Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [119]
Kitchen later admitted to having reservations about the feasibility of the project. “I knew instinctively that my generation had this ‘collector’s gene,’” he said. “They didn’t want to cut things up. They didn’t want to turn the magazine sideways. But we had to test it to prove it. If it worked and we got a lot of people writing and saying, ‘Hey, I really dig this,’ we’d do more, and if they complained, we’d rethink it. We couldn’t afford a real market survey.”
Signal from Space posed problems that Eisner hadn’t encountered with A Contract with God. He had mastered the short form of comics writing dating back to his earliest years in the business, and the longer pieces in A Contract with God, although more challenging, had involved his fleshing out the elliptical elements of comics writing. Pacing and exposition weren’t major considerations. Signal from Space was not only significantly longer and more complex than anything he had ever attempted; since it was being published in installments, Eisner had to find subtle ways to keep readers connected to his graphic novel’s characters and subplots from issue to issue of the magazine. Prose writers faced similar challenges when writing by installment, but they weren’t trying to align image and text the way comics writers were, and the difference between a phrase (or even a paragraph) of prose and a comics panel was monumental. For the sake of clarity and pacing, Eisner generally preferred to limit a scene to a single page, but that didn’t give him much wriggle room in each installment’s sixteen pages, especially when one of them was a splash page. Signal from Space was full of the usual Eisner trademarks: innovative camera angles, lighting, and movement, with more dialogue than usual.
Fortunately for Eisner, he had ample input from a publisher and, for the first time in his career, an editor. The former, Denis Kitchen, was vastly experienced in comics; the latter, Dave Schreiner, was more heavily involved with the written word.
As a publisher, Kitchen was aware of the market, and he knew, as a fan and collector, what appealed to him personally. Kitchen Sink Press was a small operation, with a small staff and very limited funding, and as pleased as he was to be publishing Will Eisner, Kitchen was by no means in the position to absorb many losses. The graphic novel was unexplored territory, and Eisner and Kitchen were mapping out its terrain as they went along. Schreiner, a Wisconsin freelance editor and old friend of Kitchen’s, possessed extensive knowledge in contemporary literature and was brought on board to act as a buffer between publisher and artist.
Kitchen and Schreiner went back a long way, to their days at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, when both were contributing to the student newspaper, Kitchen as a cartoonist, Schreiner as the paper’s sports editor. The two became close friends and, eventually, co-founders of the Bugle-American alternative newspaper. “You get to know a person pretty well when you work with him all night, week after week, pasting bits of paper on layout sheets,” Schreiner wrote of Kitchen in Kitchen Sink Press: The First 25 Years, his history of Kitchen’s publishing enterprise.
The demise of the Bugle-American hit Schreiner hard. He had been the driving force behind the paper, and he took the loss personally. For a longer time than he’d ever care to admit, he drifted aimlessly, working a string of menial jobs and drinking so heavily that he almost lost his life. The rehabilitation was slow and difficult, but once he was sober and rebuilding his life, he reconnected with Kitchen and began working at Kitchen Sink Press as an editor.
Artist and editor: Dave Schreiner worked with Eisner as an editor and advisor on all but his first and last books. Eisner looked for an editor who could be brutally honest with him, and Schreiner fit the