Will Eisner (27 page)

He wasn’t alone by any means. Comix artists, some rebels without a cause and others more traditional practitioners unable to land work with the bigger publishers, either contributed to someone else’s underground comic book or started their own. Circulation for these comix could be spotty and their lifetimes brief, but it was better to be a hometown hero than never to be seen at all. Gilbert Shelton’s
Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers
, featuring the antics of three potheads named Fat Freddy, Freewheelin’ Franklin, and Phineas, cracked up readers in their relentless pursuit of great dope. Shelton, an aspiring filmmaker, also created a stir with his
Wonder Wart-Hog
and
Smiling Sergeant Death and His Merciless Mayhem Patrol
titles, which skewered characters in the Marvel and DC stables.

Readers loved the undergrounds for their irreverence, wacky artwork, and taboo-shattering subject matter, but they also loved the energetic intelligence that rumbled beneath the surface of all the mayhem. The comix producers were offering the kind of lacerating social commentary you weren’t finding in the more traditional media outlets. Like their cousins the alternative newspapers, comix could address off-limits topics and be as subversive as they wanted to be without fear of offending any corporate sponsors that supported them through advertising. Comix would eventually be threatened by legal action and the prospects of new obscenity laws, but in their heyday they celebrated a kind of freedom that would have made Fredric Wertham faint.

In future speeches and interviews, Will Eisner would remember his visit to the 1971 New York convention in a much more favorable light. He would joke about running into a group of hippie artists who smoked strange-smelling cigarettes and laughed at all the wrong times, and he would remember admiring their work for the way it addressed social issues and confronted the Establishment. “That’s
exactly
what I felt comics should do as a literary form,” he’d say.

That’s probably how he wanted to recall it, given the way things turned out, but in reality, he might not have connected with Denis Kitchen again if Kitchen hadn’t kept his business card and contacted him. Not long after the convention, Kitchen initiated a reconciliation by sending Eisner a letter and a sampling of comix. The carefully chosen selection, taken from Kitchen Sink Press catalog, included copies of
Bijou
, R. Crumb’s
Home Grown Funnies
, and Kitchen’s own
Mom’s Homemade Comics
.

“Enclosed is a sampling of our line of underground comic books,” Kitchen wrote in his July 14, 1971, cover letter. “I think you will find them generally more tasteful than the unfortunate titles you happened to pick up in the dealers’ area of the Comic Art Convention.” Those titles, Kitchen made a point of mentioning, had been the products of a competing publisher, not of Kitchen Sink Press.

Eisner responded favorably. “You are quite right!” he told Kitchen of the comix he’d sent him. “They are more tasteful and much more professional than most. I’m particularly impressed with your own work and I was glad to see that your books have something more to say than fornication! There’s a lot of exciting promise here.”

Eisner’s enthusiastic response summed up in a very few words the basic difference, then and in the future, between Eisner and some of his contemporaries. Comic book artists, often afflicted with egos surpassing their talents or importance, could be quite dismissive and snarky in their comments about the works of others. Eisner possessed a substantial ego of his own, but with only an occasional, surprising lapse here and there, he tempered it into the kind of self-confidence that permitted him to be open-minded without the poison of negative competitiveness. He might not have cared for an artist’s style or the theme or content of an artist’s story, but he remained open to the possibilities of almost any form of expression.

Scott McCloud, graphic novelist and author of
Understanding Comics
and
Making Comics
, would recall a time, years after that New York convention, when he was sitting in on one of Eisner’s classes at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He had approached Eisner before class with a book by Japanese manga artist Osamu Tezuka and wondered what Eisner thought of it. “He liked it instantly,” McCloud said. “He really was quite fascinated by what he was seeing. He picked it up and held it aloft to his students and said, ‘There, you see, this guy’s not a slave to the close-up like you guys are.’ I showed the very same book to another very accomplished artist. He picked it up, flipped through it for no more than fifteen seconds, put it down, and said, ‘That’s enough for me.’ It really did point out the difference between the two men. Will was eternally curious. He could just turn on a dime when exposed to new ideas, even if he began with one idea in his head. He was always open, always ready to change, always ready to accept that there might be something else that didn’t previously belong to his universe or perception.”

