Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [107]
“There is no doubt that Eisner is a tough businessman,” Kitchen wrote in his journal, “and I feel terribly naïve in comparison, but still I feel an innate trust. Eisner reinforces this feeling by his candidness and apparent affection for me. At one point he said, ‘When I see you, I see myself forty years ago.’ I think 30 is more accurate in terms of pure age, but the comment nevertheless staggers me.”
Several things became evident to Kitchen while he and Eisner talked about having Kitchen Sink Press pick up The Spirit. First, Eisner clearly enjoyed the rejuvenation of The Spirit, even if he felt strongly that he had nothing new to add to the feature, that he’d exhausted the character’s potential during the feature’s newspaper run.
“If I devoted myself totally to new stories there would be almost no time left for other new projects,” he told Denis Kitchen. “Besides, I could never fill a 64 page bimonthly without full-time working under a schedule I abandoned long ago. Then there is the consideration of the audience. Composed as it is of 1⁄2 collector fans, old timers and new readers I wonder what the reader reaction would be when they have the opportunity to compare the Will Eisner of 1940–1950 to today’s Eisner.”
Kitchen also realized that after spending two decades away from the comic book scene, Eisner was genuinely surprised by the potential he saw in the underground comix and the way the new artists wrote about compelling topics for older readers. Finally, he had new ideas that he wanted to pursue, and he needed an entrée—a publisher willing to let him explore these ideas on a regular basis. The Spirit Magazine could be a combination of reprints and new material.
Kitchen was all for it. Since the magazine had been numbered under Warren Publishing, he decided that for the sake of collectors, he would pick up where Warren left off, meaning that rather than start with #1, the first Kitchen Sink Press issue of the magazine would begin at #17. He would publish the magazine on a quarterly basis, and if Eisner had new material that he wanted to present, he’d take whatever he had to offer. The magazine’s cover would be a team effort, with Eisner providing the pencil sketch and Kitchen Sink doing the rest.
“I would expect you to provide a tight pencil drawing of a wraparound cover design for each book we publish,” Kitchen told Eisner. “I will absorb the cost of inking and coloring the covers. I have in mind Peter Poplaski … and have the utmost satisfaction that Pete can do a superb job. He has an uncanny ability to mimic styles. And if you had any reservations, I would submit inked stats for your approval.”
If anything bothered Kitchen about the arrangement, it was the selection process for the Spirit reprints. The Warren magazine had published the very best of the Spirit stories, and Eisner feared that he had only “rather lightweight” stories to offer Kitchen, especially if Kitchen published the magazine on a bimonthly basis, which was his early projection. Kitchen had never seen Eisner’s archives, and he had no idea what might be available for reprinting, so every shipment from Eisner became a new adventure—and not always for the better.
“It was a hodgepodge,” Kitchen said of the selections sent to his Wisconsin-based offices from Eisner’s office in New York. “He had his brother, Pete, working for him, and Pete would pick the stories. Sometimes he would break up stories that were two or three parts. It was frustrating. We started to get fan complaints, and Will confessed that he really didn’t have that much memory of which stories belonged together and should have been reprinted together.”
That was the