Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [157]
Eisner was inspired to write the book as the result of his conversations with Ann, who told him of the travails of some of her acquaintances in the Florida retirement community. One old woman’s story especially infuriated him. Her husband had died, leaving her money, and her two grown children were constantly looking for ways to rob her of it. Eisner ruminated about their character, motivation, and actions and decided to take a reporter’s approach in telling his story: he would tell the story without serving up any kind of judgment or otherwise interfering with it. If it was successful, readers would react with the same kind of anger that he felt when he heard Ann’s accounts.
Family Matter tells the story of five siblings—two brothers and three sisters—as they gather for a birthday party for their wheelchair-bound father. None have any use for the old man, but all have secrets and ambitions that tie them to their father and reasons to demand a say in his future. The old man, unable to speak or walk, sits in a wheelchair in a room and listens in as his children argue over his fate in an adjacent room. As a story, Family Matter doesn’t approach the ambition and detail of The Name of the Game, the family saga that Eisner published three years later, and with only a couple of exceptions, the characters behave too predictably to be as memorable as some of Eisner’s characters in previous books and stories. Still, for its raw emotion, the book ranks high among Eisner’s graphic novels.
“It was pure, unadulterated anger,” observed Frank Miller, one of the novel’s admirers. “That was a side of Will that I just wanted to see more of, because I always felt that he stopped himself at the edge of something. He was a deeply angry man, like any man who’d lived through what he did would be.
“He and I actually argued over one letter in the title of Family Matter. I thought that it would have been a wonderful double entendre if it had been called Family Matters, and I felt that by making it Family Matter, he shortchanged what was really one of his most bitter and brilliant books.”
After nearly three decades of operating on a tight budget in an ever changing market, employing what, by industry standards, amounted to a skeleton crew working overtime to push out product, and reprinting the seminal work of such comics pioneers as Milton Caniff, Harvey Kurtzman, R. Crumb, Al Capp, and Will Eisner, Kitchen Sink Press finally went under in early 1999. It had been a slow, painful, ugly death.
Kitchen, quite naturally, was crushed.
“I didn’t know what to do,” he recalled of the period immediately following the demise of Kitchen Sink Press. “I was in a very deep funk—and possibly clinically depressed. I spent a lot of time just walking in the woods, sorting through stuff, not knowing what to do next.
“Will called me and said, ‘What are you going to do?’ I said, “I don’t know. I’m thinking.’ He said, ‘How would you like to be my agent?’ It had never crossed my mind. It is not something I would have suggested to him. He could have handled his own books, but he wanted to help me—he was being a friend—and he didn’t want to be distracted from the actual creation of books, he saw time slipping away and he wanted to take advantage of what was left.”
Actually, the agency proposal wasn’t entirely new. In 1997, two years before the demise of Kitchen Sink Press, Kitchen and Judith Hansen, a former deputy editor at KSP, had discussed the idea of forming an agency together, and had run the idea past Eisner. Hansen, an attorney with extensive background in both mainstream trade book publishing and comics publishing, including stints at Random House and Simon and Schuster, had known Eisner since 1994, and had started her own literary agency in Sydney, Australia.