ANN AND WILL
EISNER
By Blake Bell
(represented from the 2002 TwoMorrows’ book,
“I Have To Live With This Guy!”)
Ann Eisner’s life changed forever on Labour Day, 1949. Having little interest in the burgeoning comic industry of the 1940s, Ann was completely unaware with whom she would be spending an afternoon car ride to Maine. “It’s rather a romantic story,” recounts Ann. “My older sister was widowed at the time, and she had her two boys in Maine. I lived in New York, as did Will.
“A friend of Will’s, Arthur, was dating my younger sister, and he said to me, ‘This friend of mine and I are going to drive up to Maine this weekend, if you’d like a lift.’ Well, I thought that was wonderful, but what I didn’t know was that Will wasn’t the least bit interested in taking someone along. Where I was going would take him out of the way.”
From the moment she entered the car, Ann felt daunted by the level of sophistication displayed by Will, already successful, a decade of The Spirit newspaper strip under his belt. “I thought he wasn’t going to be interested in me,” says Ann. “He was only six years older than I am, but he seemed like ages older in the sense of being worldlier. He looked so poised and put together.
“Most of the boys I had gone out with were just that - ‘boys.’ Will was a man. He was comfortable with all kinds of people and talked to them easily. When I get to know people I am ‘easy’ with them, but I didn't have Will's innate confidence.”
Ann may have not been imbued with Will’s outgoing nature, but so impressed was she by the man, she organized a little skullduggery of her own to re-establish a connection. “We had had so many laughs on our trip to Maine that Will and Arthur stayed overnight in a cabin on the grounds before going on to their destination. I could tell right away he was a bit absent-minded, always involved in something, so I called Arthur to ask for Will's number, to thank him for giving me a lift.
“I asked Arthur if they had given anyone a ride back to New York. He told me that they had, and told me the girl's name was Margot. I called Will and said, ‘This is Margot. I just wanted to thank you for the lift.’
“Arthur had neglected to tell me Margot had a foreign accent, so Will, of course, knew immediately it was me but played along. Finally, he said, ‘By the way, Ann, are you busy next Saturday?’ Mission accomplished, on my part!”
The sophistication Ann saw immediately in Will Eisner came from being present at the explosion of an art form. Newspaper strips and primitive versions of what would be known as comic books existed back into the 19th century, but the introduction of the D.C. Comics stable of characters - Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, specifically - established the pop culture fulcrum from which all else would be built.
Trapped by what he would call a “comic-book ghetto,” Will gave birth to Denny Colt, the young criminologist, thought dead and buried, only to return as the crime fighting hero, The Spirit. Beginning on June 2, 1940, the earliest tales of The Spirit were, plot-wise, not unlike most of the product of the time, but Will’s sense of graphic storytelling stood him at the top of his field.
What truly separated Will from his peers of the day, and spared him from sixty-odd years of comic-book industry turmoil, was his ability to adeptly maneuver himself into the position as sole owner of his creation. In this single act alone, Will set the bar - one on which many work-for-hire creators, perhaps as talented as he, have cracked their heads during the remainder of the twentieth century.
Eisner owned a comic-art production shop with Jerry Iger in the late ‘30s, and was contacted by the owner of Quality Comics, E.M. (“Busy”) Arnold. Eisner met Arnold for lunch, without Iger, and received a proposal to create a 16-page comic magazine supplement for nationally syndicated, Sunday newspapers. Comic books were creating competition for newspapers.
Refusing the usual syndicate contract, Will’s negotiating skills left him as owner of the characters he created. While the copyright temporarily remained in the hands of Arnold, all the rights eventually reverted back to Will.
Will had a reputation as a producer, and Arnold and company needed product to match the groundswell of comics about to flood the market. Will was in the right place at the right time, with the right amount of moxy to achieve his goals. Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko couldn’t achieve this at the onset of the ‘60s ‘Marvel Age of Comics’ featuring the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man. Nor could Frank Miller or Alan Moore during the alleged regeneration of the mainstream superhero comic brought on their darker version of superhero icons at D.C. Comics (featuring Miller’s Batman and Moore’s Watchmen limited series) in the mid ‘80s. Perhaps only when a few hot artists jumped the Marvel Comics ship in the early ‘90s to form Image Comics, had a creator stood at such an alteration of an industry’s landscape, able to take advantage of the shifting ground around him.
Eisner was forced to monitor The Spirit feature from the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1945. “He was never sent overseas, although he wanted to be,” says Ann. “He was kept in the Pentagon building because he did a magazine for the Army called Firepower. He enjoyed his stint in the Army because he got to meet different people he never would have met at the time and really made some friends.”
Many have argued Will’s post-WWII work deserves the greatest acclaim when one observes how far he was able to push the boundaries of sequential art. Archie Goodwin, often labeled as the consummate editor in the hobby from the ‘60s to his tragic passing in the ‘90s, called The Spirit “a virtual encyclopedia, if not a bible, of how to do comics.”
All of this meant nothing to Ann Eisner on that fateful car trip to Maine in 1949.
Part 2: "The Work As Just Work"
The Spirit, April 1949.
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