Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [43]
But there was always more. Superman had been so successful as a monthly entry in Action Comics (and, not long thereafter, in its own self-titled book as well) that it was now appearing as a daily newspaper strip. When presented with the same opportunity for The Spirit, Eisner jumped at the chance. In hindsight, it proved to be a questionable decision. The weekly newspaper installments required a short story writer’s thought process; each eight-page story had a beginning, middle, and end, with an entirely different type of pacing from that which Eisner faced with a daily strip. Eisner, quite naturally, coveted the respect garnered the daily newspaper comic strip artists, but as soon as his first Spirit daily started up on Monday, October 13, 1941, he began second-guessing himself.
“I wasn’t ready to do dailies, because I had never done a big-time daily before,” he recalled. “To me it’s like trying to conduct an orchestra in a telephone booth.” The syndicate, he explained, believed that the daily strip would be a natural extension of the Sunday comic, but the experimentation Eisner was attempting on Sunday didn’t translate well into the daily installments. “The dailies weren’t doing all that well, because I was trying all these weird ideas, like a whole daily strip with nothing but footprints in the snow and so forth.”
Eisner also learned that the daily strip left him little room to develop his characters. The Spirit had been a work in progress all along, with Eisner tinkering with his title character and supporting cast on a week-to-week basis, fine-tuning as he learned more about them. Daily strips discouraged this. Readers demanded consistency.
“I discovered that daily strips would not allow the artist to experiment and grow, necessarily,” Eisner told Danny Fingeroth in 2003 when reflecting on the daily. “If you look at the daily strips over the years, the ones that have survived for 50 years, they’re pretty much the same as they were when they started.”
In the beginning, the daily strip needed a promotional boost, and Eisner often found himself on the road with a salesman, hawking the merits of the new feature. As Eisner later recalled, the salesman valued his presence during meetings with an editor.
“It gave him something to pitch—he could have a dog-and-pony act,” Eisner said. “Salesmen would use something like that as a way to see the editors who might not want to see a salesman, but might want to meet an artist.”
The ploy backfired on at least one occasion, when Eisner and a salesman were visiting the editor of a New Jersey newspaper. The editor looked at a sample of the daily strip, listened to the salesman’s pitch, and agreed that it would be a suitable feature for his paper.
The editor opened up the paper to his comics page, looked down at it, then looked at the salesman and me, and said, “Well, which one should I drop? I’ve got to drop one to carry The Spirit.” The salesman and the editor both looked at me and said, “What do you think?” I was dismayed, thinking, “My God, they’ve asking me to stab another cartoonist in the back.” Here I am, a kid of 23 with all these ideals, and I’m being introduced to the harsh realities of the world. It never occurred to me that to take my strip he’d have to sink another strip. I shifted from foot to foot, and finally my eye lit on Buck Rogers, which, as far as I was concerned, was an old strip, so I pointed it out and said, “Here’s a strip that’s old hat. The idea of science fiction is kind of passé now, because we’re in the ’40s and there’s a war on.”
The editor said, “Yeah! That space-travel business is for yesterday. Let’s drop that and put The Spirit in.” I’ve always felt guilty about doing that to Buck Rogers, but that was my introduction into the business world of comics.
The daily strip’s appearance gave Eisner his first big splash of publicity when one of the subscribing newspapers, the Philadelphia Record, published a full-page profile