Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [41]
Arnold’s thinking, Eisner concluded, stemmed from the fact that, aside from their partnership, Arnold had his own publishing company—one that Eisner & Iger had worked for—and now, with the dissolution of Eisner & Iger and the formation of a new Eisner company, they were competitors as publishers, even as they worked as collaborators on The Spirit and two other books.
This misunderstanding boiled over when Arnold tried to hire Powell.
“He offered Bob Powell an increase on what I was paying him for working on The Spirit section,” Eisner recalled. “Bob came to me and said, ‘I can make more with your partners.’ I called up Arnold and said, ‘You want a lawsuit?’ Arnold apologized, but Powell got very angry, and he said, ‘You ruined my career! You cut me off!’ I said, ‘Well, you want to quit me and go down the street and work for someone else … well, all right. But you’re not going to work for my partner while I’m around.’”
It was the kind of double standard that could set off grumbling around the studio. Eisner might have taken Powell from his earlier partnership with Iger, but he wasn’t going to let Arnold do the same.
Chuck Cuidera’s problems with Eisner ran much deeper—more than Eisner ever realized. Cuidera, who had graduated from the Pratt Institute with Bob Powell and had taken a job with Eisner at Powell’s urging, disliked Eisner from the beginning. “I didn’t like the way he handled people,” he said, admitting that he admired Eisner as a writer and artist but had great issues with him personally. “There was no way I was ever going to get along with him.”
Eisner wouldn’t have been the only name on Cuidera’s list. A man of emotional extremes, Cuidera could be fiercely combative or unbelievably loyal, generous with his praise or scathing with his criticism, and hyperbolic in stating his opinions. One of his problems with Eisner, he intimated, originated with Eisner’s refusal to allow Lou Fine to leave for Quality Comics, just as he had Powell. Cuidera was very close to Fine, and he seethed when he learned of Eisner’s actions. “I wanted to knock Eisner on his butt like you wouldn’t believe,” he said.
Cuidera was directly involved in the lengthiest, most storied feud of Eisner’s career, one that puts Eisner’s earlier fight for control over his creations in a new light. Early in his career, while working at Victor Fox’s shop and, eventually, Eisner’s Tudor City studio, Cuidera contributed extensively to two popular features, The Blue Beetle and Blackhawk. Cuidera believed that he’d created both of the long-running features, and he was infuriated later on when historians credited Eisner with creating Blackhawk—a claim Eisner didn’t publicly contest. Cuidera stewed over being denied that piece of comics history.
These kinds of disputes weren’t rare. The shop system, with the open exchange of ideas and the practice of having several people working on a single feature (often under one name, no matter who came up with the work’s ideas), invited such disagreements. As head of his studio and its main idea generator, Eisner would usually dream up a basic idea, do rough pencil sketches of the new feature’s main characters, discuss it with several artists in the shop, and, if he didn’t want to develop the feature himself, assign it to another artist. Cuidera did more work on Blackhawk than Eisner, and he felt cheated when he didn’t get the acknowledgment he felt he deserved for his contributions. As the years passed and Eisner’s fame grew, Cuidera became more insistent and louder about his claims that Eisner had stolen credit for Cuidera’s own creation.
Eisner refused to be pulled into the dispute. He remembered