Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [163]
Visually, The Name of the Game might be the most theatrical of Eisner’s graphic novels. The characters’ gestures are exaggerated, as if the actors and actresses are playing to the cheap seats; there is nothing subtle about their movements. Some of the characters, such as Conrad’s drunken yet sensitive brother, Alex, seem gratuitous, but the major players are well-rounded and fully developed, owing mainly to the constant prodding of Dave Schreiner, who had little patience with the predictability of the characters as originally designed. Eisner always pushed for credibility, and Schreiner held him to it. When discussing Eva, Schreiner chided Eisner for creating what he felt was a stock character.
“You show that Conrad and Eva haven’t had sex before their marriage,” he wrote after seeing what Eisner hoped would be the final rough pencil draft. “I find this hard to believe after seeing Conrad trying to have sex with anything in a dress and being very aggressive about it … I think something is badly needed here. I don’t suggest that you delve into her childhood of abuse or something like that—avoid the pop psychology, please. But you have to show something about Eva that shows why sex is not an option with her. Good luck on this one, but I think you need to do it in order to convince the reader that this is a strong enough woman to keep Conrad at bay.”
Schreiner was even tougher on Eisner with Rosie. As written, she was rebellious but ultimately far too passive for Schreiner, who pushed Eisner to make her tougher. “If Aron cheats on her and beats her, the Rosie you have presented would walk. Or kill him,” he suggested. “I think you have to do something here.”
Eisner took these recommendations to heart and changed the characters, especially the women—an irony, given Eisner’s propensity for creating such intelligent, independent, and motivated female characters during his Spirit years. Perhaps Eisner held back in earlier drafts because he was modeling these characters after real people in his life. Perhaps he was in a rush to complete the book. Or perhaps he simply needed an editor’s input on how to strengthen his characters. Whatever his reasons, the strong women in The Name of the Game gave credibility to the upper hand they held with men of such wealth and position.
With the publication of The Name of the Game in 2001, Eisner finished his cycle of books about family on a high note. This was his strongest work since his 1991 autobiographical book, To the Heart of the Storm, but by the time it hit bookstores, Eisner was moving on.
*Later editions of the book carried the title, A Family Matter.
chapter sixteen
P O L E M I C S
Up until now, my books were essentially entertainment—or, perhaps, art, if you will. Now, I’m entering a whole new area, where I’m taking a stand on serious matters of injustice. I want to stimulate change—change the way people think. I’m standing on a soapbox.
When Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001, Eisner was as pleased as if he had won the award himself. Chabon had assigned some of Eisner’s characteristics to his Joe Kavalier character, and this novel about the early days of comics represented, in Eisner’s mind, yet another step forward in the quest for acceptance of comics as literature, not to mention one of the finest written accounts of the powerful connection between the Jewish immigrant experience and the establishment of the comic book.
When he’d first heard from Chabon in a 1995 letter, Eisner figured he had another fanboy on his hands—someone wanting to meet him, shake his hand, or,