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if he was as cheeky as some of the people he met, request a personalized drawing. He knew nothing about the highly acclaimed author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys, other than the fact that he was another writer. Nor was he aware of Chabon’s deep love for comics. Chabon’s grandfather had been a typographer for a company that printed comic books, and he’d brought them home by the bagful for his son, Michael’s father, to enjoy. Chabon had inherited his father’s interest in superhero comics. He had read Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes when he was an eleven-year-old kid, and he’d managed to get his hands on an original April 17, 1949, Spirit insert from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which, he told Eisner in his letter requesting an interview, was one of his “proudest possessions.”

Chabon the novelist was interested in authenticity. As he noted in his letter, he could have written almost anything about the early days of comics and passed it off to the casual reader, but it would have seemed false to anyone who, like Eisner, had been around during the Golden Age. He had all kinds of information about New York City during that period, but nothing about the artists themselves. “I want to understand the marketing and production side of the business in those days,” he told Eisner. “I want to know where you all lived, what you ate, if you took the subway, what music you listened to, etc. Sure, I could make all that up, but I think my book, for all its eventual flights of fancy, will be great only insofar as it is rooted in the way things really were.”

Eisner consented to giving Chabon an hour of his time when he and Ann were attending the 1995 WonderCon in Oakland. In a relatively brief period of time, Chabon questioned Eisner about all aspects of comics, including the way they were when comic books were still in their infancy. As Chabon recalled:

I interviewed Will Eisner when I’d written very little of the book. About 60 pages or so was written. I went up to WonderCon and interviewed him. He gave me an hour of his time, in the middle of a very busy day full of things he had scheduled for him. And actually, his wife sat down with us, too. I just got them trying to reminisce about their life in the late ’30s, early 1940s. And it was great talking to him because he was not only an artist and writer of the period, but he was a businessman, too … I think that’s one of the unique things about Eisner [as a comics creator], is that he actually ran businesses, and yet at the same time he was also an artist and a writer.

Chabon’s Josef Kavalier and Sammy Klayman were a combination of the author’s imagination and a composite of the characteristics of the artists he interviewed—comics creators such as Eisner, Stan Lee, and Gil Kane. Reviewers and comic book fans detected Joe Kavalier to be particularly similar to Eisner, but Chabon denied modeling his characters after any one artist. He did admit that Kavalier’s faith in the potential for comics came directly from his conversation with Eisner.

“I gave him Eisner’s rather surprising and unshakable faith in the medium of comic books,” Chabon said. “That was rare at the time. In fact, I think Eisner was unique in feeling from the start that comic books were not necessarily this despised, bastard, crappy, low-brow kind of art form, and that there was a potential for real art. And he saw that from the very beginning, which was very unusual, and I took that quality and gave it to Joe Kavalier. I think that was the only direct borrowing I really did.”

After winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, his novel set in the early days of comics, Michael Chabon began The Escapist, a comic book based on his fictional characters’ creations. Eisner’s contribution to it was his last work. (© Will Eisner Studios, Inc., courtesy of Denis Kitchen)

Eisner’s happiness for Chabon when he won the Pulitzer Prize contrasted strongly with his feelings of nine years earlier, when Art Spiegelman won a special Pulitzer Prize for Maus. Eisner deeply and openly