Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [169]
Eisner probably knew that his reputation would carry the day. He had spent a lifetime carefully cultivating an image that, with only a rare exception, was accepted industrywide—the image of an extremely talented artist who managed to stay congenial, generous, and highly professional despite the demands placed on him by a very competitive business—and he was as skillful as anyone in dealing with the press and seeing that the focus of the interviews remained on his artistic, rather than private, life. Not that he had much to hide, in any event: his life was devoted to and defined by his work, and away from the office he lived a quiet existence. He liked to travel, especially when he and Ann could attend conventions overseas, and he enjoyed the stream of visitors, including other comics artists, that he and Ann received in Florida. But in the end, he was still a child of the Depression, committed to working as if his livelihood might someday be yanked away from him.
All this was brought into sharp focus when he heard from two young men with a compelling new project.
Andrew Cooke was a documentary filmmaker with television credits under his belt. His brother, Jon, edited and designed Comic Book Artist, one of the leading magazines covering all aspects of the comic book industry. Neither had much money to finance the project, but both wanted to team up and make a full-length documentary on the life and work of Will Eisner.
By the end of his life, Eisner had become an iconic figure in comics, instantly recognizable at conventions, popular as a speaker, and still in demand as an artist. (Courtesy of Denis Kitchen)
The project started modestly in 2002 and snowballed—or snowballed as much as their limited budget would allow. Jon had been watching American Masters, the PBS documentary television series, and he wondered why there hadn’t been a segment devoted to a comic book artist or, more specifically, to Will Eisner. The next morning, he called his brother and suggested that they work on such a documentary. Andy, a comic book aficionado in his youth, liked the idea. Jon knew Eisner from past dealings with the magazine, and when he approached Eisner with his proposed project, Eisner responded enthusiastically.
“He was immediately very agreeable to it,” Jon remembered, “but he did have some caveats. We had to contact Tom Powers, who had started a documentary that had been put on hold. Will wanted everything aboveboard, and he wanted everything on paper. It was the first time that I worked in a business deal with Will, and it was a wonderful introduction to working with him in a business concern. Comic book people are notoriously bad businessmen, but he was quite the exception. He had some very practical ideas, and he was looking out for us, as well as for himself.”
Even though he had abandoned his plans to make a documentary, Powers turned out to be an important contributor to the Cooke brothers’ project. Powers had shot a lot of interview footage—including footage of Eisner in his studio—that wound up in the Cookes’ documentary.
“He was incredibly gracious,” Andy Cooke noted. “He had interviewed Kurt Vonnegut and Gil Kane; he’d shot an interview with Ann, and a couple of interviews with Will. There was some really great stuff.”
Eisner, of course, had been dealing with the media for decades. He knew of the high mortality rate of proposed movies and documentaries, of the great ideas that never saw the light of day through lack of time, money, or lost interest. A Brazilian documentary, Will Eisner: Profession: Cartoonist, produced and directed by Marisa Furtado de Oliveira and Paulo Serran, had been issued in 1999. He