Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [42]
Their public tangle lasted for nearly six decades after Blackhawk made its first appearance on the stands. Finally, in 1999, Eisner and Cuidera sat together on a panel conceived and hosted by comics writer and historian Mark Evanier at the San Diego Comic-Con. Evanier, well versed on the history of the feud, had hoped that the panel would settle the issue once and for all.
“It always struck me that Will’s wording, whenever he talked about it, was ambiguous,” Evanier explained. “He never said he did; he never said he didn’t. On the panel I asked him four different times who created Blackhawk, and I never got an answer. Will was not going to say the words Chuck created it, nor was he going to say the words I created it. He chose to keep it ambiguous, to protect his future options, which I thought was a very savvy thing to do.”
The dispute appeared to be settled when Cuidera, seated next to Eisner and apparently in a conciliatory mood, said, point-blank to those attending the panel session: “He’s the guy who started it all, the guy next to me. Believe me.”
Eisner, who might have been forgiven if he’d chosen to bypass the convention panel in the first place, was relieved. “After the panel, Will came up to me and thanked me for organizing it,” Evanier recalled. “He felt he had some unresolved problems with Chuck, and he was very happy to have dealt with them.
“There is no universally accepted definition of the word creator in comics, and there are arguable claims, especially in cases where guys were working in a shop arrangement. What I think happened here was Chuck made a massive contribution which you could argue was creation, and Will made a massive contribution that you could argue was creation. If Will was not willing to concede the word creator to Chuck, I wasn’t going to drag it out of him. I thought Will was very smart about the way he handled it. He wasn’t endorsing what Chuck did. He praised Chuck and talked about how great he was, and he gave Chuck his dignity, because Chuck was a celebrity at the convention because of his association with Will. I was happy with how it came out.”
Despite the outward appearance of a reconciliation, Cuidera remained bitter for the rest of his life. Two days before his death in 2001, in an Alter Ego magazine interview with comics historian Jim Amash, Cuidera was still taking the offensive, attacking Eisner and holding firm to his previous statements about his role in comics history.
“I created Blackhawk before I met Will Eisner,” he declared. “Eisner had nothing to do with creating Blackhawk. When Bob Powell got me to come over to Eisner, I had already started creating Blackhawk. I finished creating it when Will Eisner was down South hunting. With the second or third Blackhawk story, the feature took off and even outsold Batman.”
Blackhawk was but one of many new titles issued from Eisner’s shop. Doll Man, Uncle Sam, The Ray, Black Condor—in almost every case, Eisner came up with the idea, sketched out characters, wrote the first episode or two, and even did early covers. Tacked on to his duties on The Spirit, which required him to produce more than a page of new material per day, plan new episodes, and oversee the work on the weekly comic book’s other two stories, the workload drained him of his prodigious energy and pulled his creative mind in every imaginable direction. Producing a weekly sixteen-page comic book and a couple of monthly newsstand books might have seemed well within reach when an ambitious young Will Eisner formed his partnership with Busy Arnold, but after trying to hold up under the