Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [160]
The art has a grainy, gritty look, as if the pictures had been hastily penciled into a notebook by someone in the field. To further achieve the effect of authenticity, Eisner included archival photographs from Vietnam between stories.
Eisner carried a sketchbook whenever he traveled, creating studies of people, buildings, and places. These previously unpublished sketches are from a notebook Eisner kept while visiting China. (© Will Eisner Studios, Inc., courtesy of Denis Kitchen)
The six stories in the volume were nonfiction “memories,” as Eisner labeled them on the book’s cover, based on events that Eisner witnessed in person. Only one—the title story—takes place amid actual fighting, but even so, they are heartbreaking, frightening, uplifting, ironic, and violent, with the kind of tension, drama, and boredom that GIs felt when they were safe on a base or on leave, knowing that combat was up ahead. One story, presented with no dialogue or narrative, offered one of the most violent scenes in the book, when a young soldier is seriously injured by a prostitute. Fear rumbles just beneath the GIs’ tough talk, and Eisner makes it very clear that the most dangerous soldiers are the ones itching for battle—the ones who will kill or be killed, contributing to statistics. Senseless death is at the core of the two stories eliciting the greatest emotional response from Eisner—and, presumably, the reader. In “A Dull Day in Korea,” the only story set outside Vietnam, a loudmouth GI, bragging about his hunting abilities back home in West Virginia, decides to display his marksmanship by shooting an innocent woman out gathering wood, only to be stopped by his commanding officer before he can kill her. “A Purple Heart for George” tells the story of a gay GI named George, who gets drunk every weekend and writes a note requesting dangerous combat duty; the weekly notes are intercepted and destroyed by friends working in the base commander’s office, until finally—and tragically—George gets his wish when no one is in the office to tear up his note.
“ ‘A Purple Heart for George,’” Eisner wrote in the book’s introduction, “left a residue of guilt in many of us. I don’t know about the primary actors in that event, which I witnessed, but for me it has never left my mind. I simply cannot forget it.”
Dark Horse published four other Eisner titles—Shop Talk, Eisner/Miller, a reprinting of Hawks of the Sea, and a coffee table book called Will Eisner Sketchbook—during Eisner’s brief but productive association with the company. Shop Talk, a gathering of the interviews that Eisner published in The Spirit Magazine and Will Eisner’s Quarterly, featured in-depth conversations with such comics icons as Milton Caniff, C. C. Beck, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, Gil Kane, Joe Simon, and Joe Kubert, speaking in an informal setting and talking about their work habits and contributions to comics. All had known Eisner for a long time prior to the conversations and felt comfortable about providing the kind of anecdotal detail that made the interviews a delight to read.
Eisner/Miller offered a different kind of interview. As originally planned, the book was to be the first of a series of book-length interviews with a younger generation of comic book and graphic novel creators, with such giants in the field as Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and maybe, with luck, the usually reclusive R. Crumb. But Eisner lived to see only one to fruition. Eisner/Miller, as published, was an informative, occasionally contentious discussion between two of the industry’s heavyweights, but getting to that point was more work than anyone had anticipated in 2000, when the book was planned. Miller was busy on a Dark Knight project and unavailable, and Eisner was impatient, unhappy about the delays. When the two finally got together