Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [104]
Word of these inquiries bounced around the comics rumor mill, and Jim Warren, the colorful founder and publisher of Warren Publishing, eventually contacted Eisner and set up a meeting. Aggressive and competitive, Warren relished the thought of being able to stick it to Marvel and DC by signing Eisner to his company. Problem was, there was no way Warren could begin to offer Eisner the kind of money that Marvel or DC could wave at him. To have any chance of snagging Eisner, Warren had to appeal to the artist in him. He’d also have to hope that Eisner had forgiven him for hiring Mike Ploog away from P*S magazine a few years earlier.
Warren pitched his idea over lunch in a posh Manhattan restaurant. Eisner, no slouch as a salesman himself, listened closely to what Warren had to say. By the end of their lunch, he was convinced that Warren Publishing offered more than the other publishers he’d been dealing with, including Kitchen Sink. Warren’s distribution network easily surpassed Kitchen Sink’s, though it wasn’t as extensive as DC’s or Marvel’s. Kitchen Sink, Marvel, and DC published standard-sized comic books; Warren offered to publish The Spirit in a larger, magazine-sized edition. Warren wanted to publish reprints, where Marvel insisted on new material.
One other important issue tipped the scale in Warren’s favor. “I felt better dealing with a smaller publisher for very practical reasons,” Eisner later explained. “To Jim Warren, I was one of maybe four properties he had. To Marvel, I was just one of 400 properties they had. I felt I would get better care and attention from Jim Warren than from Marvel.”
Eisner and Warren discussed the terms of their agreement, and Eisner walked away with a sweetheart deal. Eisner would receive $1,000 per issue and royalties on sales, in return for onetime reprint rights. Eisner, of course, would own his properties.
One sticky problem remained: what to do about the small publisher Eisner was currently dealing with—the one already devoting great care and attention to his work. The second Underground Spirit had just hit the streets, which led to one final provision in Eisner’s arrangement with Warren. Eisner hated the notion that Kitchen might lose money on the new Spirit issue if it failed to sell as well as anticipated, so before the deal became final, Jim Warren had to promise to buy out Kitchen Sink’s inventory. Warren agreed without hesitation.
When breaking the news of his agreement with Warren, Eisner tried to appeal to Kitchen’s own business instincts. The Kitchen Sink experiment had been valuable, Eisner said, but Warren Publishing offered an opportunity he couldn’t ignore. The first Underground Spirit had sold in the twenty-thousand-copy range; Warren believed he could do much better. “He thinks he can sell a hundred thousand,” Eisner told Kitchen. “I hope you understand. It’s not personal, but I’m going to have to explore this other venue.”
The buyout arrangement with Warren blunted the blow to some extent, but the sudden and unexpected change of plans left Kitchen angry, frustrated—and “heartbroken,” as he later said.
He also knew better than to say or write anything that might jeopardize his chances of working with Eisner in the future, so as soon as he learned of Eisner’s buyout arrangement with Jim Warren, he sent a letter to Eisner intended to keep all business doors open.
“It is apparent that Warren ‘made an offer you couldn’t refuse,’” he wrote, paraphrasing Vito Corleone’s famous statement from Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel and Francis Ford Coppola’s movie, The Godfather, “and I am not at all resentful that you decided to go with him. THE SPIRIT certainly deserves a circulation and package which we could not deliver at this time. I am grateful that you gave us the