Denis Kitchen reminded Eisner of his own youthful ambitions. Kitchen was as much an outsider as Eisner had been back in the 1930s, when he decided to enter a field with very little past and no predictable future. As a businessman, Kitchen showed the same type of gumption that Eisner himself had shown when he’d formed Eisner & Iger and, later, his own company, when he’d forged ahead with the belief that there had to be a market, perhaps a lucrative one, for quality comics aimed at all audiences, even adult ones.

Denis Kitchen and Will Eisner. (Courtesy of Denis Kitchen)

“Maurice is at work putting together a dummy of ‘The Spirit’ magazine,” Eisner wrote in conclusion to his initial response to Kitchen’s proposal. “As soon as we have something in hand, we shall be talking to you on more specific matters.”

“More specific matters” meant hammering out a basic publisher-artist agreement on the terms of royalties, payment schedules, copyright ownership, and other points of publishing and distribution common to any publishing business agreement. After talking to Kitchen about his business practices at the convention, Eisner felt confident that the agreement would be reached without some of the contentious back-and-forth that he had faced in the past. Kitchen had boasted of the way the undergrounds allowed artists to maintain ownership of their characters, and he had established a track record of reliably reporting sales figures and paying royalties to his artists. These hippies were loose and easy and anti-Establishment right down to the way they conducted their business. It was a fair, honest exchange between artist and publisher. Eisner didn’t have to look far to see how artists had lost control of their creations—Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were still struggling for control of, or at least better compensation for, Superman; Bob Kane had been forced into a brilliant legal maneuver in order to see something for his creation, Batman; and the creators of Spider-Man, Captain America, and others were essentially out of luck at Marvel—and publishers had earned their oily reputations for being cheapskates, from the per-page rates they paid to the credits they gave their writers and artists. Maybe it was because he was an artist himself, maybe it was the pot that he was smoking, or maybe it was just a matter of his being a decent guy, but Denis Kitchen seemed to be different.

He was, as Eisner discovered shortly after they had reached a verbal agreement on the terms of their relationship. The deal was beneficial to both sides. Eisner was not only granting Kitchen Sink Press permission to reprint
Spirit
stories long out of print, he also agreed to produce new stories and artwork, including covers. For his part, Kitchen was offering a deal that included 10 percent royalty payments, total control of the material, and copyright ownership.

“Send me a draft of your proposed contract and we’ll proceed,” Eisner instructed Kitchen.

“Contract?” Kitchen responded. “I don’t do contracts.”

Kitchen went on to explain that contracts, as he viewed them, were “a product of an uptight, corrupt, and cynical capitalistic system that exploits creative people.” Kitchen thought he was appealing to the artist in Eisner, to the man who had been abused by the system. Contracts, Kitchen insisted, had always been imposed on artists in the comics business.

“We’re trying to do business in a more progressive manner,” he said. “Besides, I don’t want to give money to lawyers.”

Eisner heard Kitchen out before delivering a lecture of his own. Contracts, he explained, shouldn’t be looked on as impositions, not if both parties were in agreement; instead, they were protection for both parties, insurance that their agreement would be honored in the unlikely event something terrible happened to one of them.

“What happens,” he asked, “if you are killed in a car accident tomorrow? Or vice versa, if something happens to me, how does my widow know what obligations I’ve burdened her with or what income she might expect from my literary dealings with you? Are there restrictions on her if she is presented with third party opportunities to license my work? Who controls the media or merchandise rights?”

Kitchen, who had only considered contracts in abstract, dogmatic terms, was knocked backward a couple steps. He had never considered the scenarios Eisner was presenting. There was clearly a difference in thinking between the twenty-four-year-old still feeling his way through the dark and the fifty-four-year-old with life lessons to support his arguments.

In recalling the conversation nearly four decades later, Kitchen could only laugh at the irony. “I had this notion that publishers force oppressive contracts on artists,” he’d say, “and here was the artist forcing the contract on the publisher.”

Eisner agreed with Kitchen on one point: He didn’t like paying attorneys to review contracts, either. So he offered to draw up a contract using his own boilerplate language. If Kitchen agreed with the wording and terms, he could sign the contract and it would be a legally binding document.

