Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [40]
In a shop boasting this kind of talent, holding egos in check and avoiding flare-ups and hard feelings could be a challenge. Eisner ran his shops the way Walt Disney ran his animation studio: even though you employed talents with disparate styles, you aimed for a studio look, a sense of singular vision.
“Everything had his name; he was the brand,” noted David Hajdu, author of The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. “He ran this shop on the production model. He ran this little art-making factory—it was a factory, but what it made was art, and it was important to Will that the product be art. The best way to really understand Will is to apply the matrix of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, because Will was to comics what Duke Ellington was to jazz. Will has created in this factory a laboratory and a hot house that gave opportunities for people not only to work, but to achieve a kind of greatness in a place where greatness mattered, where they would be rewarded for being great. This was largely in part to make money and to gratify Will’s ego, which was insatiable. You could not have enough talent in that room. They could not do enough great work on a high enough level to satisfy him. That stimulated people. They’re playing off each other, they’re learning from each other. He’s empowering individuals who might not have been empowered in other ways, not just to do Will Eisner work but to contribute in a creative way, and to bring their own styles and voices and sensibilities to work, to serve this larger whole. This kind of system is a complicated way of making art. The standard perception of the creative process is that art is the expression of an individual communing with the Muses. Will represented something a lot more complicated: a kind of a collaborative, a communal way of making art, the coming together of art and commerce in a way that doesn’t negate the value of either one, or doesn’t corrupt either one.”
Eisner took special pride in his ability to write as well as illustrate his comics stories. (© Will Eisner Studios, Inc., courtesy of Denis Kitchen)
Eisner was actively involved in all aspects of the art being produced in his studio. He’d wander up and down the aisles, glancing at pages over the artists’ shoulders, offering advice that he hoped was more coaching than criticism. “Since the comments were not personal, no one registered annoyance over a suggested change,” he explained. Eisner liked to believe that the easygoing yet professional work setting could be attributed to a young, talented staff “open to criticism, unafraid of competition, and in a work environment that respected them.”
Yes, Eisner liked to believe that, but it wasn’t the whole story. On a day-to-day basis, his staff did respect him as a boss, and they worked well together as a team. There was a sense of camaraderie that extended after hours, when some of the guys would get together and wind down at a bar or restaurant. But Eisner’s managerial acumen wasn’t infallible. There were times, as there are in any shop setting, when members squabbled among themselves, complained about the long hours and low pay, or mumbled under their breath about Eisner’s demands. It was no secret that Chuck Mazoujian and Lou Fine had their sights set on leaving comics and going into commercial illustration, or that Chuck Cuidera, whom Eisner regarded as a shop leader, actually disliked Eisner intensely, or that some of the artists would happily take their talents elsewhere if someone offered them a better deal.
Busy Arnold, of all people, tried to entice Bob Powell and Lou Fine into leaving Eisner and coming