Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [175]
Weil was so excited about the prospects of seeing Eisner back at work that he immediately e-mailed Denis Kitchen with a brief account of their earlier conversations.
Will be sending you by overnight tomorrow my edited copy of Will’s gorgeous Contract. When I spoke to Will on the phone at the hospital today, he said he would be delighted that I send you my editorial parts now. From his strong baritone voice and demeanor today, it sounds as if he’s eager to plunge back to his work.
Ann hung around the hospital, as she had on every previous day of her husband’s stay, until both she and her husband needed to get some rest.
“It was about ten o’clock that night,” Ann recalled. “I said, ‘Good night, honey. I’ll be back at eight.’ And two hours later, I got a call. He was dead.”
Eisner had passed away in his sleep.
* * *
Obituaries and tributes poured in. The New York Times, in a half-page notice that included the high points in his career, noted the value of Eisner’s innovative writing, from his work on The Spirit through P*S magazine and his graphic novels. “His seriousness,” the Times writer stated, specifically citing A Contract with God, “helped bring mainstream attention to works like Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus’ and Marjane Satrapi’s ‘Persepolis.’”
Following private family funeral services, Will Eisner was buried near his daughter, Alice, in the family plot in the Mount Pleasant Cemetery near White Plains, New York. A plain headstone lists his first name as “Will,” marking the resting place of a man who, in death, would be as unassuming as he was in life. A short time after the private services, a public memorial service was held in Manhattan, where, in a dignified yet casual setting, fanboys mingled with some of the comic book community’s most influential contributors, all celebrating a life that somehow seemed too brief, despite Eisner’s almost eighty-eight years on earth. Such comics magazines as Comic Book Artist, Comics Journal, and Alter Ego published issues devoted to remembrances of Eisner’s life, all agreeing that Eisner’s considerable influence would continue to be felt for many years to come. The 2005 San Diego Comic-Con held panel discussions about the man and his work.
In the years immediately following his death, Eisner was never far removed from the public light. The annual awards bearing his name continued to be given to significant contributors to the comics medium. Bob Andelman’s biography, Will Eisner: A Spirited Life, with an introduction by Michael Chabon and an appreciation by Neal Adams, was published within months of Eisner’s death, the first of what promised to be a line of biographies and studies of the artist’s life. Andrew D. Cooke and Jon B. Cooke’s highly anticipated documentary, Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist, was released in 2007. The Spirit, a theatrical motion picture directed by Frank Miller, hit theaters at Christmastime in 2008.
More significant, Eisner’s own work continued to be published. In an irony that Eisner would have appreciated, his final Spirit adventure, the last work he’d delivered before entering the hospital, was published in Michael Chabon’s comic book series, The Escapist. Eisner had been feeling poorly while working on the story, but he was determined to drop it in the mail before visiting a doctor.
The Plot, which might have signaled a new direction for Eisner, had he’d lived to do more work, was published to generally favorable reviews. “His final book combines literary biography and criticism into an activist work striking a blow against anti-Semitism,” wrote Time’s Andrew D. Arnold. “Though not without flaws, The Plot carries through Eisner’s ambitious legacy to the end.”
Jonathan Dorfman, in a review for the Boston Globe, praised The Plot’s economy in words and pictures. “It is a testament to Eisner, and his skill in the genre, that he packs so much historical narrative into so few pages. ‘The Plot’ tells the story of ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ with a wallop, and makes you writhe in disbelief at how this rubbish