Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [141]
Fourteen artists, including Eisner, donated plates for the portfolio, which was issued in a signed, numbered edition of 250 and in an unsigned edition of 1,250. The effort wound up raising more than $20,000, which turned out to be urgently needed when Correa was convicted in a lower court and funds were needed to hire a First Amendment attorney for the appeal. Correa was eventually exonerated, and with the money left over from the fund-raising, Kitchen founded the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, for which he would serve as president from 1986 to 2004.
Comic book creators’ legal rights had improved since the beginning of Eisner’s career, although at a painfully slow pace—and only then as the result of the efforts of a very few. Artists had fought for ownership of the characters they created, for copyright of the stories they wrote, for the return of their artwork after its publication, and for protection against censors who would impose their will on the creative process.
Neal Adams, one of the most highly regarded artists in comics, knew of these struggles. He’d leveraged his standing in the industry to advocate for the rights of others with less influence. He could recall a time when, as a young graduate from the School of Industrial Arts, he’d wanted to go into comics but had been advised that comic books were on the way out, that he should find another way to apply his considerable skills in the job market. He wasn’t one to surrender easily. He created shorts for Archie Comics, contributed to other titles, kicked around in advertising, earned his chops on the Ben Casey newspaper comic strip, and finally settled in at DC, where he became the company’s star artist by virtue of his cover art and, later, his groundbreaking team-up with writer Dennis O’Neil. He’d reluctantly gone along with some of the industry’s long-standing business practices until one day, while working for DC, he saw one of the company’s employees cutting up original art.
Eisner enjoyed appearing at comics conventions and sitting on panel discussions, where he was able to promote his lifelong agenda of seeing comics realized as entertainment for adults. (Courtesy of Denis Kitchen)
“I got up hypnotically and walked toward him,” Adams remembered. “He was slicing original art into three pieces. I stopped him. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘I’m cutting up the art and throwing it away.’ I said, ‘Hold on a second. Please stop. I really don’t know exactly how to say this, but you really shouldn’t be cutting up that artwork.’ He said, ‘Yeah, yeah. I’m the low man on the totem pole. I get the crap jobs. Every three months, we pull the art out of the cabinets and chop it up and throw it away.’ Once I got a hold of my soul, which had shriveled to the size of a peanut, I said, ‘Look, I don’t want you to cut up any of these pages anymore. I’m not kidding. I have to go talk to some people, but while I’m talking to them, I don’t want any of these pages cut up.’”
Adams’s journey was only beginning. After leaving the befuddled employee wondering why discarded art mattered to anyone, Adams visited his friend and DC art director, Carmine Infantino. Adams hoped that Infantino, an outstanding artist himself, would be sympathetic to his appeal. Infantino agreed in principle that the art shouldn’t be destroyed and that it belonged to the artists and not