Will Eisner (30 page)

He set up his class at the School of Visual Arts similar to the way he’d taught at Sheridan College. The room was arranged like one of his old shops, with rows of drawing desks facing his desk in the front. Huge windows looking out over Twenty-third Street gave the room lots of natural light. Eisner would lecture or, on occasion, bring in a guest speaker. He called his class “Sequential Art,” but as he’d quip in interviews, no one seemed to know what that meant. He liked to differentiate between “comics,” which had an entertainment connotation, and “sequential art,” which included other types of art, such as the work he was doing for
P
*
S
and American Visuals. The officials at the school found it confusing. “In the catalogue they say, ‘Mr. Eisner is teaching sequential art,’ and then, in parentheses, ‘See comics,’” Eisner quipped.

In preparing his syllabus, Eisner found himself in the unusual position of considering matters that for more than three decades had been coming to him instinctively.

“I had been dealing with a medium more demanding of diverse skills and intellect than I or my contemporaries fully appreciated,” he wrote in
Comics and Sequential Art
, an instructional book based on his lectures, published by Poorhouse Press in 1985.

Traditionally, most practitioners with whom I worked and talked produced their art viscerally. Few ever had the time or the inclination to diagnose the form itself. In the main they were content to concentrate on the development of their draftsmanship and their perception of the audience and the demands of the marketplace.

Trying to corral a lifetime’s experiences into a class that met one day a week for three hours involved no small amount of planning, and the class was constantly evolving during Eisner’s 1974–1993 involvement with the school, to such an extent that he wrote three textbooks—
Comics and Sequential Art
(1985),
Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative
(1996), and
Expressive Anatomy
(published posthumously in 2008)—as a result of the experience. It wasn’t enough just to cover such topics as story breakdowns, panel construction, dialogue, narrative, and point of view in the class; one could understand all there was to know about the art of the comic book and never see his or her work published. Eisner believed that he had an obligation to share his knowledge about the
business
of comics and how it was as important for artists never to compromise the ownership of their work as it was to be notable.

His students would remember him as a supportive but no-nonsense teacher, a guy who wore a jacket and tie at a time when T-shirts, torn blue jeans, and punk hairstyles were in vogue among many of his students. Award-winning filmmaker John Dilworth, who attended the School of Visual Arts from 1982 to 1985, characterized the students as “paint-splattered torn jeans and sneakers, tee, oversize black portfolio, smokes, dirty fingers, swaggering pride, diamond ambition, and arrogant willfulness immune to objectivity and criticism.” Eisner’s teaching style, he said, was “one of amusement …

“He appeared to be amused by the students and the work they presented to him,” Dilworth said. “He wouldn’t approach the students. The students would present their studies to him for criticism. He was always chuckling. He rarely expressed dramatic comments. He was a gentleman. The studies were ‘corrected’ with tissue paper. The results were immediate. As I reflect, Eisner may have contributed to my belief that comparisons make the best education. Eisner would simply redraw the assignment in front of you. What made the critique so effective was how fair he was in complimenting the good or promising qualities.”

Eisner reminded Batton Lash of someone “sort of like a shop teacher. He had a good rapport with the class, but everyone in that class knew who was in charge. He wasn’t going to put up with any nonsense, and I think that came from his years of running a shop.”

Eisner’s style, his former students all agreed, contrasted strongly with the teaching style of Harvey Kurtzman, whose class was as popular as Eisner’s. Loose and easygoing, Kurtzman wanted his students to be his friends, to the point where he would invite some of them into his home. Students who had taken both artists’ classes felt that Kurtzman let the more aggressive students walk all over him, whereas with Eisner there was no thought of disruption. On those occasions when someone did act out, Eisner didn’t hesitate to throw the student out.

Eisner’s own curiosity made him a different type of teacher. His class wasn’t all shop talk and drawing, which pleased some of the students and irritated others.

“He was interested in everything, even though he was teaching a course about comics,” Lash explained. “He always wanted to hear what was going on in the film department. If someone was taking a film class, he’d want to hear about it. He wanted to see a student’s photography. He was always interested in what was going on.”

The interest in film came naturally. Eisner had been influenced by movies as a young artist, and he was curious about what his students found interesting in the films they were seeing.

“One day, he said, ‘Okay, put down your pens and pencils, we’re going to screen this Chaplin movie,’” recalled David Mandel, a former student. “He screened the whole film, and afterwards he discussed it with the class. He related it to his own comic work.”

The class objective, aside from the actual learning process, was to produce a comic book called
The Gallery
, to be published at the end of the semester. The project, Eisner believed, not only gave students a taste of the mechanizations of assembling a comic book, it also taught them important elements of business.

John Walker, a native New Yorker who attended the School of Visual Arts and wound up running a successful advertising agency in Connecticut, remembered the class as being much more than picking up a pencil or pen and creating art.

“He taught us a lot of fundamentals of business,” Walker said. “He’d say to us, ‘All right, how are we going to get this thing printed?’ We’d say, ‘Well, you know, the school must have some money.’ He’d say, “No, if you guys want to showcase your artwork, get out there and see if the local pizzeria will take an ad.’ I was taking a course in advertising, and he’d say, ‘Johnny Walker, you’re a salesman. Get out there and find a local bar that might take an ad in
The Gallery
. Sell space. That’s how we’re going to pay for printing.’”

A large portion of each meeting was devoted to looking at the students’ work for the proposed comic book, and Eisner could be a tough taskmaster when a student disappointed him with inferior work—or, worse yet, a missed assignment.

