Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [148]
Will Eisner himself presented the awards to each of the winners, and for many of them, the handshake from the comics legend was as big an honor as winning the award itself. Eisner enjoyed the attention, but even for someone half his age, standing onstage in one place for a couple of hours could be physically difficult. Eisner soldiered through the ceremonies, refusing to be seated, until one year he faced a situation that was in parts a tribute, a practical joke, and a means of getting him off his feet. The idea originated with comics artists Jeff Smith and Kurt Busiek, who were concerned about having Eisner stand throughout the ceremony. They contacted Jackie Estrada and outlined their plan.
With DC editor Julius Schwartz and Batman creator and high school friend Bob Kane. (Courtesy of Denis Kitchen)
“We’ve got to get some kind of throne,” they said.
One of the convention workers had connections with the San Diego Opera, and it was through the opera company that Estrada was able to borrow a throne upholstered in red velvet. The prop, everyone involved agreed, was perfect. Smith and Busiek hid the throne behind a curtain until after Eisner had been introduced and was onstage, and then they brought it out, to the laughter and applause of the awards ceremony attendees. Eisner, though slightly embarrassed, played along, taking a seat and posing for pictures until the hoopla had died down. Then he stood up—and stayed that way for the remainder of the ceremony.
J. Michael Straczynski, winner of an Eisner Award for Best Serialized Story for his work on Amazing Spider-Man in 2002, probably offered the best summation of the experience of receiving the award from Eisner when, after taking it and shaking Eisner’s hand, he held the award up in the air and said, “You know, you get the Emmy, you don’t get it from Emmy. You win the Oscar, you don’t get it from Oscar. How freakin’ cool is this?”
While organizing his office and files after his move to Florida, Eisner came across a small book’s worth of artwork originally intended for New York: The Big City. The pieces, like those in The Big City, were short takes—graphic essays, he called them—that hadn’t fit into the other book’s thematic structure, but the art was too good to be discarded. In looking over the work, Eisner decided to gather the pieces into three basic themes—Time, Space, and Smell—and release them as a small book.
Eisner never intended City People Notebook to measure up as a literary work against his ambitious graphic novels or even to New York: The Big City. It was more of a confection, a grouping of thirty-two pieces, some only a page or two in length, all dealing, like the vignettes in The Big City, with what Eisner called “the most influential and pervasive environmental phenomena” found in the daily life of New York City. The pieces, Eisner said, were very personal—the kinds of sketches he might have slipped into other graphic novels—and he included self-portraits in some of the art, depicting the artist as an observer.
Eisner’s decision to release the sketchy, disparate pieces was based largely on a writer’s ultimate nightmare: he was suffering through a prolonged period of writer’s block and couldn’t come up with a topic for a full-length graphic novel. Work on The Dreamer and The Building had drained him, and as he complained in a letter to Dave Schreiner, he was struggling to find the enthusiasm that fueled each new project.
“While it is true that I go through periods of ‘blockage’—generally after the completion of a work—it usually lasts only until I get ‘revved’ up for a new project,” he wrote. “What I did reveal to Denis