Denny Colt, the detective who’d risen from the dead to become the Spirit, was about to be resurrected once again.

*
“Comix” was an informal term, adopted by publishers, artists, and fans to signify the difference between the usual mainstream comics of the day and the alternative publications springing up across the United States in the late sixties and early seventies. In
Comics in Wisconsin
comics creator and historian Paul Buhle wrote: “The
x
factor that changed comics to comix was first seen in San Francisco, in the poster shops where Day-Glo images and photos of very angry-looking Black Panthers pioneered a poster print business with advertising big enough to keep
Ramparts
magazine, then master of muckraking journalism, going for years. Young Robert Crumb was the foremost artist, by a long shot, but along with him came a dozen highly talented, definitely leftwing comics veterans, the oldest of them still not thirty, a pack of them (including Art Spiegelman) from New York. There were a handful of comix in traditional comic book form, but they had twenty-four to forty-eight pages, black-and-white insides, and a pricetag of fifty cents or a dollar.”

chapter ten

R E S U R R E C T I O N

It’s a literary dream to think that a character you created is going to live on. It’s more than anybody in this field could ever ask for. So I’m very proud of it and very grateful for it.

E
isner caught the New York convention and met Denis Kitchen at the perfect moment. He liked people to believe that he was snug and happy with his life in educational comics and
P
*
S
magazine, that he was using these opportunities to further the growth of comics in other types of media. And although this was true enough, by 1971 he’d had enough of
P
*
S
and was ready to move on. In reality, some of his corporate experiences had been nightmares that he’d just as soon forget. He had applied his art to all sorts of endeavors and could feel accomplished at it, but he wasn’t truly happy. For as creative as he could be in enterprises such as American Visuals,
P
*
S
, and A. C. Croft, a Connecticut-based firm that produced educational materials that Eisner purchased, he’d been removed from the comic book scene long enough that he missed the shop environment and the camaraderie among the artists, the energy of the comics industry, the joy of entertaining, and the challenge of finding new ways of writing comics for adults. The convention had brought all this home. He discussed this with Ann from time to time, until one day she encouraged him to divest himself of his business interests and do what made him happy.

Eisner had no interest in starting up new Spirit adventures; he was insistent about that from the onset of his relationship with Denis Kitchen. He would create new covers and add some interior artwork involving the Spirit character for the Kitchen Sink books, but he had no desire to reprise the old grind of coming up with complete, all-new stories on tight deadlines. He’d been on that treadmill nearly all of his adult life, at the cost of having to turn down other projects that demanded more time than his weekly or monthly commitments would permit. Reprints would have to suffice.

As it was, he had another
Spirit
reprint commitment, this one with Dave Gibson, a California comics publisher and packager who was issuing reprints as small comic books, packaged in polybags and aimed at collectors. Each bag would contain ten
Spirit
stories, published in black and white, with additional new commentary by Eisner.

Denis Kitchen, delighted to be publishing Will Eisner in any capacity, was fine with this arrangement. He was already publishing Robert Crumb and, through such publications as
Bijou
and
Bizarre Sex
, the work of Harvey Kurtzman, Art Spiegelman, Bill Griffith, and a host of other popular artists. Adding Will Eisner to the roster meant more diversity in content and style. No one in the business could boast of a cast of characters as diverse as Angelfood McSpade, Zippy the Pinhead, and the Spirit.

Eisner was having the time of his life. After more than twenty years of working in other sequential art adventures, producing to order for the army and corporate clients, he had returned to his first love, and he couldn’t hide the pleasure he was getting from it. “This is fun—after all these years!” he wrote Kitchen.

Selecting
Spirit
installments for the Kitchen Sink books presented a problem. Eisner had piles of old
Spirit
comics, from original artwork to published Sunday supplements to photostats, but none it was cataloged. Worse yet, only a handful of pre–World War II
Spirit
original artwork was still in existence. Zinc had been a precious commodity during the war years, rationed out as parsimoniously as the paper upon which comics were printed, and Busy Arnold had protected his zinc plates by stacking them carefully with a sheet of original art sandwiched between each plate. When Eisner returned from Washington, D.C., after the war and tried to get his artwork returned, he learned that almost all his original art had been destroyed. He’d saved the Sunday supplements of his early work, but much of that wasn’t in the best condition—certainly not good enough for Denis Kitchen to reproduce for the new magazine.

