Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [121]
Eisner wanted his work to be judged as literature, and Schreiner held him to literary standards. Schreiner read Eisner’s work as he would a novel, and he expected Eisner to honor the rules of the novel, from characterization to plotting, from point of view to pacing. The key to dealing with Eisner was to be straightforward but diplomatic. Eisner had a favorite expression—“Don’t tell me how to do it, just tell me what’s wrong”—and Schreiner would work off that.
Denis Kitchen would often overhear the telephone conversations between Schreiner and Eisner, and he was impressed with Schreiner’s methods of critiquing Eisner’s work. “Dave would say, ‘I don’t think this transition works,’ or, ‘This character isn’t plausible,’” Kitchen explained. “He’d then say, ‘You can take this in several directions, but here’s what’s wrong with it.’ And Will would say, ‘Oh, I got it. Okay. Here’s what I’m going to do. What do you think?’ And Dave would say, ‘Well, you could take him in that direction, or you might throw the reader a curve and do this.’ They would have these conversations, and Dave would follow them up with letters.”
Over time, the two developed a very strong, trusting writer-editor relationship. Schreiner worked closely with Eisner on all of his longer graphic works, editing every one with the exception of A Contract with God and The Plot, Eisner’s final book.
When Denis Kitchen initially set up arrangements to publish The Spirit Magazine, it was with the hope that Eisner would be contributing new material to complement the reprinted Spirit stories. He had more than six hundred Spirit episodes to choose from—enough to sustain the magazine for years to come—but he was convinced that, for as much as collectors might want to see old episodes of the old comic, they would also clamor for something other than reprints. Since new Spirit adventures were out of the question, Kitchen depended on Eisner to come up with other supplemental material for the magazine.
Eisner more than held up his end of the bargain. The twenty-five Kitchen Sink Spirit Magazine issues, presented quarterly over the six-year stretch from 1977 to 1983, caught Eisner in one of his most creatively fertile periods. His new material, besides each issue’s wraparound cover and the Signal from Space graphic novel entries, was astonishing in its range and quality—enough to eventually make up his book New York: The Big City and form the foundation for the instructional book Comics and Sequential Art. Eisner’s “Shop Talk,” featuring his interviews with such comics legends as Gil Kane, Milton Caniff, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, and Joe Kubert, would also be gathered into a book. The centerpiece of Spirit Magazine #30 was a “jam,” in which fifty comics artists contributed to a single new Spirit story. It was reaching the point where the Spirit was fighting for space in his own magazine.
The Big City project, years in the making, was particularly close to Eisner’s heart. Eisner had used New York City—renamed “Central City,” to satisfy editors in newspapers across the country—as the setting for The Spirit, and in interviews he spoke candidly about his passion for the city. He could live in a suburban setting, as he did now, or he could move away completely, as he would do in years to come when he and Ann moved to Florida, but New York would always be home. Writers, he’d say, were encouraged to write about what they knew best, and New York was where he grew up, where he learned the rules of the neighborhood, where he sold newspapers and opened his first studio. He’d seen countless dramas played out; he’d seen joy and despair. “I know it and understand it,” he said. “The city is my area, and I want to talk about it.”
“Just call me a Jewish Frank McCourt,” he said on another occasion. “I’m a city boy. I love New York. That’s what I know and that’s what I write.”
The project began in 1980, when Hollybrook Graphics published a limited-edition, six-plate portfolio