Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [173]
It was an opinion he would never receive. On August 27, six days after Eisner sent the letter off to his longtime editor, Dave Schreiner lost a lengthy battle with cancer, less than three months shy of his fifty-seventh birthday. His health had been in decline for several years, but Eisner had hoped that he would somehow beat this latest setback. He wept when he heard the news.
While Eisner worked on The Plot, Judith Hansen worked on brokering a deal that would place Eisner’s other graphic novels with the company. This, too, was extremely important to Eisner: He’d had no qualms about the way DC had re-issued his books, but DC was a comics publisher and Eisner was almost desperate to be published by a respected generalist house. After a meeting at DC in Paul Levitz’s office with Levitz, Eisner, Hansen, Denis Kitchen, and DC attorney, Jay Kogan, Hansen and Kogan had extensive negotiations over the reversion of copyrights to all of Eisner’s graphic novels except Last Day in Vietnam and Fagin the Jew. Part of the negotiations involved Hansen’s proposal of combining the various individual works into hardcover editions and publishing the individual titles in trade paperback format. Hansen had read a French edition of Eisner’s work that combined several of his graphic novels into one large volume, and she reasoned that this would be an interesting approach in the United States—presenting anthologies of the graphic novels with related stories or themes collected into attractive hardcover volumes. Hansen discussed this with Eisner and suggested that hardcover anthologies of the graphic novels, followed by trade paperback publication of the individual works, would be a way to keep the works in print, present them in a fresh way, and still allow for publication of each individual title.* Eisner was thrilled. With any luck, his books might finally escape the comics ghetto and find their way to the shelves of serious literature.
“Will’s quest in all of this,” said Paul Levitz, “was for the respectability of the medium, not just for himself, but with himself as sort of a Moses: ‘Can I please at least get into the Promised Land?’ This was one of the debates that I had with Will that led to his doing the books [with Norton]. We were half-equipped, and the Nortons of the world were half-equipped: we knew how to physically make a book and reach the core audience; Norton knew how to reach the libraries and how to publicize it in a different environment. I was highly confident that we would reach that point in the next couple of years, but I remember Will sitting there and saying, ‘I’m not sure I’ve got a couple of years.’ That was the irresistible argument for his taking that body of work and going to Norton, and our freeing the backlist for him. We try not to give stuff up, but Will had a unique role in the history of all of it, and he was a total gentleman to do business with, and as long as we were getting something that we could look ourselves in the mirror and say, ‘All right, we got a fair value in the deal,’ we had to let him go.”
Norton agreed to reissue Eisner’s graphic novels in volumes designed to look more like traditional trade paperbacks as opposed to the old comic book look. With any luck, Eisner thought, his books might finally escape the comics ghetto and find their way to the shelves of serious literature.
He worked on The Plot throughout 2004, assembling the book like a scholarly work of history. He annotated the book, wrote a lengthy introduction giving the history of his involvement in its creation, enlisted Chris Couch’s help on a bibliography, and even put together an index. Meanwhile, Robert Weil contacted Umberto Eco, an internationally acclaimed novelist and comic book fan, to write a preface for The Plot.