Will Eisner (41 page)

When Eisner finally relented, it was under two conditions: He would not be responsible for creating or editing the new material; and he had to approve all material that others produced, “to be sure that they would not warp or defame, or otherwise alter the basic concept of The Spirit’s character.” He wasn’t about to allow other artists, regardless of their talent, to kill or marry off the Spirit, turn him into a tormented street character hooked on drugs or alcohol, or otherwise tarnish the standard set half a century earlier.

“It was a little like putting your child up for adoption,” Eisner said of his allowing others to create stories for his character. He was relieved when the new stories in
The Spirit: The New Adventures
were assigned to some of the best writers and artists in the comics business, including Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, and Dave Sim. “I was astounded at what some of them were doing with him,” he admitted. “Clearly, I would never have done stories the way these guys did. Guys like Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman are very much in touch with today’s reader, and they were talking to them in that vein. I had no sense of violation or concern; they just saw The Spirit from their perspectives.”

He was especially pleased by the focus on story. Moore (
Watchmen
), Gaiman (
The Sandman
), and Sim (
Cerebus
) were master craftsmen known for elevating the level of storytelling in their work, and they clearly had an understanding of Eisner’s character before they began their work on
The New Adventures
. This was evident in the series’ first issue, when Moore wrote and Dave Gibbons illustrated three Spirit origin stories, including a retelling of Eisner’s own account of how
The Spirit
came to be: there was a familiarity to the work, but it was obviously not Eisner’s. The same was true of Neil Gaiman’s entry, illustrated by Eddie Campbell, an account of a frustrated screenwriter who suddenly finds himself caught up in a Spirit story.

“I did not try writing a Spirit story,” Gaiman explained. “I tried writing a story about the Spirit, which is rather different. What I felt was fun was just sort of going, ‘Okay, what would happen in somebody’s life if he keeps bumping into a Spirit story?’”

Gaiman had to be talked into writing the story. When Denis Kitchen called and asked him to contribute to
The New Adventures
, Gaiman turned him down, despite the fact that he’d been hooked on the Spirit since he’d picked up the second Harvey reprint issue at age fourteen. What Gaiman hadn’t counted on was Eisner’s powers of persuasion.

“He was determined that he would have me in his book, and I was just as determined that I wasn’t,” Gaiman recalled, “because my attitude is that you can’t do a Spirit story as good as the classic Spirit stories that burned my brain.

“I remember the moment he closed me, and it was like being closed by a really good salesman. You had no plans to buy that car, and you walk out of there with the keys in your pocket. We were in Gijón in northern Spain at a week-long convention. All of the events took place at night, so you didn’t do very much in the afternoon. And one of those afternoons, Will told me we were going for a walk. Will and Ann and I walked for several miles on the beach and stopped at a little café. Will and I had this very, very long conversation, in which we both wound up realizing that what I wanted to do with
The Sandman
was what he’d done with
The Spirit
, which is create a character who is a machine for telling stories.”

The two talked on and on about comics—about their history, the direction they were taking, and
The Spirit
. Eisner kept trying to convince Gaiman that he was a good candidate for writing a new Spirit story and Gaiman kept resisting until Eisner finally closed the sale by promising Gaiman the original cover art to the published issue of
New Adventures
containing Gaiman’s contribution. Eisner was doing the pencils for the covers and letting others ink and color, which led to an awkward scene when the issue with Gaiman’s story appeared.

“I had this really weird and embarrassing conversation with [inker and colorist] Mark Schultz,” Gaiman remembered. “I said, ‘Can you send me the cover?’ And Mark said, ‘Will promised me the cover.’ I mentioned it to Denis, and shortly thereafter he sent me the pencil sketch for the cover—Will’s sketch, which I honestly preferred to the finished thing, because it’s Will’s pencils. The way Will sent it to me was absolutely fascinating. He just rolled it up and taped it. There wasn’t even a cardboard tube. I thought that was wonderful, how little Will valued that part of the thing.”

Eisner bristled whenever he heard criticism that his books were too sentimental. He admitted that his own philosophy of inherent human goodness had been influenced by his boyhood reading of Horatio Alger, but he did not find anything objectionable about depicting triumph over adversity, or survival in urban grit. He saw nothing wrong with giving his books happy or wistful endings. He could have chosen another route, one reflecting the hardships of his life, and while some of those difficulties had been addressed in
A Contract with God
,
A Life Force
, and, most recently,
To the Heart of the Storm
, bitterness was something that he felt was best left to others. He could point to any number of his
Spirit
or other graphic stories that had ended unhappily, but his harshest critics didn’t seem to notice.
Family Matter
*
, the darkest original story he would ever produce, and the last graphic novel he would submit to Kitchen Sink Press, seemed to be a direct response to those critics. Readers would have to look hard to find anything uplifting about it.

The story, about a family’s gathering for its patriarch’s ninetieth birthday, contained disturbing elements of greed, lust, euthanasia, incest, alcoholism, and violence—all told over a brief period of time, through flashbacks and some of the most pointed dialogue Eisner would ever write. Placing this dialogue in the familiar comics balloons, Eisner realized, was problematic in a novel so serious. He knew that to much of the public, dialogue balloons not only gave comics their distinctive look, but had the unintended effect of making otherwise adult subject matter appear to be something less than good, valid work.

