Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [118]
One of Will Eisner’s favorite pieces of his own work was a single-panel drawing, a self-portrait with no caption or dialogue balloon. Eisner portrays himself, leaning casually against a crude, makeshift newsstand stocked with copies of his graphic novels. The stand is set up in the middle of nowhere. The land around him is hilly but barren. Three birds fly in a cloudless sky.
Eisner looks off into the distance.
On the horizon, far away, a cloud of dust is being raised by a throng of people heading in his direction.
Eisner could wait.
chapter twelve
O U T E R S P A C E , T H E C I T Y —
N O L I M I T S
Think of me as a one-man band, walking down the street with a sign saying “Sequential Art,” every once in a while looking around and there’s somebody following me, but the line isn’t too big at the moment.
Pleased with the results of A Contract with God, Eisner started another graphic novel, this one to be written and published in a radically different way. Beginning with the third Kitchen Sink issue of The Spirit Magazine in 1978, Eisner serialized Life on Another Planet (later published in book form as Signal from Space), which presented more drama and less humor than had been the trademark of The Spirit, with a larger cast of characters plopped down in a world that allowed Eisner the opportunity to comment on the human condition more than ever before. A year prior to the publication of the first installment of Eisner’s story, Star Wars, George Lucas’s space opera, had shattered box office records and jacked interest in science fiction and fantasy to a new level. But Signal from Space was light-years from Star Wars, more James Bond than Luke Skywalker, complete with a cold war, international espionage, murder and mayhem, exotic settings, crooked politicians and corporate officials, a Nixon-like ex-president named Dexter Milgate, an Idi Amin–like African dictator named Sidi Ami, treacherous female villains, and conflicted heroes. The feature, running in sixteen-page installments, appeared in eight consecutive issues of The Spirit Magazine, beginning in October 1978 and concluding in December 1980.
In this case, creating the story and art was the equivalent of working without a safety net. Eisner had begun the project with the idea of building a story about the repercussions roiling around the discovery of another form of life on a planet a mere ten years’ travel distance from Earth. But whereas with A Contract with God he’d carefully plotted out the stories before penciling them, here Eisner was virtually improvising, with no real idea where he was taking this graphic novel. The first installment/chapter opened with two scientists receiving a transmission from somewhere out in space, and from that point on Eisner just let his imagination take him wherever it chose.
“I’m gonna let it happen, just do it and let it happen,” he told the Comics Journal shortly after the first installment’s appearance in The Spirit Magazine #19. The uncertainty, Einser said, added to the excitement of creating a new story. “I don’t know what the second chapter is going to be yet,” he admitted, “but I’ll do that very shortly.”
Eisner’s plans for presenting the continuing installments differed greatly from anything he’d done before. Rather than publish in the traditional comic book way, he and Denis Kitchen decided to experiment with a pull-out section that readers could remove from the magazine and cut and fold, creating a booklet in the process. The idea sounded good in theory, but Kitchen received complaints from distraught collectors who didn’t want to tear apart their magazines.
“There has been a universal ‘nay’ vote from readers in response to the format of ‘Life on Another Planet,’” Kitchen wrote Eisner. “Fans seem to like the story but resent having to clip their copy or reading in a helter-skelter manner.”
Eisner was disappointed by the news, but he agreed to drop the insert idea. “In view of information relating to the consistently ‘NAY’ vote on the format for LIFE ON ANOTHER