Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [45]
Eisner was less agreeable when Arnold attacked the artwork in the different publications. He wasn’t happy to hear Arnold’s familiar complaints about less than perfect borders—one of Arnold’s pet peeves—but statements such as “I can get good second- and third-rate independent artists who are superior to the ones you hired,” or “Nick [Cardy] has too many far shots and not enough close-ups,” or on a more personal level, “The last eight pages of The Spirit looked like they had been hammered out in no time and the job looked second-rate,” did nothing to improve Eisner’s disregard for Arnold’s lack of knowledge of comics art. He respected Arnold’s business experience, as he had Jerry Iger’s, but, as he liked to point out, Arnold’s appreciation of art was linked directly to how much it sold.
Arnold also felt compelled to forward all complaints about The Spirit. Eisner openly admitted that The Spirit was a work in progress, a continually developing feature that in the beginning was hit or miss. (Ironically, The Spirit’s first two years, in retrospect, were tame in comparison with Eisner’s later work on the feature.) Arnold, worried that a paper might decide to cancel the supplement, constantly cautioned Eisner against using material that might frighten or disturb young readers, especially violence, blood and gore, or spooky facial expressions. When critical letters arrived at Arnold’s—or Henry Martin’s—office, Eisner was certain to hear about it. Arnold would attempt to mollify an unhappy editor, and then he’d confront Eisner, who was learning on an alarmingly regular basis that his hopes of writing for an adult audience were being undermined by editors who still regarded comics as the domain of children.
Fortunately for Eisner, Arnold rarely looked at The Spirit until after it had been published, and newspaper editors, although unhappy with some of the content, made no attempts to censor it. But when calls or letters from angry readers came in, the complaints were passed along, often with not-so-veiled threats of cancellations. One early Spirit entry—a two-part episode, “Orang the Ape-Man,” involving a talking ape that falls in love with young women, including Police Commissioner Dolan’s daughter, Ellen—brought in a flood of angry responses; another, in which an undercover Adolf Hitler visits the United States, did the same. At a moment in history when America was precariously close to entering World War II, hypersensitive editors objected to any name (such as “Kurt”) that might indicate German heritage.
Eisner continued to experiment with The Spirit, regardless of the uproar from Busy Arnold, Henry Martin, and the newspapers subscribing to the comic book insert. He toyed with unusual panel shapes and sizes, camera angles, and the use of shadows and black ink. Eisner would eventually deem these innovations a response to necessity, to an attempt to solve problems. His experimentation with panel sizes and shapes, he said, could be traced back to his days of working on Hawks of the Seas, when the feature was being marketed to different-sized publications; he’d had to cut and rearrange the panels to fit the smaller-sized formats, and from this he had learned how to compress story and action as well as create a visually appealing style. His interest in movies, dating from his childhood in the Bronx, also contributed to The Spirit’s cinematic feel. Finally, there was Eisner’s hyperactive creative mind: never content to stay put, he was constantly on the lookout for something new.
The Spirit’s splash page, to the exasperation of the Register & Tribune Syndicate, became Eisner’s most creative and enduring innovation. In the beginning, The Spirit opened like a traditional newspaper comic strip—an opening panel plunging readers into the story—but after a few weeks, Eisner tried a single-page opening that served several functions. First and foremost, it acted as a cover for The Weekly Comic Book, giving the insert the feeling of a magazine independent of the other sections