Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [130]
Three years would pass between the appearance of the last installment of A Life Force in Will Eisner’s Quarterly and its publication in book form—an unfortunate time lapse. The book fit better as a follow-up to A Contract with God than in the order in which it was presented, but the timing was a necessity given the large volume of his work being published by Kitchen Sink Press. Besides Will Eisner’s Quarterly and The Spirit comic book, which demanded a chunk of his time and assured him of regular appearances in the Kitchen Sink catalog, Eisner was busy preparing Life on Another Planet, which he was now calling Signal from Space, for publication in book form.
Signal from Space was more than just a recycling job. Two of the book’s eight installments in The Spirit Magazine had been published in a sideways, pull-out format, with smaller panels and less background than the other six installments, which were presented in the standard Spirit Magazine size and format. So before it could be bound together, Eisner had to overhaul one fourth of the book. As long as this was the case, Eisner decided to revise the rest of his story by reworking parts that, in retrospect, he deemed weak. On top of that, Life on Another Planet had been black and white, but the book was to be in color. Eisner was far too preoccupied with other projects to color it himself, so he brought in his old colleague André LeBlanc for the job. Life on Another Planet became the only Eisner graphic novel ever published in color.
Although she had been born and raised in New York, Ann Eisner did not share her husband’s enthusiasm for the city. She enjoyed much of what the city had to offer, particularly the arts scene, but she preferred the tranquillity of White Plains to the energy of Manhattan. She hated the New York winters, and now that she was ready to retire from her job at a hospital, she yearned to move somewhere warm, as far away from the snow and blustery winds as possible. Will’s brother, Pete, and his wife, Lila, had relocated to Florida when Pete had taken a job with Dannon yogurt—a job that Will had lined up for Pete when he could no longer afford to keep him as an employee—and Ann reasoned that Will might be happy living in Florida and reuniting with his Pete and his family.
Eisner, as Ann expected, initially opposed the idea. He felt Florida was a place where people retired and vegetated, where people went to finish out their lives. He was still very active, producing more art than ever, teaching at the School of Visual Arts, and keeping a busy social calendar. New York City was his home, not some godforsaken town in Florida, where he’d be as far removed from his business as he could imagine. His relationship with Pete, while loving, was complex, built largely on a lifetime of looking out for his younger brother. Pete had worked for him for a long time, and he’d been a loyal, outstanding employee. Still, having a brother as an employee had built-in complications that others didn’t have to face, and Eisner was happy for Pete’s success outside of his sphere of influence.
Ann was insistent, Will relented, and in the summer of 1983, they began the process of finding a place in Florida and packing up their belongings. They moved on July 1, but it wasn’t easy. Eisner was a pack rat who kept every scrap of paper he’d ever drawn on, every letter he’d ever written or received, every book he’d ever read. His personal archives included original art, tear sheets, published books, magazines and comics in which his work (or interviews) had appeared, newspaper clippings, awards, memorabilia, and business correspondence. The long-distance move simply would not permit the transfer of all this from one place to another.
Fortunately, largely through the efforts of Cat Yronwode, there was now an order to Eisner’s archives. A lifetime’s work had been organized and cataloged. Some of the memorabilia could be sold off to collectors. The rest of the archives would be divided between Eisner’s new home and a university library. Yronwide contacted