Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [189]
235 “I said”: Interview with Dennis O’Neil.
237 “The Spirit was”: Andrew D. Arnold, “The Graphic Novel Silver Anniversary,” Time, November 14, 2003.
237 “This represents an example”: Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art, p. 114.
237 “That was his art”: Interview with Dennis O’Neil.
238 “a turning point” and “From then on”: Weiner, Faster Than a Speeding Bullet, p. xi.
239 “When I began”: “V.A. Club: Art Spiegelman,” The Onion, December 29, 2004.
240 “The superhero largely”: Arie Kaplan, “Looking Back,” Comics Journal #267.
241 “I wanted to write”: Interview with Neil Gaiman.
242 “I became obsessed”: Henrik Andreassen, “Timeless Insights: An Interview with Will Eisner,” Seriejournalen #19 (spring 1995); reprinted in Comic-Con International, 2005.
243 “thought provoking” and “You’ve stressed”: Letter from Dave Schreiner to Will Eisner, November 20, 1986.
243 “somehow absorb[s] the radiation”: Will Eisner, introduction to The Building (Princeton, WI: Kitchen Sink Press), p. 4.
244 Eisner/Groth feud: Gary Groth, “Will Eisner: Chairman of the Board,” Comics Journal #267; interviews with Ann Eisner and Denis Kitchen.
244 “frivolous and tepid”: Groth, “Chairman of the Board.”
244 “The review was harsh”: Ibid.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: WINNERS AND LOSERS
246 Epigraph: Mike Jozic, “Will Eisner: The Godfather of Comics,” Meanwhile (online), interview conducted March 7, 2000.
246 “it was also”: Denis Kitchen, “Origins of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund,” unpublished manuscript.
248 “I got up”: Interview with Neal Adams. All other citations in this passage are from this source.
248 Siegel and Shuster: Jones, Men of Tomorrow, pp. 319–323; The Comic Book Makers, pp. 108–109; interviews with Neal Adams and Jerry Robinson.
250 “The first Superman movie”: Interview with Jerry Robinson. All other direct quotations in this passage are from this source.
252 “This matter has gone”: Will Eisner, “An Open Letter to Marvel Comics,” Comics Journal #110.
252 Jack Kirby’s legal struggles: Ro, Tales to Astonish, pp. 217–241; interview with Mark Evanier.
253 “A whole new generation”: Eisner, “Open Letter to Marvel.”
254 “I asked him”: Tom Heintjes, “Stage Settings: The beginning of the end,” The Spirit #84 (CB).
255 “I will be interested”: Dana Jennings, “Will Eisner in France,” Comics Journal #89.
256 “It made my toes curl”: Interview with Denis Kitchen.
256 “They have about”: Letter from Will Eisner to Denis Kitchen, June 19, 1986.
256 Spirit movie: In 2008, a theatrical motion picture directed by Frank Miller was released. Although stylish, visually interesting, and filled with homages to Eisner and inside jokes about comics history, it was an unqualified critical and box office disaster. The difficulties in bringing the Spirit to the big screen, Eisner hinted in an interview with Tom Heintjes seventeen years earlier, might have stemmed more from the character’s unique makeup than from others’ efforts to bring him to the screen: “There’s always been a great disparity between what I felt made The Spirit work and what other people thought, with a couple of exceptions like Jules Feiffer, who was able to understand my approach almost intuitively … We’ve talked about many recent stories where the writers—and the artists, too—were not able to get inside the head of the characters and write stories that seemed plausible, given the characters’ personalities. That same disparity also existed when people outside comics tried to handle The Spirit” (Heintjes, “The Beginning of the End”).
256 Miller, in an interview for this book, though clearly in disagreement with the movie’s harshest critics about The Spirit’s merits, seemed to agree with Eisner that the many complexities of the Spirit’s character, as well as Eisner’s personal investment in the character, made the Spirit difficult to translate to the screen. “He lived through The Spirit when he did it,” Miller said. “One of the challenges of adapting his work was trying to capture all those different aspects,