Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [161]
“It didn’t go as smoothly as we would have expected,” Dark Horse founder and publisher Mike Richardson said of the interview sessions. “I think that both went in respecting each other, but when you have two people with egos and differing opinions about what they do, there might be a little bit of friction during the course of something like that.”
When retracing the weekend’s conversations, Miller shrugged off the tension as nothing outside of the ordinary whenever he and Eisner got together.
“It was mild compared to what we’d do privately,” he said. “There are probably people who thought we didn’t like each other, when in fact we loved each other. When I was working on the movie of The Spirit, I designed Commissioner Dolan after Will, and his conversations with the Spirit after the conversations that Will and I had. Very frequently, a conversation between Will and me would end with him saying, ‘I don’t know why I even talk to you anymore.’ I used that line pretty much every time Dolan and the Spirit talked.”
Both men enjoyed a good verbal tussle over comics and where they were headed, and while they did loosen up considerably during their discussions for Eisner/Miller, they still sparred as often as they agreed, making for an eye-opening, entertaining exchange. The finished book, lavishly illustrated with art from both and presented in a straight Q&A format, was published in 2005, just months after Eisner had passed away. It would stand as his ultimate “Shop Talk.”
Eisner wasn’t yet ready to abandon his obsession with family. He knew that in Ann’s family, he had enough material for a graphic novel that would be a kind of combination of the family saga presented in To the Heart of the Storm and the close-up family drama depicted in Family Matter. Ann’s family had a long, colorful history, bathed in the wealth acquired from banking and Wall Street, and Eisner was intrigued by the possibilities of exploring the dynamics of a family so unlike his own. He’d grown up in a world of tenements and survival; Ann’s relatives and immediate family were more concerned with social position.
Eisner had begun the new book, tentatively entitled A Good Marriage but quickly changed to The Name of the Game, in 1998, when Kitchen Sink Press was in its death throes; but without a publisher, he’d set it down until after he’d secured a contract with DC and had marketed Minor Miracles and Last Day in Vietnam. It was a good move. He’d worked on the book in fits and starts, wrestling with how much he should say about Ann’s family and how much he should fictionalize. The first draft was a mess, and he wasn’t sure if he should even continue. As always, he sent a rough pencil dummy to Dave Schreiner, with a cautionary note expressing some of his misgivings about the project. “I’ve been concerned about its ‘validity’ and whether it has enough value for me to undertake its finish,” he admitted.
Schreiner responded with a positive, detailed report proposing changes to characters and the plot. He liked the book, he told Eisner, but he agreed that there was a lot of work ahead. “I know this will lead to many revisions for you, if you go ahead with them,” he said.
That had been July 1998. More than two years and numerous drafts later, Eisner was still at it, adjusting the plot to satisfy Schreiner and Denis Kitchen, double-checking the book’s timeline, adding depth to characters—trying to make it work. Eisner had