Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [152]
Such was the case in early 1991, when he read a newspaper account about a woman named Carolyn Lamboly, a disabled, destitute woman who, in the throes of loneliness and depression, had hanged herself with a light cord a few days before Christmas 1990. Her body lay for two months in a funeral home, and when no one stepped forward to claim her, she was buried in an unmarked grave in Dade County’s Memorial Park. As sad as the story was, it got worse. The woman had spent a year trying to get help from government and community services, but she had become lost in the system, just another name on an endless list of faceless, “invisible” people you see every day but never notice. On January 3, 1991, just days after her suicide, she was formally approved for housing and medical coverage.
Angered by the story, Eisner set out to work on three comic book–length stories about people who, like Carolyn Lamboly, went about their lives unnoticed. Published by Kitchen Sink Press as three individual comic books, the stories, entitled “Sanctum,” “The Power,” and “Mortal Combat,” were eventually bundled into a single book and published as Invisible People.
“Sanctum,” the story most closely modeled after Lamboly, is a tale about Pincus Pleatnik, a bland, middle-aged bachelor who works as a clothes presser, keeps to himself, and tries to blend into the scenery, believing that anonymity “is a major skill in the art of urban survival.” His life takes an irreversible turn one day when he opens the newspaper and sees his name listed on the obituaries page. He suddenly has to prove—to his boss, his landlord, the newspaperwoman reporting his death, and the police—that he’s alive. It doesn’t go well. After a series of misadventures bordering on the absurd, he winds up homeless and jobless and ultimately loses his life as a result of his quest to prove that he’s not dead. In a bitter postscript to the story, the person who wrote his obituary, now retiring and being honored at a party thrown by her employer, receives an award and a $5,000 savings bond for the accuracy of her reporting.
Pincus Pleatnik, Eisner explained in an introductory note to the story, was a composite of the people he’d seen on the street during his youth. Like most other New Yorkers, he passed by without paying them a shred of attention.
“I grew up accepting this as a normal phenomenon of metropolitan life,” he wrote. “Only years later did I realize how pervasive was this brutal reality and how people often accept, even welcome, invisibility as a way to deal with urban danger.”
If “Sanctum” dealt with the worst possible results of predictable invisibility, “The Power” showed how even great promise might slip into such a state. There’s no question that Morris, the main character in this story, is special. He discovers early in his life that he has the power to heal humans and animals, and rather than manipulate that power for fame and wealth, he decides to use it for the greater good. He wanders aimlessly from job to job, hoping to make a difference, only to slip into obscurity. When a scam artist from a circus finds him, she announces that he is the father of her young boy, who is hobbled by a birth defect and needs someone to heal him so he can walk. Morris hopes to be a good father, while the boy and woman are interested in him only for his powers. But Morris is unable to heal the child, and the woman and child abandon him in his final obliteration.
The third story, “Mortal Combat,