Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [11]
These experiences taught Eisner invaluable, if painful, lessons.
“One of the difficulties of this business is that you have to learn to deal with rejection,” he said. “Every kid coming out of school, sooner or later, will walk into an art director’s office or a publisher’s office and the editor will look at his work and say, ‘now don’t take this personally … but this is the stupidest, crappiest work I’ve ever seen.’
“It happened to me,” he continued. “I remember, as a young kid, I showed my work to a magazine and the editor looked at this work and laughed and said, ‘These are the stupidest faces I have ever seen.’ And I walked out of there very dejected. And sitting out in the waiting room, waiting to see this editor next after me, was Ludwig Bemelmans, the famous illustrator [of Madeline]. A foreigner. And he said to me in broken English, ‘Don’t vorry, boy, somebody vill like your vork.’”
Later in his career, Eisner illustrated this encounter in a four-page story commissioned for a compilation of stories entitled Autobiographix, a collection devoted to personal narratives capturing important moments in the contributors’ lives. Eisner entitled his piece “The Day I Became a Professional.”
Eisner eventually scored a job in the advertising department of the New York American, working the graveyard shift and drawing illustrations for the paper’s “pimple ads”—the tiny ads that ran along the paper’s borders. Eisner divided his paycheck between his family and himself. Lunch was his favorite time of the day. At midnight, he’d head up to the roof of the American’s building, where he watched New York’s nightlife and, he’d say later, picked up the nuances of the way shadows played on the street scenes, lessons he would use to great effect in his graphic novels and Spirit stories.
The pay at the American was lousy, and Eisner tried doing freelance work on the side to supplement his income, but with little success. The advertising work posed no creative challenge, and Eisner yearned for something else, if not in comics, then in commercial art. When he heard that a new magazine called Eve, geared toward young Jewish women, was looking for an art director, he applied for the job, even though he knew almost nothing about what young Jewish women wanted in a magazine. He got the job, most likely because he would work for little money, and he set out to provide the magazine with illustrations of all kinds, publishing under the name “Julian Willi,” which was a combination of his brother’s name and his nickname. Neither the magazine nor Eisner lasted long. Eisner was fired when it became evident to the editors that he had very little knowledge of the magazine’s target audience and that readers would have little interest in illustrations of, say, women with firearms. The magazine folded a few months later.
A chance encounter with Bob Kahn set Eisner’s career in another direction. Kahn had been hustling his work all over town, occasionally selling single-panel cartoon jokes. He told Eisner of a periodical called Wow, What a Magazine!, which published cartoons and illustrated stories for boys.
“They buy from everybody,” Kahn assured Eisner. “Go up there and see.”
Eisner packed his portfolio and headed downtown to the magazine’s offices.
* One of Sam Eisner’s prized possessions was a book about Julius Caesar, given to him by a teacher upon his completion of his English class. Sam eventually gave the book to his son Billy, who, in one of his earliest artistic exercises, drew illustrations based on the text.
chapter two
A B U S I N E S S F O R T H I R T Y B U C K S
You stop anybody on the street and ask him, “What is art?” They’ll say, “Well, an oil painting—that