Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [0]
A Dreamer’s Life in Comics
M i c h a e l S c h u m a c h e r
T o I v y a n d D y l a n
w h o s e d r e a m s I c a n ’ t r e m e m b e r o r i m a g i n e
I wasn’t aware that I was making a revolution. I knew what I was
doing was different because I meant it to be different, and I was talking
to a totally different reader.
—Will Eisner
We used to feel very much like a Mama Rabbit and a Daddy Rabbit,
who were running around, being chased by a bunch of dogs. They
dove into a hole and the Mama Rabbit is quivering. She’s saying,
“Oh, this is terrible. We’re doomed.” The Daddy Rabbit says, “No,
don’t worry about it. We’ll stay here, and in a half an hour, we’ll
outnumber them.” I always think of that when people ask me how
I felt about all those years of so-called struggle.
—Will Eisner
C O N T E N T S
Chapter 1 The Depression’s Lessons
Chapter 2 A Business for Thirty Bucks
Chapter 3 Supermen in a World of Mortals
Chapter 4 A Spirit for All Ages
Chapter 5 A Private Named Joe Dope
Chapter 6 Flight
Chapter 7 Ann
Chapter 8 Out of the Mainstream
Chapter 9 Back in the Game
Chapter 10 Resurrection
Chapter 11 A Contract with God
Chapter 12 Outer Space, the City—No Limits
Chapter 13 A Life Force
Chapter 14 Winners and Losers
Chapter 15 The Heart of the Matter
Chapter 16 Polemics
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
chapter one
T H E D E P R E S S I O N ’ S L E S S O N S
I carry with me a cargo of memories, some painful and some pleasant,
which have remained locked in the hold of my mind. I have an ancient
mariner’s need to share my accumulation of experience and observations.
Call me, if you will, a graphic witness reporting on life, death,
heartbreak and the never-ending struggle to prevail …
or at least to survive.
Will Eisner boasted that he could draw the New York City of his childhood from memory, that he didn’t have to consult old photographs or conduct research to conjure up images of towering tenement buildings with their wrought-iron fire escapes and broken front stoops, of clothes hanging on lines cast between buildings, of fire hydrants and subway grates, of endless rows of grimy windows, of kids playing stickball in the street and their parents engaged in the mighty struggle of stretching a few last dollars from Tuesday to Friday, hollering their frustrations at one another or, if the moment was right and the shades were drawn, slipping into tenderness offering reassurance, if not promise. To the New Yorker growing up in Depression-era Bronx or Brooklyn, as Eisner did, the neighborhoods, packed tight with immigrants and buildings and shifty politics, were places to survive until hope began to make sense. Eisner’s graphic novels caught all this and more, often in tenement buildings on the fictitious Dropsie Avenue, where Eisner’s memories gathered and, in the solitude of a drawing board, took flight.
“The city, to me, is a big theater,” he once said. “It’s a never-ending source of story, largely because there’s a concentration of human beings who are impacting on each other. And each human carries with him, or her, a whole story. It’s a struggle for existence.”
Eisner was always the outsider. His family moved frequently, usually as the result of his father’s inability to pay rent and make ends meet, so as the perpetual new kid on the block, he was continually the observer, again and again learning the lay of the land, guarding his younger brother and sister, dealing with these lower-middle-class neighborhoods’ anti-Semitism, finding a way to fit in—surviving. And, too soon, at an age when other boys were trying out the fit of adolescence, he became the unofficial head of the household, the provider. His childhood was over and his city shrank.
Born on March 6, 1886, Shmuel (Samuel) Eisner, Will Eisner’s father, was an old world artist and intellectual who learned, during the bleak days of the Depression, that neither art nor intellectualism could buy you