Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [36]
At the drawing board in his Tudor City studio. (Will Eisner Collection, the Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum)
The character anchoring the comic book took months to develop, mainly because Eisner set the bar so high when he mapped out his goals for the feature. In his main character, he was trying to accommodate two conflicting ideas: since he wanted to concentrate on story rather than character, his hero should be able to blend almost unnoticed into each week’s story line, yet at the same time, that central figure had to be strong enough to make readers return week after week. He wanted an entirely human character, a hero operating without superpowers or even a weapon, a detective fallible enough to make mistakes and take a licking as he worked on solving a case. He would live outside the law, as adventurers often do, but honor it enough to devote his life to maintaining justice and order.
“When I decided upon [the character], I worked from the inside out, you might say,” Eisner explained. “That is, I thought first of his personality—the kind of man he was to be, how he would look at problems, how he would feel about life, the sort of mind he would have. When that was worked out, I didn’t have to imagine him as a person. I began to see him. Handsome, obviously, and powerfully built, but not one of those impossibly big, thick-legged brutes. He was to be the kind of man a child could conceive of seeing on the street.”
The character’s name—Denny Colt—was easy to come up with. It was an easy name to remember, and it had an All-American sports hero ring to it. To give him a personality, Eisner returned to the characters he enjoyed in his boyhood reading and to Hollywood leading men. In Sherlock Holmes, for example, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had created just the type of character that Eisner had in mind.
“You read Sherlock Holmes stories for the stories,” he explained years later. “The stories endure, not the idea of a super-detective.”
Holmes, however, was a little too stodgy, a little too invincible in his powers of deduction and detective work, to be the only basis for Eisner’s new hero. He hoped to inject a healthy dose of humor into his feature, an element so clearly absent in the superhero comics that Eisner saw every month on the stands.
“I didn’t want him to be a conventional hero,” he would insist. “I wanted him to be like James Garner in Maverick, which came much later. I wanted [Denny Colt] to have the appearance of a character who was strong and capable and yet very vulnerable, and even a little clownish.”
Cary Grant, who was rising in popularity with such movies as Topper, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, and Only Angels Have Wings, seemed to be an ideal model for the combination of humor and drama that Eisner was seeking.
“I like using what I consider to be a Cary Grant type of humor, where the big, strong, masculine guy is clowning around,” he explained. “At the same time, he never lost a bit of his heroism. One of the wonderful things about doing [the book] is that I never had to say to myself, ‘Well, he really wouldn’t do this,’ because I know the only thing he wouldn’t do is take himself seriously.”
Eisner was pleased with the way his character was developing. Unfortunately, his partners were not. This was not the type of character they bargained for when they’d met for lunch. Denny Colt didn’t at all resemble the comic book heroes taking the country by storm. Where, for instance, was his costume?
Eisner promised to work on it, but he’d reached a dead end. He’d come up with costumed—or, at least, exotically dressed—characters for the supplement’s other features: Mr. Mystic, little more than a knockoff of Eisner’s earlier Yarko the Great, and Lady Luck, a blond female answer to Denny Colt. Lady Luck wore a cursory costume (featuring an oversize green hat), had no superpowers, and seemed to stumble onto her adventures as much by accident as by design. The character’s looks, Chuck Mazoujian would remember, were “patterned after [his] wife.”