Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [127]
Money had been tight in those early days. In later years, after he was well established and earning a good annual income, he was able to loosen up.
W. W. Norton editor Robert Weil, who later bundled Eisner’s graphic novels into attractive hardcover volumes, reissued his entire catalog of graphic novels and instructional books, and worked closely with Eisner on his final book, bristled when he heard stories accusing Eisner of being a tightwad.
“I’m still offended by this talk about how he was cheap, how he was penurious, how he saved things. Will was unfailingly generous, if not overgenerous, in my working relationship with him. I remember the first meal I ever had with him. He treated us to a meal at the Princeton Club.”
John Walker also disputed the idea that Eisner was overly tightfisted with his money.
“I wouldn’t say he was cheap,” Walker said. “One time, I needed a compressor and he lent me the money. He gave me an advance on my salary to get it. He was kind that way. I think people said he was cheap because he lived simply. He drove this beat-up old Dodge Dart. His house was a nice suburban home, but it wasn’t some McMansion kind of thing. But I wouldn’t say he was cheap. He paid us well when we worked for him. It wasn’t a sweatshop or anything.”
chapter thirteen
A L I F E F O R C E
I want my reader to feel that he is watching something real. I start everything I do with the words “believe me.” “Believe me,” I say, “let me tell you this story.”
Eisner’s sixty-fifth birthday found him in a reflective mood. Although he was in the autumn of his life and had no way of predicting how many more years lay ahead, he felt hopeful and ambitious: he had much left to do. His health was still very good. He played tennis almost every day, usually in the early afternoon, after his morning work session and lunch, and he still had great stamina. He and Ann enjoyed active social lives. This was encouraging, yet he couldn’t help but seriously ponder what he had accomplished and what he might do in the future. He worried that he wouldn’t accomplish everything that he hoped to do, that the “sands of the hourglass”—a phrase that he bandied about often with friends and business acquaintances—would run out when he was in the midst of his next great new idea.
What rose out of these ruminations was A Life Force, perhaps the most ambitious graphic novel he would ever create, which addressed issues that had gnawed at the edges of his imagination for the better part of half a century. In the preface to The Contract with God Trilogy, he explained:
The debate over Darwinism and Creationism continues over the decades, but the Meaning of life remains scientifically unanswerable. It is one thing to deal with How we got here. It is another to deal with Why. I undertook this book after my 65th birthday, a hallmark that seemed to arrive too soon. For someone who has always felt caught in a mortal struggle with time and who has an enormous number of yet undone projects ahead, this was a sobering event. Suddenly, enduring memories that were accumulations of the detritus of living seemed more ephemeral.
In A Life Force, Eisner created two characters to address his past and present selves, the aging process, and how simple lessons in life help form a much greater perspective: Jacob Shtarkah, an aging carpenter who suddenly finds himself unemployed and questioning the purpose of his life; and Willie, a politically active young artist who finds his youthful ideology challenged by the realities of the day. Both reside at 55 Dropsie Avenue, the Bronx tenement building that Eisner used as a setting in A Contract with God.