“If you screwed up a deadline, he would chew you out,” Walker recalled. “He’d say, ‘You let yourself down and you let the class down. What do you have to say for yourself?’ That kind of stuff. There were kids who didn’t care, and they would know that this guy was going to be a drill sergeant and they would remove themselves from the class. He was a tough guy. He grew up in the Bronx and took no crap from anyone. He had that sort of steely gaze. It was his way of saying, ‘You’re letting me down, but you’re letting yourself down, too.’ It was a team effort, with give and take, and that’s how he ran the class.”

Teaching at the School of Visual Arts and seeing the creativity in student work inspired Eisner more than he could have predicted, stoking the fires of a decision that had been long in arriving. Eisner had never wavered in his belief in the potential of using comics to make a serious statement. Seeing the work published in the underground comix had strengthened this belief, but Eisner still lacked the motivation to pursue the ideas in his head until he saw some of the potential realized in his students’ work.

“In the process of teaching, you get to test your own concepts,” he explained in an interview with
Heavy Metal
magazine. “You look at the professional world with a different perspective. I began to discover that there were some things to do that hadn’t yet been done in the world of comics.”

Eisner had considered some of these other possibilities, but his obligations to other projects demanded that he relegate them to an ever-expanding file of future projects. He’d had a family to support and the youthful confidence to believe that there would always be time to accomplish whatever he wished. Now, with the endorsement of his wife, who encouraged him to pursue whatever he wanted to in comics, he concluded, “If I don’t do it now, I ain’t ever going to do it.”

The “it,” more specifically, was a lengthy, cohesive work exploring themes and topics that might appeal to older readers—perhaps readers in their thirties, forties, or maybe even older than that—readers who might have grown up reading
The Spirit
, readers no longer attracted to superhero adventures but still interested in comics.

Eisner was still haunted by his daughter’s death, by the unspeakable sadness and anger he’d felt when he’d watched helplessly as Alice succumbed to leukemia. At the heart of his rage were questions and issues that he’d never thought of exploring in his work, all focusing on an individual’s relationship to God. By his own admission, Eisner was not a religious man. He had been brought up to believe in a deity, but life had left him an agnostic grasping for faith. Alice’s death had embittered him, but it had also deepened some of his reflections on the idea of a personal God. If such an all-powerful, all-knowing being existed, where was He when Alice became ill? Why had He let her suffer and die when she was so young? Religious leaders had preached that the virtuous were rewarded, that they had a
contract
with God that promised good things to those living an honorable life. Yes, human beings violated the contract from time to time—they were human, after all—but an omnipotent God had to be held to a higher standard. Alice’s death had been a violation of a contract, a type of betrayal for which there could be no answer.

Eisner had pondered these issues since his daughter’s death, and though years would pass before he was able to publicly admit that his long graphic story “A Contract with God” had emerged directly from those horrible times in his life, his tale about Frimme Hersh, a good man devastated by the loss of his adopted daughter, was as personal as anything he had published in four decades of comics writing.

“The creation of this story was an exercise in personal agony,” he wrote in the preface to
The Contract with God Trilogy
, a grouping of three Eisner books set in a fictitious tenement building at 55 Dropsie Avenue in the Bronx and published in 2006, nearly four decades after Alice Eisner’s death.

My grief was still raw. My heart still bled. In fact, I could not even then bring myself to discuss the loss. I made Frimme Hersh’s daughter an “adopted child.” But his anguish was mine. His argument with God was also mine. I exorcised my rage at a deity that I believed violated my faith and deprived my lovely 16-year-old child of her life at the very flowering of it.

Eisner set the tone for his story in its opening pages, picturing Hersh, a single, middle-aged man, stooped over in grief and walking through torrential rain. He is returning home from his daughter’s funeral. Eisner had always used rain—Harvey Kurtzman dubbed it “Eisenshpritz”—to establish mood and a sense of reality to his art, from
The Spirit
to his work in
P
*
S
magazine; but the sheer weight of Nature’s own grief, gathering in pools on the street, rushing down the stairs of the stoop leading to the tenement building, and forming watery footprints in the hallway inside, matches Hersh’s sense of overwhelming loss. When Hersh pulls off his shoes and sits on a tiny stool near the window of his apartment, his head buried in his hands and a single candle burning on a table nearby, he almost disappears into himself. His despair is palpable. The story immediately flashes back to the days of Frimme Hersh’s youth in Russia before Hersh’s immigration to the United States, to accounts of his many acts of kindness that led others to believe that he was truly blessed, of his literally setting his contract with God in stone, and of his finding a baby girl abandoned on his doorstep—a girl he takes in and treats as his own. He believes, from his religious background and training, that he will be rewarded for living an exemplary life. And now this …

Emotionally hardened, Hersh abandons his faith and pursues monetary wealth. He begins his quest by purchasing a tenement building with money he’s embezzled from his synagogue, and he eventually amasses a small fortune in real estate, making him a powerful and respected man. But he cannot escape the man he once was—a moral man capable of good deeds. He needs another chance, another contract, and to obtain it he makes amends, returning the stolen money and vowing to lead a good life. Hersh’s story ends cynically when, after setting his life back in order and planning a future that might even include another daughter, he suffers a fatal heart attack.

Eisner wisely chose to set his story in Depression-era Bronx, giving it a feeling of life preserved in amber. The art is drastically different from Eisner’s earlier comic book work, with open, borderless panels, strong lines that give an edgy feeling to the characters, and no washes to soften the backgrounds. The world of Dropsie Avenue is stark and relentless.