The approach to selecting
Spirit
reprints was scattershot, based entirely on originals most readily available and which of those Eisner preferred to publish. In addition, Kitchen Sink was in no position to reprint
The Spirit
in color—not that Eisner looked askance at this turn of events. If offered the choice, he would have preferred to see
The Spirit
published in black and white all along. He could never rely on printers to get his colors right, plus he felt that black and white added a cinematic film noir element to
The Spirit
.

“
The Spirit
seemed to look better to me in black and white than it did in color,” he said, adding that even though fans and collectors preferred color, the black-and-white
Spirit
s helped preserve the accent on story. “
The Spirit
was originally designed for color, but I found myself liking the work better in black and white. It seemed to have more of a mood and expression, everything I wanted to convey.”

As soon as he’d signed on with Kitchen Sink, Eisner busied himself with major projects: designing a cover for the forthcoming Kitchen Sink comic book
Snarf #3
, choosing the entries for
Spirit #1
(informally marketed as the
Underground Spirit
), and coming up with the magazine’s cover. The covers would place the Spirit in sexier, more violent settings, enough to prompt Kitchen to note on the covers that the contents of these comics were “adults only.” The caveat, of course, all but guaranteed head shop browsing.

The
Snarf
cover, appearing in early 1973, combined the type of cover work seen on previous
Spirit
magazines with the more mature artwork common in the undergrounds. The Spirit is shown breaking through the door of a seedy, waterlogged basement comix studio, where long-haired artists are preparing an underground book. A thoroughly disgusted Commissioner Dolan follows the Spirit through the doorway, snarling, “I’m gonna arrest them, Spirit,” to which the world-weary detective responds, “For what, Dolan?” The cover served as Eisner’s commentary on his entrance into the undergrounds.

It also acted as a preemptive strike against the proponents of a new run on comic book censorship. The popularity of the undergrounds had stirred up talk of new regulations and obscenity busts. Eisner hated the thought of it, regardless of how put off he was by some of the more provocative comix he’d seen, and he wasn’t shy about expressing his feelings. “I’m against any form of censorship other than the restrictions imposed by the creators’ own tastes, or sense of responsibility to moral values,” he said.

The first
Underground Spirit
presented four
Spirit
reprints (including stories featuring the popular P’Gell and Octopus villains), a full-color wraparound cover, several new one-page entries, and an introductory essay by Maurice Horn, all for a fifty-cent cover price. More than a quarter century separated the original appearance of the stories and the Kitchen Sink reprints, and the times and readers couldn’t have been more different. When the stories in the Kitchen Sink edition had first appeared in the Sunday supplements, World War II had ended, America felt optimistic about the future, babies were booming, and Levittownesque subdivisions were sprouting up in suburbs across America. The country was in a dramatically different mood now. The war in Vietnam was still dragging on, and the sour winds of Watergate, following on the heels of the sixties, found America mired in pessimism. Readers of the
Underground Spirit
books would be an entirely different breed from those who’d picked up the old Sunday comic book newspaper inserts the first time around.

Ebony, the Spirit’s African-American sidekick, was the ultimate symbol of the changes Eisner had to address. When Ebony, with his minstrel show character traits, backwoods English, and sense of servitude in his relationship with the Spirit, made his first appearance in a
Spirit
story, the
Brown
v.
Board of Education
Supreme Court decision was a decade away and the civil rights movement two decades in the future. This characterization wasn’t going to go unnoticed in the wake of the violence accompanying the civil rights movement, the Black Power manifestos, the fair housing and busing confrontations, more than a decade of hotly contested legislation, Cassius Clay changing his name to Muhammad Ali, and a controversial new show called
All in the Family
, in which a couple of white characters regularly sparred over racial bigotry. A character like Ebony White was fodder for debate—and it wasn’t always polite. Some critics went so far as to hint that Eisner himself was racist. Eisner reacted defensively or angrily, depending upon his mood. Knowing that a sizable percentage of his current readership might take exception to his depiction of Ebony, Eisner confronted the issue in the first
Underground Spirit
in a one-page short, in which Ebony is interviewed by a young black reporter who looks as if he just stepped off the set of
Shaft
. Although heavy-handed, the dialogue cuts to the point in five panels:

Reporter:
Ebony White, I’m here to interview you on behalf of Spirit fans and collectors of your old adventures with the Spirit. Er, some of my questions may be quite blunt …

Ebony:
No sweat … ask anything!

