Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [44]
The comic strip, [Eisner] explains, is no longer a comic strip but, in reality, an illustrated novel. It is new and raw in form just now, but material for limitless intelligent development. And eventually and inevitably it will be a legitimate medium for the best of writers and artists.
“There was no precedent for that interview with the Philadelphia Record,” David Hajdu remarked more than a half century later, long after Eisner’s words proved to be prophetic. “He not only believed in comics as a legitimate art form as early as the 1940s, but he had the guts, the chutzpah, to say so publicly, in print, on the record. He was utterly unique in his eagerness to champion this art in public.”
Eisner’s statements would have been bold predictions for a well-established comic book artist with clout in the industry, but coming from a twenty-four-year-old, virtually unknown to anyone but his peers in the business, they came across as brash and a tad highbrow. Rube Goldberg would confront Eisner at a National Cartoonists Society meeting in New York, dismissing Eisner’s beliefs in the literary potential of comics as so much hogwash. “We’re vaudevillians,” Goldberg admonished Eisner. “Never forget that. We tell jokes!”
As Eisner recalled, his colleagues found the statements funny: “I got back into New York and the kids in the shops kept laughing and saying, ‘We read that, are you trying to be uppity?’ Nobody really believed that this was what it later on seemed to prove itself to be, which is a true means of expression, story, and idea.”
He would never waver from these beliefs.
Eisner’s relationship with Busy Arnold deteriorated in the wake of the Bob Powell dustup. The two remained cordial, but Eisner found Arnold’s meddling almost intolerable. A day didn’t pass without the arrival of a piece of mail, a memo, or a call from Arnold’s office in Stamford. Eisner had no choice but to take whatever Arnold dished out when he complained about misspellings and typos and inconsistencies in the comics—and there were enough of these to raise the hackles of the most even-tempered editor.
“Here is a terrible example of the terrible work your staff is doing,” Arnold scolded in his usual overstated style. “In one panel of ‘Lady Luck,’ Lady Luck and another man are in a rowboat. In the next panel, there are two men in the boat with Lady Luck. How about checking more carefully?”
Six days later, Arnold was on Eisner again, this time for the sloppy proofreading in the first issue of Uncle Sam: “There are at least 200 mistakes in spelling in the entire book and the same applies to Doll Man Quarterly. In this book your boys didn’t even spell a word the same way twice in a row.”
How much of this is true and how much exaggerated is impossible to tell, since the original art no longer exists. In interviews, Eisner acknowledged that such problems did occur and that he had no choice but to hear out Arnold’s criticism and pass it along to the responsible parties. Arnold, he’d concede, was the first to hear from disgruntled newspaper editors who in less than subtle terms pointed out problems that could have easily been avoided.
“Whenever anyone complained about The Spirit,” Eisner said, “Busy took the brunt of the criticism and then he passed it along to me. It was his idea to ‘shake Bill up,’ as he put it. He was like the fight manager