Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [103]
He wasn’t. Eisner thought the idea was wrongheaded for two basic reasons. First, he felt he had gone as far as he could with the Spirit during the character’s newspaper lifetime, and he wasn’t fond of the idea of updating the character or placing him in a more contemporary setting. Second, Marvel’s comic book readership was younger than the Spirit’s newspaper readership, and Eisner wanted to create more adult work.
With Stan Lee. (Courtesy of Denis Kitchen)
Marvel, Lee suggested, might have something along that line. Marvel had been developing a satire magazine aimed at college students and young adults, and Lee had writer/editor Roy Thomas meet with Eisner and sound him out about the idea.
“Stan wanted something in the Mad vein, only for a little older audience, because this was the time of National Lampoon,” Thomas recalled. “He had me go out to lunch with Will, but not much came out of it.”
What Lee really wanted was for Eisner to take over his duties at Marvel. Lee had been with the company since his teenage days, and he was anxious to move to the West Coast, to Hollywood, where in recent years a rebirth of the motion picture industry, led by a new wave of directors and such highly regarded films as The Graduate, The Last Picture Show, Easy Rider, and The Godfather, promised talented people the chance to earn big bucks and gain big exposure. Marvel, seeing the potential for huge earnings from movie adaptations from its comics and characters, was kicking around the idea of starting up a motion picture division within the company. Lee fancied himself to be a natural in this environment—which, as later years proved, turned out to be true enough—but he couldn’t leave his job as editor and publisher at Marvel before hiring a replacement. The comic book industry was brimming with young talent, but none with Eisner’s knowledge and background. Eisner seemed to know everyone in comics, which promised to be valuable in attracting new artists and writers to the company. Lee believed that Eisner was the ideal candidate to lead Marvel through the next decade or two of business. “I really wanted to make our company bigger than it was, and I thought he would be the greatest guy to get a handle on all these new things I wanted to do,” Lee said.
Although flattered by Lee’s proposal, Eisner wasn’t interested in overseeing a huge list of characters he hadn’t created. More important, he wanted no part of being another cog, albeit an important one, in the corporate world; he’d just escaped all that by signing on with Kitchen Sink Press. Marvel still did business the old-fashioned, work-for-hire way—the company paid by the page, maintained copyright ownership, and held on to the artists’ work—and Eisner wouldn’t work under those conditions. More than thirty years had passed since his initial dickering over copyright and character ownership with Busy Arnold and Henry Martin, and nothing had changed his opinion in the interim. To Eisner, it wasn’t an issue of rights or of proverbial white hats and black hats. Publishers had rights, as did writers and artists. It was an issue of negotiation, of the artist having the chance to make a choice and living with his decision.
And so it went with Marvel. The salary would have been lucrative, but money wasn’t the point. Eisner informed Lee that if he was put in charge at Marvel, he’d want to initiate changes that gave writers and artists ownership of their work. Lee was in no position to negotiate such changes.
“We had a long lunch,” Eisner said of his meeting with Stan Lee, “and that was the end. I thanked him very much. And we were walking out to the elevator, and he said, ‘Why aren’t you interested?’ I said, ‘I think it’s a suicide mission.’ Really, it wasn’t for me.”
The two parted amicably,