“I’m coming to the reluctant conclusion that there is a stout wall of prejudice out there among adult readers against anything with dialogue that’s encapsulated within a speech balloon,” he told interviewer R. C. Harvey. “It makes the book suspect and translates it into a totally different category. If there’s a balloon, it’s comics; and if it’s comics, it’s for kids or idiots.”

Eisner was inspired to write the book as the result of his conversations with Ann, who told him of the travails of some of her acquaintances in the Florida retirement community. One old woman’s story especially infuriated him. Her husband had died, leaving her money, and her two grown children were constantly looking for ways to rob her of it. Eisner ruminated about their character, motivation, and actions and decided to take a reporter’s approach in telling his story: he would tell the story without serving up any kind of judgment or otherwise interfering with it. If it was successful, readers would react with the same kind of anger that he felt when he heard Ann’s accounts.

Family Matter
tells the story of five siblings—two brothers and three sisters—as they gather for a birthday party for their wheelchair-bound father. None have any use for the old man, but all have secrets and ambitions that tie them to their father and reasons to demand a say in his future. The old man, unable to speak or walk, sits in a wheelchair in a room and listens in as his children argue over his fate in an adjacent room. As a story,
Family Matter
doesn’t approach the ambition and detail of
The Name of the Game
, the family saga that Eisner published three years later, and with only a couple of exceptions, the characters behave too predictably to be as memorable as some of Eisner’s characters in previous books and stories. Still, for its raw emotion, the book ranks high among Eisner’s graphic novels.

“It was pure, unadulterated anger,” observed Frank Miller, one of the novel’s admirers. “That was a side of Will that I just wanted to see more of, because I always felt that he stopped himself at the edge of something. He was a deeply angry man, like any man who’d lived through what he did would be.

“He and I actually argued over one letter in the title of
Family Matter
. I thought that it would have been a wonderful double entendre if it had been called
Family Matters
, and I felt that by making it
Family Matter
, he shortchanged what was really one of his most bitter and brilliant books.”

After nearly three decades of operating on a tight budget in an ever changing market, employing what, by industry standards, amounted to a skeleton crew working overtime to push out product, and reprinting the seminal work of such comics pioneers as Milton Caniff, Harvey Kurtzman, R. Crumb, Al Capp, and Will Eisner, Kitchen Sink Press finally went under in early 1999. It had been a slow, painful, ugly death.

Kitchen, quite naturally, was crushed.

“I didn’t know what to do,” he recalled of the period immediately following the demise of Kitchen Sink Press. “I was in a very deep funk—and possibly clinically depressed. I spent a lot of time just walking in the woods, sorting through stuff, not knowing what to do next.

“Will called me and said, ‘What are you going to do?’ I said, “I don’t know. I’m thinking.’ He said, ‘How would you like to be my agent?’ It had never crossed my mind. It is not something I would have suggested to him. He could have handled his own books, but he wanted to help me—he was being a friend—and he didn’t want to be distracted from the actual creation of books, he saw time slipping away and he wanted to take advantage of what was left.”

Actually, the agency proposal wasn’t entirely new. In 1997, two years before the demise of Kitchen Sink Press, Kitchen and Judith Hansen, a former deputy editor at KSP, had discussed the idea of forming an agency together, and had run the idea past Eisner. Hansen, an attorney with extensive background in both mainstream trade book publishing and comics publishing, including stints at Random House and Simon and Schuster, had known Eisner since 1994, and had started her own literary agency in Sydney, Australia. When Kitchen Sink finally sank in 1999, Kitchen and Hansen moved forward, with Eisner and former Kitchen Sink author Mark Schultz as founding clients.

Eisner, who had begun work on the book that would become
Name of the Game
, only to suddenly find himself without a publisher or anyone to market his work, was delighted to have Kitchen and Hansen representing him. “As you know, we have a long 25 year relationship which I don’t want to abandon,” he wrote Dave Schreiner, referring to his business and personal relationship with Kitchen.

Eisner was equally concerned about retaining Dave Schreiner as an independent editor. “I see no reason why we cannot continue our editorial relationship on future works when & where appropriate,” he wrote Schreiner, who had remained in Wisconsin following the Massachusetts relocation of Kitchen Sink Press and taken a job with a publisher in Madison. Schreiner was happy to continue the relationship.

Not surprisingly, it didn’t take long for the new agents to find a new home for Eisner’s work. Paul Levitz at DC Comics, an admirer of Eisner’s work from the moment he’d seen his first
Spirit
comic, was immediately interested in adding Eisner to the DC roster. Hansen, however, was looking for more than a one-shot deal: She wanted DC to reprint his entire backlist of graphic novel titles. DC was open to this, and a deal was struck.

One of DC’s book publishing division’s highlights was its “Archives” series, featuring reprints of
Superman
,
Batman
, and other popular long-running features, all published in handsome hardcover volumes and featuring beautifully restored color artwork.
The Spirit
, Levitz figured, would be an ideal addition to the series. DC would start at the beginning, with the
Spirit
’s very first 1940 appearance in the Sunday comic book supplement, and present the full run of Eisner
Spirit
s, running in chronological order, marking the first time the feature had been available in its entirety, in full color, in bound books. Each book would feature an introduction written specifically for that volume by a comics authority. To be complete, the company would have to publish more than two dozen volumes, at a hefty price tag of $49.95 each, but Levitz reasoned that there were enough libraries looking for bound copies of the legendary comics feature, as well as fans with discretionary cash, to make the series profitable. Eisner, quite naturally, was very pleased with the arrangement, especially when he learned that the first volume was outselling similar volumes featuring Superman and Batman.