Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [111]
Eisner’s own curiosity made him a different type of teacher. His class wasn’t all shop talk and drawing, which pleased some of the students and irritated others.
“He was interested in everything, even though he was teaching a course about comics,” Lash explained. “He always wanted to hear what was going on in the film department. If someone was taking a film class, he’d want to hear about it. He wanted to see a student’s photography. He was always interested in what was going on.”
The interest in film came naturally. Eisner had been influenced by movies as a young artist, and he was curious about what his students found interesting in the films they were seeing.
“One day, he said, ‘Okay, put down your pens and pencils, we’re going to screen this Chaplin movie,’” recalled David Mandel, a former student. “He screened the whole film, and afterwards he discussed it with the class. He related it to his own comic work.”
The class objective, aside from the actual learning process, was to produce a comic book called The Gallery, to be published at the end of the semester. The project, Eisner believed, not only gave students a taste of the mechanizations of assembling a comic book, it also taught them important elements of business.
John Walker, a native New Yorker who attended the School of Visual Arts and wound up running a successful advertising agency in Connecticut, remembered the class as being much more than picking up a pencil or pen and creating art.
“He taught us a lot of fundamentals of business,” Walker said. “He’d say to us, ‘All right, how are we going to get this thing printed?’ We’d say, ‘Well, you know, the school must have some money.’ He’d say, “No, if you guys want to showcase your artwork, get out there and see if the local pizzeria will take an ad.’ I was taking a course in advertising, and he’d say, ‘Johnny Walker, you’re a salesman. Get out there and find a local bar that might take an ad in The Gallery. Sell space. That’s how we’re going to pay for printing.’”
A large portion of each meeting was devoted to looking at the students’ work for the proposed comic book, and Eisner could be a tough taskmaster when a student disappointed him with inferior work—or, worse yet, a missed assignment.
“If you screwed up a deadline, he would chew you out,” Walker recalled. “He’d say, ‘You let yourself down and you let the class down. What do you have to say for yourself?’ That kind of stuff. There were kids who didn’t care, and they would know that this guy was going to be a drill sergeant and they would remove themselves from the class. He was a tough guy. He grew up in the Bronx and took no crap from anyone. He had that sort of steely gaze. It was his way of saying, ‘You’re letting me down, but you’re letting yourself down, too.’ It was a team effort, with give and take, and that’s how he ran the class.”
Teaching at the School of Visual Arts and seeing the creativity in student work inspired Eisner more than he could have predicted, stoking the fires of a decision that had been long in arriving. Eisner had never wavered in his belief in the potential of using comics to make a serious statement. Seeing the work published in the underground comix had strengthened this belief, but Eisner still lacked the motivation to pursue the ideas in his head until he saw some of the potential realized in his students’ work.
“In the process of teaching, you get to test your own concepts,” he explained in an interview with Heavy Metal magazine. “You look at the professional world with a different perspective. I began to discover that there were some things to do that hadn’t yet been done in the world of comics.”
Eisner had considered some of these other possibilities, but his obligations to other projects demanded