Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [138]
“I wanted to write about comics and graphic novels,” he recalled, “and I went to an editor of a major English newspaper and said, ‘Alan Moore is doing Watchmen, Art Spiegelman is doing Maus, Frank Miller is doing The Dark Knight. All of them will talk to me. I want to do an article on this thing that is happening right now.’ I was told, ‘Neil, it was English comics character Desperate Dan’s fiftieth anniversary six months ago. We wrote about it. Why would you write about this now?’ I went to the Sunday Times magazine in England, and I sold an editor on letting me do it. I talked to Alan and Art and Frank, and to the Hernandezes and Dave Sim, and wrote an article about this crazy thing that was happening right now. I handed it in and, not hearing anything back, I called the guy and said, ‘What did you think?’ He said, ‘Well, we have a problem with it. It’s not balanced.’ I said, ‘What do you mean it’s not balanced?’ He said, ‘You seem to think they’re a good thing’—meaning that in order to get proper balance, I needed to have somebody saying that comics led to juvenile delinquency or whatever.”
Gaiman was learning a lesson that Eisner had learned during the early days of comic books: Acceptance was going to be a long, tough process. Graphic novels would go through the same process of naysaying and skepticism, critical examination, opposition, and ridicule before the public eventually came around. But it was going to take some time.
Eisner adapted well to his new home in Florida, settling into a routine busy enough to rival any work period of his career. He complained to friends that he had too many ideas and not enough time to pursue them. Rather than tie up a year or a year and a half to create a lengthy graphic novel of the scope of A Life Force, he decided to develop smaller projects addressing some of his philosophical musings—books that would take much less time—and he would stay on this path for the better part of the next decade. His next book, The Building, was one such project.
While living in the orbit of New York, Eisner had taken the changes in the urban landscape for granted. Stores and restaurants came and went, businesses failed and new ones started up. After moving to Florida, Eisner saw New York as a kind of expatriate, revisiting the scenes of an earlier life; and in revisiting those scenes, he couldn’t avoid noticing that the structures of the city, like living organisms, had a kind of life expectancy.
“I became obsessed by the fact that the buildings in New York City that I grew up with were being torn down,” he said. “Every time I came back to the city, another building was missing, and a new glass building was there instead. At first I was outraged and said that this was terrible, but then I asked myself: why? What happened? Can it be that when a building is torn down that nothing is left?”
Like A Contract with God, The Building was a grouping of four stories connected by location, in this case a Manhattan building modeled after the Flatiron Building on Twenty-third Street. And like New York: The Big City, the new book continued Eisner’s obsession with how human drama is played out in plain view, unnoticed by the public. Once again, the four stories’ main characters were dreamers whose lives are altered—and ultimately destroyed—by their pursuit of those dreams. Monroe Mensh is a man who keeps to himself and minds his own business until one day, when an innocent child is caught in the crossfire of a shooting in front of the building. Haunted by the fact that he might have saved the child if he’d pushed the boy to the sidewalk or even shielded him with his own body, Mensh devotes the rest of his life to making amends, working for a number of children’s organizations, never satisfied that he is making a difference. Gilda Greene, a beautiful woman, falls for an aspiring