Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [105]
“We’ll do something again in the future,” Eisner assured Kitchen.
At that time, neither could have estimated just how much they would be doing.
Jim Warren, like Jerry Iger, Busy Arnold, and other impresarios Eisner had dealt with throughout his career, was not a comics writer or artist. He operated by instinct and a strong understanding about his special niche in the comics market, and he could be very stubborn and assertive. He wasn’t often called diplomatic, but even those who disliked him had to admit that, in surviving in an extremely competitive business, he must have known what he was doing. Warren Publishing’s titles often sounded like knockoffs of what other publishers were producing, when in fact Warren was coming up with ideas that the bigger houses were imitating.
A comics aficionado since his youth, Warren started Warren Publishing in Philadelphia in 1957, fresh off the Senate hearings and the establishment of the Comics Code Authority. To circumvent the Comics Code Authority and its little corner cover stamp, Warren published in the standard 81⁄2-by-11-inch magazine size, charged a magazine’s cover price, and declared his audience to be older than the kids picking up Superman or Batman. His early magazines specialized in horror or science fiction, but by the mid-sixties, he was well established, with titles that included Creepy, Eerie, and (with the Vietnam War heating up) Blazing Combat. By the time he and Eisner connected, Warren had worked with such notable editors and artists as Archie Goodwin, Harvey Kurtzman, Richard Corben, Alex Toth, Wally Wood, and Al Williamson. Frank Frazetta, who gained international acclaim for his work on the Tarzan and Conan books, created sexy, over-the-top covers for the Warren horror magazine Vampirella. As he’d hoped, Warren saw many of his publications stocked on magazine racks next to general interest periodicals, rather than languishing on drugstore spin racks or buried among the ever-increasing number of new comic book titles.
Warren had crossed paths with Eisner a decade before their Spirit deal, when one of his early publications, Help!, a humor magazine edited by Harvey Kurtzman and featuring reprints by some of the Golden Age artists whom Eisner admired, reprinted a Spirit story in its February 1962 issue. But like so many of Eisner’s reprints between 1953 and 1972, it was a one-shot deal. W. B. DuBay, one of Warren’s top editors, had once interviewed for a layout artist job at P*S, but he had lost the job to Mike Ploog. Now, coincidentally, he became Eisner’s editor at Warren.
Warren took an approach similar to that of Denis Kitchen in publishing The Spirit. Issued bimonthly beginning in April 1974, Warren’s Spirit magazine reprinted eight Spirit stories per issues, all but one entry in black and white. Eisner would have preferred to see the stories reprinted in chronological order, but the disorganized state of his files, along with Warren’s wishes, nixed the idea. Warren had projected lofty sales figures for the magazine, but since comics sales were volatile in the early seventies and he had no way of predicting how long interest in The Spirit might last, Warren hoped to present the very best of the character in each issue. To grab the attention of potential readers browsing through titles in the stores, Warren insisted on colorful, action-packed covers radically different from the inventive splash pages Eisner had used to introduce each newspaper supplement episode. The original splash pages were included with each story in the magazine, as they had to be, but the Warren covers, like the Kitchen Sink covers, gave the magazine a more standard comic book feel.
Eisner appreciated the care devoted to each issue of the magazine, although, true to his perfectionist nature, he was never totally satisfied with the final product. He tinkered with the stories before submitting them to Warren, redoing some of