way
Bijou
was being handled. Kitchen vowed to dump Print Mint and publish the third issue of
Mom’s
himself, only this time he was going to do it on a broader scale. The Print Mint versions of
Mom’s
had been enthusiastically received on the West Cost, where the undergrounds were really thriving, and Kitchen had no reason to believe that his third issue wouldn’t do as well, perhaps even better, without Print Mint.

Lynch listened to Kitchen’s spiel, and when the Wisconsin artist was finished, Lynch made a proposal. The people at
Bijou
, like Kitchen, were looking to switch publishers. How would Kitchen feel about publishing future issues of
Bijou
under his proposed new publishing imprint? As Kitchen would remember, he responded with “what may have been the smartest or dumbest thing I ever said: ‘Sure. Why not? Doing two is as easy as one.’” At that moment, he became “a publisher by default.”

Phil Seuling conducted his conventions like a drill sergeant dragging buck privates through basic training—but without the charm. He would be remembered for his dictatorial manner of running his conventions, for his shouting and pointing and barking directions. He’d learned early on that comic book creators tended to be loners in need of someone to nudge them in the right direction—or
any
direction, for that matter. The fans were even worse. The circus needed a ringmaster, and Seuling was it. Friends would remember that once off the convention floor, Seuling was much more laid-back—engaging, funny, full of great stories.

Passionate about comics and the business of comics, Seuling, a high school English teacher from Brooklyn, had been devouring comics for as far back as he could remember, and he offered no apology for his affection for them as an adult. He knew his comics history—the titles, stories, artists, the evolution of the comics as a cultural phenomenon—and in very short order, he had graduated from fanboy to industry leader. He almost single-handedly ushered in the comic conventions that we know today, expanding them from small-time gatherings of geeks and dweebs to huge, high-profile, high-energy, moneymaking events attracting people from all over the world. There was still a higher percentage of dweebs and geeks attending these conventions than you’d find gathered in any one place on the street, but you’d also see a strong mixture of artists, serious collectors, publishers, and businesses attending the same conventions, all ready to talk shop, swap stories, mingle with the troops that kept their bank accounts solvent, or, in increasing numbers, plop down previously unheard-of sums of money for original artwork, bagfuls of the latest titles, or, God forbid, a pristine copy of
Action Comics #1
or
Detective Comics #27
.

Seuling’s involvement with the comics conventions came gradually, dating back to July 1964, when he had his first experience in conventions. Besides teaching, Seuling ran a comics sales and memorabilia business on the side. Doug Berman, a fellow teacher, heard about a comics convention being held at a Manhattan union hall on Fourteenth Street and Broadway. Both sensed a business opportunity. Bernie Bubnis, the convention’s organizer, offered Berman and Seuling a shot at selling refreshments. As Seuling remembered, the total concessions take at that first convention came down to a case of soda. Comics artist Tom Gill (
The Lone Ranger
), the convention’s guest of honor, spoke to about a hundred attendees seated on folding chairs placed on the union hall’s old wooden floor. It might not have seemed like much to people now accustomed to massive comics conventions thrown at Madison Square Garden, but at the time Seuling was impressed. “In 1964, I think the world was ripe for a comics convention,” he declared years later.

The following year, the convention moved to the Broadway Central Hotel, and each ensuing year saw the convention growing in popularity. Bubnis dropped out of the business, and Seuling graduated from soda salesman to convention organizer. As Seuling saw it, the convention was too provincial for its potential: “In 1968, I said, ‘Hell, why are we doing this on such a small scale? Let’s get some people here from Oshkosh, Peoria, and Podunk.’ We ran it at the Statler Hilton Hotel and called it the International Hotel.”

Attendance rocketed, expanding exponentially, as Seuling knew it would. By 1971, the convention was pulling in sixty-five hundred attendees and still growing. Seuling was now earning enough money off his former hobby to seriously consider giving up teaching and pursuing a career in distributing comics and presenting conventions. His annual convention, held on the Fourth of July weekend, became a fixture in the industry.

After he started attending them in 1971, conventions energized Will Eisner through the rest of his career. He loved looking over the new books and chatting with their creators; he enjoyed the talk about the business of comics, from contracts to sales figures. He had a keen understanding of the evolution of comics, and he tried to anticipate the directions in which they were heading. To Eisner, conventions were sensory overload, and he would walk away from them with a newfound enthusiasm for the future. Over the years, he would repeatedly mention how, after attending a convention, he couldn’t wait to get back to work. It wasn’t just a matter of a collision between ambition and inspiration; Eisner hated the thought of being outdone by the upstarts that he’d just met, regardless of how friendly and encouraging he could be toward them on the convention floor.