Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [125]
The house, at 51 Winslow Road in White Plains, not far from where the Eisners were currently living, was a modern wood-and-glass structure designed by an architect for his own residence and office. It sat on three quarters of an acre of land, much of it wooded, in semiseclusion near the end of a dead-end road. The architect had built a beautiful detached studio in back of the house.
“It’s absolutely beautiful,” Ann declared after taking a tour of the house and grounds, “but it’s too big for us.”
Eisner couldn’t argue that point. With five bedrooms on the second floor, the place was more house than the one they were thinking of leaving. Still, the detached studio, the woods …
“That house just spoke to me,” he said to his wife. “It said, ‘Buy me.’”
“He just fell in love with it,” Ann recalled. “It was just about perfect.”
John Walker was another School of Visual Arts student who wound up working for Eisner after taking his class. For Walker, the job was an extension of the classroom, a place for further learning, especially about the business aspects of comics art. Eisner, it seemed, was always passing on his knowledge to anyone willing to listen. Walker drew illustrations for one of Eisner’s Poorhouse Press joke books, which turned into an exercise of practical business.
“He’d say, ‘You are going to illustrate and I’m going to pay you to do that. What are you going to charge me for the rights to use your illustration?’ I’d say, ‘I’ll be happy with whatever you pay me.’ ‘Don’t be a schmuck,’ he’d say. ‘Let’s sit down and look at this contract. I’ll pay you x amount to do the drawings, but you have to come up with a number for me to own the rights to these illustrations forever. Do you want a thousand dollars? Fifteen hundred?’ I’d say, ‘I don’t know what I want,’ and he’d say, ‘Well, let’s do some research on it.’ He’d send you to the library and you’d research business law and contracts. He really opened my eyes that way, on my value as an artist. He would say, ‘Your art has value. Your art will have value decades from now, even after you’re dead. You don’t know, a Walker cartoon might be famous.’”
Walker, like other Eisner students, was constantly amazed by how Eisner could turn almost anything into a learning exercise. One Friday, Walker recalled, Eisner approached him and asked him what he was doing that upcoming weekend. When Walker replied that he had nothing special planned, Eisner pulled out an envelope with two tickets to the ballet. “I’m not using these,” he said. “You’re gonna go.”
“The ballet?” Walker responded, hoping not to disparage his boss’s generosity. “I’m not into the ballet, Will. But thanks.”
Eisner wasn’t taking no for an answer. “Go to this and bring a sketchbook. I want you to draw while you’re at the ballet. Just do it for me, please.”
What Walker didn’t realize was that Eisner had done his own sketching at the ballet, back when he was in the Art Students League and would head to the ballet on Fifty-ninth Street in Manhattan—a point that Eisner drove home when Walker, after attending the ballet and sketching some figures, showed him his work. Rather than spending a half hour or so in a life drawing class at the School of Visual Arts, sketching a model standing stock-still, Walker had drawn the human body in motion and enjoyed the ballet at the same time. “It’s amazing how quickly you can capture the human form and an appreciation for it by watching ballet,” Eisner observed.
Walker stayed in touch with Eisner after his apprenticeship, leading to an informal collaboration on a famous television commercial that Eisner never spoke about in interviews. Walker, working for an advertising agency, needed to come up with a symbol to represent a fabric softener, something soft and fuzzy, representative of the product’s name: Snuggle. Walker designed a number