Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [139]
Their stories are played out through extensive flashbacks. They now exist as spirits who gather in front of the building, invisible to those on the sidewalks, forgotten, anchored to their pasts. The building is replaced by a steel-and-glass high-rise, leaving the spirits in a kind of limbo until an accident—a window washer’s safety belt breaks and he falls onto a sign overhanging the building’s entrance, where he dangles precariously while a horrified crowd watches below—gives them a purpose, perhaps even an opportunity for redemption. The book’s happy ending negates what might otherwise have been an overwhelmingly cynical set of stories.
When he first saw the rough pencils for the book—which Eisner was then calling City Ghosts—Dave Schreiner projected a lot of work ahead. He liked the premise, which he called “thought provoking,” but Eisner’s execution of it was sloppy and not credible. “You’ve stressed to me before that you want a strong editor, or at least strong opinions,” Schreiner reminded Eisner in a letter expressing his first reaction to the rough pencils of the book. “With that in mind, I have to say there are some things I feel are not right with ‘City Ghosts’ in its present configuration.”
This was not what Eisner wanted to hear. He had hoped for a quick turnaround on the book, and in a phone call responding to Schreiner’s letter, he told Denis Kitchen that he would consider Schreiner’s suggestions but added that he had already lettered half the book—a sure indication that he would listen to positive criticism but probably wouldn’t be making a lot of changes.
In an effort to keep his message—that the building, like all buildings in the city, “somehow absorb[s] the radiation from human interaction”—front and center, Eisner intentionally kept his allegorical stories simply told and illustrated, which only highlighted the book’s inadequacy in character and plot; prose writers would have struggled to get any of these stories published. The theme of the book was sound, but the stories seemed to be filled with stock characters behaving in predictable ways. The element of surprise, a staple in Eisner’s best work, was absent, as was the sense of play that made The Spirit stories so entertaining. Eisner could only hope that his readers would be emotionally attached enough to his stories to accept these shortcomings.
Gary Groth, editor of the Comics Journal, was not one of those readers. Groth, who was born in 1954, had not grown up reading The Spirit, and when he was finally introduced to Eisner’s work, he was not inclined to lump Eisner in with Carl Barks, Harvey Kurtzman, or Jack Kirby, his favorites of the classic comic book artists. Although he had no personal issues with Eisner, Groth wasn’t terribly fond of his book-length work, which struck Groth as “frivolous and tepid compared to the underground comics I was also devouring at the time.” Nor was he pleased by what seemed like the free pass Eisner was given by the critics and comic book historians. When Eisner’s books were reviewed—usually by fanzines, since newspapers still weren’t reviewing graphic novels on a regular basis—they were treated as if they were stone tablets issued from on high, and Eisner was treated as if he were the man destined to deliver comicdom to the Promised Land. He even seemed immune to the criticism, now becoming very public, of editors and publishers who treated their artists like slaves, holding on to their works’ copyrights and keeping their artwork long after