Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [4]
Eisner would never forgive or forget it.
One thing Billy Eisner’s parents could agree on was pulp fiction. The pulp magazines, they felt, were trash—cheap entertainment aimed at lower-class working people who couldn’t read more challenging literature. Billy read everything he could get his hands on, from Chekhov to Chandler, and he wasn’t discriminating about where his reading material came from. One of the tenants in his building read Black Mask Detective magazine, and he would slip Billy the latest issue as soon as he was finished with it. The young Eisner would read it on the sly, in his room with the door closed, and he hid it from his parents’ view, much the way teenagers would stash their girlie magazines several decades later. Pulp characters such as the Phantom and the Shadow not only kept him turning the pages, they had a tremendous influence on his creation of the Spirit, his best-known comic book character.
Billy’s parents were at least partially correct in their assessment of the pulps: the magazines were cheap entertainment. They were printed on wood pulp paper, cost a dime each at a time when magazines printed on slick paper were running a quarter, and had a way of falling apart almost as soon as they were read. Most ran about 128 pages and were genre based. There were detective pulps, science fiction and fantasy pulps, horror pulps, romance pulps, men’s adventure pulps—all sparsely illustrated, sensational, and filled with as many short stories as they could squeeze into an issue. Some serialized novels assured a continuing readership—assuming, of course, that the novels had any merit. The more popular ones sold in excess of a million copies per issue.
Billy Eisner loved the short story form. They didn’t take long to read, were filled with action and suspense, and often had surprise endings that Eisner would favor later when he was writing his own comics. “From those pulps, I learned how to write short story material,” he’d say. “I learned how to compress and structure a story. To this day, I choose the ending and write from the beginning to the end.”
The budding artist in him also appreciated the pulps’ cover artwork. Lurid, full-color paintings—done by some of the best illustrators in the business and rivaling the best B-movie posters, depicting damsels in distress barely contained in ripped dresses or handsome heroes, muscles bursting out of their shirts—all but leapt out at you from the newsstand racks. Pulp magazines paid more for the art, which sold the magazine, than they paid for their stories, and competition for these jobs was fierce. For a young, talented artist with no hope of breaking into slick magazine illustration, these covers promised a future.
Billy absorbed all this—and more. On those rare occasions when he had loose change in his pockets, he’d head to the movie theaters, where, like most boys his age, he reveled in the exploits of the heroes of the day. But for Billy Eisner, like other comic book artists of the future, movies were more than just entertainment: they served as informal templates for the medium, offering an education about ways to structure and pace narratives, develop character, and stage action sequences; equally important, they provided invaluable tutorials on how to use camera angles to heighten suspense and create mood—skills that would eventually distinguish Will Eisner as a leader in the field.
“I grew up on the movies—that was my thing, that’s what I lived on,” Eisner told comics journalist John Benson, speaking of an interest that began in his boyhood, when he watched the popular action feature of the day, and extended