Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [123]
The comic book was made possible largely through the efforts of Cat Yronwode (pronounced Ironwood), a fan and scholar who knew more about The Spirit than anyone other than Eisner himself. Eisner had hired Yronwode to sort through and catalog his work, and her “Spirit Checklist,” a detailed, comprehensive list of every Spirit appearance, in newspaper and reprint, ran in three consecutive issues of The Spirit Magazine and became the final word on the feature’s history. Yronwode spent weeks at the Eisners’ home, poring over an extensive archives that, although carefully preserved, had no sense of organization. “Will Eisner never threw anything away,” she recalled. “He lost a lot of things, and I went up there and I found things that he didn’t know he had.”
Strong-willed and intelligent, Yronwode was in parts an academician and a barefoot hippie, a solid writer and editor with an interest in esoterica, an obsessive comics historian, and an archivist with an instinctive feel for the importance of the tiniest scrap of prose or art. Born Catherine Manfredi, Yronwode was the daughter of a special collections librarian at UCLA, and she appears to have inherited his meticulous eye for detail and organization. At the time of her initial meeting with Will Eisner, she was living in a cabin in the Ozarks and freelance writing for a meager living. She’d hoped Eisner might have back issues of The Spirit newspaper sections to fill the holes in a friend’s collection, and she reasoned that the best way to approach him would be through an interview, where she could ask him face-to-face about the issues. Armed with an interview assignment for the Comics Journal, she set out for New York. Eisner not only gave her the interview, which ran in two parts in consecutive issues of the magazine, he saw how broke she was and also gave her the job of arranging and cataloging his archives as a means of helping her earn some money. Thus began an association that lasted nearly twenty years and found Yronwode working extensively with Eisner, assisting with the writing and editing of some of his books and comics, appearing with him at comics conventions, compiling the checklist of Eisner’s work from high school through The Spirit, and representing his art as an agent until their friendship evaporated after a bitter falling-out around the time of Eisner’s eightieth birthday.
Yronwode’s work on Eisner’s archives yielded an immediate harvest of publishable material: Color Treasury and Spirit Color Album, published in 1981, and The Art of Will Eisner and Spirit Color Album Volume Two, published a year later, all by Kitchen Sink Press, all in simultaneous hardcover and paperback editions. The Art of Will Eisner, edited and with written text by Yronwode, was a lavishly illustrated biography, with work dating back to Eisner’s DeWitt Clinton days and running through his early graphic novels. Some of Eisner’s earliest published work, including posters and comic strips, had been buried in his archives and never seen by the public, and the book gave Eisner fans the chance to see his development as an artist, as well as glimpses of such rarities as “Muss ’Em Up Donovan” and selections from P*S magazine. The Color Treasury published full-color reproductions of two of Eisner’s portfolios—The Spirit Portfolio and The City Portfolio—both previously issued in limited editions and never reprinted elsewhere.
The Spirit comic book premiered in November 1983 and ran through December 1992, eighty-seven issues in all. Every month, Eisner designed a new cover related to one of the four stories in the issue, and as was his practice with The Spirit Magazine, he tinkered with the