Reporter:
It is hard for many of us to understand why you have accepted the role of a sort of “Man Friday” … a form of Uncle Tomism larded with a kind of humble servility the whites have always expected as due them from blacks in those days!! What I mean is … how can you have found pride in a secondary role … in an era of rising black identity that was emerging during those years!?

The Spirit:
(entering the room) Hey, Ebony! Did you have any success tailing that pusher this morning? Dolan is howling for evidence!

Ebony:
(pointing to trussed-up criminal on floor next to him) Well, Spirit … I took about 15 photos of this rat makin’ a big buy … Then I took 9 shots of him selling the stuff in a schoolyard!! Then he spotted me! So I hadda ack fast … He chased me up an alley … I rolled a trash can at him … He tripped, knocked hisself out on a fire escape ladder, then I jes’ dragged him in … You can book him with all the evidence!

The Spirit:
Great!

Ebony:
(turning back to the reporter) Sorry, now would you mind repeating that question?

The dialogue was as honest an appraisal of the character as Eisner could muster, a straight-on summation explaining his reasons for Ebony’s continuing adventures with the Spirit. Whenever confronted with the Ebony issue in interviews—and there were many such occasions—Eisner would insist, first and foremost, that he felt no regrets for creating Ebony, that Ebony had been brought into
The Spirit
as a means of infusing humor into the stories. Ebony was a creation of his times, much the way Shylock—himself in a play its writer called a comedy—was the product of Shakespeare’s times, Li’l Abner was a reflection of Al Capp’s times, or Rochester was used as a foil in the classic Jack Benny comedy skits. No malice had been intended. Humor, Eisner insisted, often depended on the stereotypes and clichés of the day, and stereotypes, in and of themselves, were not necessarily harmful. To Eisner, it all boiled down to intent: if caricatures were drawn for evil purposes, such as Nazi propagandists’ caricatures of the stereotypical hook-nosed, dark, curly-haired European Jews, there was no doubting the artist’s intentions to injure. Ebony, Eisner submitted, was entirely different. He was the featured character in any number of
Spirit
stories; his actions were always positive, even heroic. In his early appearances in
The Spirit
, Ebony had been an older man, but Eisner fine-tuned the character over the years, first by making him younger in an effort to bolster the humor and then by giving him more to do.

“When the feature began in 1940, Ebony was perhaps more viable and valid than he is today,” Eisner conceded to an interviewer, adding, “I would imagine that Shakespeare would have one hell of a time defending Shylock in
The Merchant of Venice
to today’s socially conscious people. It doesn’t make an author any less culpable for what he does, but it does indicate how difficult it is for an author to divorce himself from current norms, especially if he’s being entertaining.”

According to Eisner, his perceptions began to change during World War II, when he witnessed troop segregation, and his views continued to change over the following two decades, when national consciousness turned to the civil rights movement. By then, the Spirit and Ebony had been retired and Eisner had moved on. The reprints kindled new disputes. Not only did Eisner have to address the criticism, he was also saddled with a position that younger readers, steeped in the conflicts of the 1960s, weren’t inclined to accept. Nor did it matter that as
The Spirit
evolved, Eisner had introduced other African-American characters more in step with the times.

One of Eisner’s most common defenses focused on two letters he had received at about the same time, one from an old DeWitt Clinton classmate who accused him of abandoning his youthful, liberal ideals, the other from an African-American newspaperman from Baltimore who praised him for his compassionate treatment of Ebony. Such was the nature of the conflict.

The debate would continue for decades, first with the Spirit and Ebony and later when Eisner published
Fagin the Jew
, his graphic novel addressing stereotypes and anti-Semitism in Charles Dickens’s classic novel
Oliver Twist
. Eisner labored, sometimes awkwardly, to explain his position, but he was never able to fully resolve the issue.