Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [131]
For the library, obtaining the Eisner collection was a major event, adding to its reputation of being one of the finest cartoon archives in the academic community. “Eisner’s work has been of major importance in the development of both comic book art and narrative,” Lucy Caswell, the library’s curator, declared when the university formally announced its procurement of the Eisner collection. “His creative use of layout and design in the 1940s influenced a generation of cartoonists.”
One unexpected offshoot of the Eisners’ move to Florida was a new, twenty-eight-page graphic story, “A Sunset in Sunshine City,” published in Will Eisner’s Quarterly #6 and reprinted later in the miscellany Will Eisner Reader. It is the story of Henry Klop, widower, father of two daughters, and owner of a well-respected small business, who has bought a retirement condominium in Florida. It’s a bittersweet move. As he wanders down the snowy streets of New York, Henry is haunted by the memories of his youth, marriage, children, and business—all preserved, it seems, by the mundane objects of the city itself. “After all, what else is there to bear witness to the past?” he wonders, repeating an Eisner theme explored in New York: The Big City. “Only lampposts, fire hydrants … a street, a sewer, a building … They are monuments to my memories.”
“That was his getting used to things,” Ann Eisner said of “A Sunset in Sunshine City.” Like Henry Klop, Eisner couldn’t imagine himself as a retiree so far removed from the memories of his youth—a point that Ann Eisner readily acknowledged. “It’s mostly retirees in south Florida where we moved,” she said, “and it took some getting used to.”
Ironically, Ann made a significant contribution to the story when she suggested the montage of Henry Klop’s New York memories presented early in the story. Ann’s involvement with her husband’s work had developed slowly over the years: from the earliest days of their relationship, when she had no use for comics and didn’t even visit his office until after they were married, to her much greater interest and more active involvement in his art after he began his graphic novels.
Denis Kitchen watched this evolution from the perspective of a publisher. On one occasion, shortly after he and Eisner began working together on The Spirit Magazine, he visited the Eisner home in White Plains. During a lull in their dinner conversation, he asked Ann, innocently enough, to name her favorite Spirit story.
“There was a silence,” Kitchen remembered, “and she kind of glanced at Will, and then looked at me and said, ‘Well, honestly, I’ve never read any of them.’ My jaw dropped. As a fanboy and a guy making a living publishing this stuff, that was incomprehensible to me. I think she saw my response and felt slightly embarrassed. She said, ‘I married the man, not the cartoonist’—which I thought was a great comeback. I didn’t bring it up again.”
Eisner valued his wife’s feedback. Although they had very different tastes in entertainment—he favored public television, she network programming, for instance—she was well-read and had strong instincts on what might work or be appropriate in a story, and she wasn’t shy about stating her opinions. She strongly objected to one scene in Signal from Space, which depicted one of the characters urinating in a rainstorm. (“Will, that’s not you,” she scolded. “You shouldn’t do that.”) On another occasion, she protested her husband’s intention of putting together a never-to-be-released Poorhouse Press book entitled 30 Days to a New Beautiful You (or, in its original working title, 30 Days to a Brick Shithouse Figure).
“He wanted her opinion,” Denis Kitchen said. “I can remember one time when Will had a character having an affair in the