Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [124]
“Stage Settings,” one of the comic book’s regular monthly features, gave readers a close-up view of Eisner’s creative mind. Written by Dave Schreiner in an interview/article format, “Stage Settings” generally occupied two or three pages of the comic book, with Eisner commenting on the stories in that month’s issue, in effect creating a logbook detailing what inspired the stories, how they were drawn, who worked on such elements as the lettering and inking, and anything else that Eisner wished to address. Eisner clearly enjoyed talking shop.
“He was an amazing combination of artistic dreamer and hard-nosed pragmatist,” said Tom Heintjes, who took over “Stage Settings” for Dave Schreiner in 1989 and wrote the feature until the comic book ceased publication. Heintjes had worked for Fantagraphics, one of the leading publishers of graphic novels and comics studies, where he became acquainted with Denis Kitchen, and he inherited “Stage Settings” after Kitchen relocated his Kitchen Sink to Northampton, Massachusetts, and Schreiner, back in Wisconsin, became too busy with other work to continue it. Heintjes, a comics historian who created his own magazine called Hogan’s Alley, was impressed by how quickly Eisner thought on his feet.
“What was interesting to me,” he pointed out, “is how much of what we take now as standard comics storytelling devices was, to him, problem solving on the fly, because he was having to produce so furiously. I guess I went in with this impression that he sat at his drawing board, scratched his chin, and developed these genius ideas. I found out that it wasn’t like that at all. He was having to crank this stuff out and solve problems, because the form was so new in those years that there was no well to go to, really. He was digging the well.”
Eisner had plenty of help on the comic book and other projects. Some of his assistants, like Robert Pizzo, were former students hired to help around the studio. Pizzo had studied at the School of Visual Arts from 1978 to 1980, and the circumstances behind his hiring had to have seemed like a case of déjà vu to Eisner, a parallel to his initial meeting with Jerry Iger.
“I saw him on the train one day and found out that he lived near my neighborhood,” Pizzo remembered. “On the last day of school, I asked him, ‘Would you mind if I took a ride out to the studio one day?’ And he said, ‘By all means, come up.’ I went up the next week, and when I got there, it was really like one of those movie moments. The place was crowded and busy, with people running all around. One panel of an illustration was bad, and Will was complaining about how they had to fix it and couldn’t get a hold of the guy to do it. I literally heard myself saying, ‘I could do that.’ He put me down at a drawing board and said, ‘All right, this is what I need. Take a shot at it.’ I did it, and he said, ‘That’s perfect.’ Then, as I was leaving, he followed me outside and said, ‘Listen, do you want to come up here and work a little bit?’”
Pizzo reported to the studio several days a week and was put to work on a variety of projects. He added stars to some of the panels in Signal from Space. He worked on some of the background revisions and color overlays for The Spirit comic book. Eisner, acting every bit the role of the studio head, would assign the activities and supervise his assistants’ work.
“We were surprised to find that he had another whole studio in his house,” Pizzo said. “He had a room set up with a drawing board and everything, and we found out that this was where he got the main work done. In the studio, he sat at his desk with his phones. He wasn’t at a drawing board that often, though there was one that was kind of reserved for him.”
The studio was a special place for Eisner. A few years earlier, in 1975, he and Ann had decided to downsize their living quarters. With Alice gone and John no longer living with them, they were alone in a fairly large house. A real estate agent had shown them several