Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [132]
The Eisners impressed their friends as an ideal couple. Even after thirty-plus years of marriage, they were playful, openly affectionate, clearly still very much in love. Every year on their anniversary, Will would tease Ann about signing on for “one more year,” and on those occasions when Will would bring home flowers, Ann would tease him about what he must have done wrong to warrant the purchase of such an unexpected gift. As extensive as his business travels had been, Will still missed Ann when he was away, and after she retired and they moved to Florida, Ann would accompany him on almost all of his journeys. Ann enjoyed watching her husband bask in his popularity at comics conventions and lectures, yet she had a way of seeing that none of it went to his head.
“To me, they were the role model of a married couple,” noted Denis Kitchen. “I saw them in their natural environment, where you can only fake things so long. I would especially notice it in the morning, at breakfast, or at dinner. Will was obviously the famous one, but at home he was just Will. He’d leave his ego at the door, and Ann would reprimand him if he would even say anything that seemed a little pompous. It was a complete give-and-take.”
Jackie Estrada, a longtime volunteer and administrator of the San Diego Comic-Con, the largest annual comic book convention in the world, had many occasions to see the Eisners together. She and her husband, cartoonist and former Eisner student Batton Lash, traditionally had breakfast with the Eisners on the Friday morning of the convention, when the four of them could relax before going off to face the bedlam on the convention floor.
“It was so funny when Will and Ann were together,” Estrada said. “Will would start to tell a story, and Ann would go, ‘That’s not the way it went at all. That’s not what happened.’ And Will would go, ‘I’m giving her one more year.’ They were a great match.”
Ann Eisner’s biggest concern about their move to Florida was the effect it would have on her husband when he could no longer teach. But those worries were put to rest when Eisner told the School of Visual Arts that he was moving and submitted his resignation. The school officials, shocked to be losing one of their high-profile teachers, countered with an offer to fly Eisner to New York every other week for classes. Eisner accepted. Those forays to the city, along with a couple of other longer visits, gave Will the “carbon monoxide fix” he needed to keep his yearnings for the big city at bay.
Eisner found an office near their home and set up shop. It had two rooms—an outer office and a studio in which to work—and was located in a small professional building in a strip mall. Eisner found himself surrounded by doctors, dentists, lawyers, and accountants—hardly the environment he’d enjoyed in New York City or in his studio in White Plains, but it was functional.
He already had a couple of projects in mind that he wanted to develop: an autobiographical work and a textbook on sequential art. Neither approached A Life Force in ambition, but both reflected his nostalgia for his lost youth and the city he’d left behind.
The Dreamer, a roman à clef of his early days in comics, started out at approximately the same length as “A Sunset in Sunrise City,” but Denis Kitchen and Dave Schreiner were so taken by it that they pressed him into extending it to include more detail and anecdotes.
“Dave Schreiner and I both were badgering him, urging him to put more flesh on the bone,” Kitchen recalled. “We were fascinated with early comic book history, and we had been asking him to do kind of a memoir in comics form. When he did that, I said to him, ‘Will, this is a great outline, but we want the whole story.’ And he very reluctantly said, ‘All right, all right, I’ll add eight pages.’ He would, and we’d say, ‘More.’ We pushed