Will Eisner: Conversations

A Cartoonist’s Cartoonist

108 A Cartoonist’s Cartoonist ELINOR BURKETT / 1989 From The Miami Herald, September 6, 1989, pp. 1D, 3D. Reprinted by permission of the Miami Herald. Copyright © The Miami Herald 1989. If you sneak around back, you can peek into the inner sanctum and catch a glimpse of the legend himself: one of the comic-book medium’s founding fathers, creator of The Spirit, the first comic book inserted into a Sunday newspaper. He’s the balding one in the polyester pants, the old guy hunched over the desk, scribbling away on the adult comic books he has been penning in the ’80s. He’s alone. The beautiful Miss Cosmek, agent from Planet Mars—who defected to Earth, where laughter, love, and tears are not a crime—is locked away. Poor Gerhard Shnobble has been laid to rest by a world so distracted by the BIG EVENTS that it never noticed the quiet little man—an ordinary-looking bank guard—who could actually fly. The Spirit lurks about somewhere, but fifty years after his birth the superhero is retired from the never-ending battle against evil. It’s hard to imagine how Will Eisner ever hung out with such a crowd. At seventy-two, he looks too much home at Tamarac’s Woodmont Country Club, where the company is bland by comparison. He seems entirely too normal to have spent a half century creating superheroes and penning KA-BOOM!!! across the pages of cartoons geared to the fantasies of what he calls “ten-yearold cretins from Kansas City.” But the self-effacing guy who slams tennis balls across the net at his wife, Ann, every morning has not only spent a lifetime shaping comic books. To many, he is comic books: one of the medium’s founding fathers, the guru of elinor burkett / 1989 109 the younger generation and the center of an international cult of fans who have remained loyal to his fantasies for two generations. A man who Jules Feiffer, who apprenticed with Eisner for four years, says “had a staggering influence on everybody’s work—and still does.” “It’s a little embarrassing,” Eisner responds, not at all embarrassed, “but someone once said that Will Eisner might not have given birth to comic books, but he was certainly there at the christening.” Honest day’s work? Comic books? What kind of work is that for a grown man? The question has haunted Eisner since he doodled his first cartoon strip as a seventeen-yearold in the Bronx. First it was his mother, a Jewish refugee from Central Europe. “‘My son, an artist?’” Eisner remembers her moaning. “‘Cartoons? You’ll never make any money. It’s not a pursuit for a grown man.’” His mother’s lament has pursued Eisner for almost six decades. “Once I went to a teachers’ convention to try to convince educators of the value of using comics,” he recalls, “I felt like a drug pusher in a schoolyard.” Eisner has never begged for indulgence—from his mother or anyone else who considers comic books the slum of the art world, the back alley of literature. Not a grown-up profession? Not real art? P-F-FOOF—H-H-HOOEY!!! “Comic books were regarded as deleterious reading material because the content was junk. But the medium is capable of being more than funny pictures and entertainment.” Churning out strips Eisner might have believed it, but for much of his career he had little chance to pen any proof. He was too busy churning out strips about jungle queens and swashbuckling pirates. By 1940, he was consumed with The Spirit, the nation’s first comic-book insert in a Sunday newspaper, the adventures of the masked protector of Truth, Justice and Five Million Weekly Readers. The Spirit was not the first comic superhero. That distinction still belongs to Superman, two years his senior. But he certainly was the least likely: none 110 will eisner: conversations of the godlike qualities of Superman, none of the panache of Batman. Permanently disheveled, The Spirit was forced to rely on an exceptionally hard head (how could one man get bonked on the noggin so often and not end up with a permanent concussion?) and moral philosophy that liberally quoted both Montaigne and Gilbert and Sullivan. His creator wouldn’t even let the fictionalized vigilante take himself seriously . The Spirit found himself fighting a 1,000...