Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [159]
DC Comics soon learned what Denis Kitchen had known at Kitchen Sink Press: Will Eisner was so prolific that it was impossible to publish his books as quickly as he was writing them. He had a backlog of material that he wanted to publish, including a new collection of graphic stories based on what he observed during his travels for P*S magazine. He’d worked on the book during the last days of Kitchen Sink Press, even though he didn’t have a market for it, but when he insisted that this new book be published in time for the upcoming San Diego Comic-Con, DC, unenthusiastic about the book to begin with, declined, stating they couldn’t meet Eisner’s publishing timetable.
The book, Last Day in Vietnam, landed with Dark Horse Comics, an Oregon-based company founded in 1986 and specializing in graphic novels and comic books for mature readers as well as in serious studies of their creators and comics history.
Diana Schutz, an editor at Dark Horse, was assigned the task of preparing Last Day in Vietnam under the tightest production schedule imaginable. The book landed on her desk in April, and with the San Diego convention looming only three months in the future, she had to accomplish the copyediting, design, story sequence, and photo work in one-third the production time to which she was accustomed. She’d never worked with Eisner before, and had no idea what to expect. On the business end, she had to solicit advance orders in a time-crunch that, by comics standards, was preposterous.
“Those orders guide your print numbers,” she explained. “It was April, and we were already soliciting for July. To solicit without any part of a book to send is crazy, impossible. But those were my marching orders.
“Will had already worked with Dave Schreiner on the various stories in the book. All the stories were done and the pages were drawn. The book was finished. That’s why Will wanted it out for San Diego. In his mind, all we really needed to do was publish the damn thing, and, in a sense, that was true. Will was perfectly amenable all the way through, never once was there any kind of tussling or arguing.”
Eisner believed that Last Day in Vietnam, with only limited use of dialogue balloons, marked a new approach that comics could take in the future. In these stories, the character is speaking directly to the reader, making the reader a participant in the story.
“It’s an innovation which I thought has been coming for some time,” Eisner explained in an interview that appeared when Last Day in Vietnam was published in 2000. “Anybody who has followed my work will probably know that I make a very major effort to make contact with the reader—almost directly. That’s one of the reasons I use rain and weather and so forth in many of my stories—it seems like it involves the reader more heavily, brings them more into the story being told.”
Eisner had attempted this type of narrative on one previous occasion, in a Spirit story in which a character, a sea captain, spoke directly to the reader. Eisner liked the approach, but he never followed up on it, partially because his frenetic work schedule prohibited his experimenting further and partially because this type of storytelling could be used only in very specific kinds of stories. “It only works on material where all the dialogue comes from one person,” he pointed out. “I don’t know how you could eliminate the use of balloons in other situations.”
The artwork for the stories was similarly inventive. During his visits to Korea and Vietnam, Eisner had drawn numerous sketches of what he saw. With this new book, he wanted his readers to feel as if they were looking through his sketchbook, seeing what he saw, reacting to events the way he had reacted to them decades earlier.
“I wanted to keep it as close to a kind of diary as I could,” he said of the approach. “As a matter