Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [109]
Denis Kitchen recalled a time, not long after he’d begun reprinting The Spirit in magazine format, when he was chiding Eisner for his Poorhouse Press and Scholastic Books projects. “I said to him, ‘Will, what are you doing that stuff for? Fans don’t want to see this stuff.’ He picked up one of those paperbacks that I thought was schlocky, and said, ‘This sold forty thousand copies. This made my mother very happy.’ Then he picked up A Contract with God and said, ‘This made my father very happy.’ He never let one prevail. Had he been strictly business, he never would have created the stuff he’s justly famous for, but you could argue that had he just been focused on the art, he wouldn’t have had the success, because it was the business side of him that negotiated the much better deals.”
Eisner wasn’t speaking literally when he held up his books and spoke of his parents’ reactions to them. Neither, in fact, had lived to see him reach his peak in international acclaim. Fannie Eisner died in 1964 at age seventy-two, long before the birth of Poorhouse Press and her son’s big push in commercial publishing, at a time when he was still working at P*S magazine and going through the ups and down of American Visuals. Sam Eisner, a dreamer until the end, passed away in 1968 at age eighty-two, a decade before the publication of A Contract with God and the ensuing praise of his son’s graphic novels. Sam never abandoned his passion for art and was painting landscapes, some on a very large scale, as though he were trying to express the breadth of the dreams he’d never given up well into his old age.
* * *
A much bigger—and more time-consuming—occupation materialized from an unexpected source: the School of Visual Arts, a Manhattan-based facility specializing in training students in fine art, commercial art, photography, and filmmaking. The school had discontinued its courses in comics art until a couple of students requested that such courses be offered again. Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman were the first two artists recommended for teaching positions.
“I always read that if you wanted to be a cartoonist, go to the School of Visual Arts,” recalled Batton Lash, a School of Visual Arts alumnus who went on to a successful career in comics. “Once I got there, I realized they had dropped their cartooning classes. I had met a lot of other like-minded students who went to the school for the same reason I did. We talked to Tom Gill, the artist for The Lone Ranger, who was head of the alumni department, and he went to the president of the school and proposed that they reinstate the cartooning classes. The school decided to start them again, and they asked Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner if they’d like to teach, and both of them said yes. It was a very exciting time.”
Eisner loved the idea of teaching a class. He’d given many young artists their starts, of course, and he’d taught a brief course at Sheridan College in Ontario in 1974. He’d enjoyed the experience. He and the class had created a new Spirit adventure entitled “The Invader,” and he’d found that he liked sharing tips, business advice, artistic shortcuts, and ideas with aspiring cartoonists. He didn’t appreciate the fact that so many putative comics artists were interested only in learning how to draw superheroes in order to land jobs with DC or Marvel, but he could also remember a time, back in his youth, when he was creating similar characters to order for Busy Arnold and others.
He set up his class at the School of Visual Arts similar to the way he’d taught at Sheridan