Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [154]
To those who knew them, Will and Ann Eisner were a model couple, as happy together late in life as they were when they initially met. (Courtesy of Denis Kitchen)
His international fame only added to his sense of accomplishment. His books had been translated into more than a dozen languages and had appeared in Europe, South America, and Asia, published by prestigious houses willing to give him the kind of exposure and circulation that American comics artists would have envied in their own country. He was invited to global comics conventions, where he was greeted as an icon. In 1996, he designed a special mural from his “Gerhard Shnobble” story for the side of a building in Copenhagen, and The Spirit had even appeared on the Berlin Wall before it was brought down.
Still, the acclaim wasn’t enough. He was approaching his career goals, but he still felt confined in a comics ghetto. His awards were industry awards; his books were still limited to the comics section of bookstores, next to the superhero books and away from general interest or literary fiction shelves. Art Spiegelman had won a Pulitzer Prize for Maus, and newspapers were now devoting at least token space to reviewing higher-profile graphic novels, and while these were important steps forward, Eisner was growing impatient.
The key, he felt, was survival—waiting for the world to finally put the final pieces in place and his living long enough to see it happen.
New, unexpected projects popped up out of nowhere. One, originating from a Florida public television channel in the mid-1990s, combined Eisner’s love of adapting classic literature to sequential art with his continuing interest in using comics as a teaching tool. The Florida television station had come up with the idea of producing a series of what could best be described as electronic comic books, in which there would be very little animation other than dialogue balloons that would be read by young viewers. Eisner’s job was to supply the artwork, which was similar to storyboards used in movies.
“I developed what I called a reading experience on television,” he explained. “I took the classics and reduced them to a little half-hour show in which there was no animation in the art, but the balloons were animated, so the language would pop in as the characters spoke it, and that would force the reader to read it. Well, it never went anywhere. They couldn’t get enough funding to pursue it, and I was left with a bunch of stories.”
The stories, in the form of pencil dummies, were filed away but not forgotten. Eisner, who never threw away a scrap that might eventually be recycled or worked into something, talked about the ill-fated television project with his agents and publishers overseas, and to his surprise, he learned that libraries were interested in stocking these comics as children’s books. By then, Eisner had moved on to other graphic novel projects, but he found a way to satisfy the demand for these children’s books without compromising his work on adult material. He worked on the adaptations after he’d completed one of his graphic novels, using them as sort of a cool-down exercise. “After I finish a heavy book,” he explained, “I find that doing something very light is a great antidote.”
Self-portrait from the unpublished Count of Monte Cristo. Eisner hoped to use comics to adapt the classics for young educational television viewers, but a lack of funding killed the project. (© Will Eisner Studios, Inc., courtesy of Denis Kitchen)
Unpublished panel from The Count of Monte Cristo. (© Will Eisner Studios, Inc., courtesy of Denis Kitchen)
Eisner enjoyed the break. Aside from adapting some of the stories he’d enjoyed as a boy, he was able to put his own spin on some of the classics, such as in The Last Knight, his adaptation of Don Quixote, where he included a scene in which Don Quixote meets Miguel de Cervantes, his creator. Publication of the books was spaced over a period of years, in Europe and Brazil and, eventually,