Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [46]
“I knew if I didn’t get the reader’s attention as he flipped through the Sunday newspaper, I might lose him,” Eisner said of his splash pages. “So I began to innovate on the covers. Also, I had only eight pages—seven pages, later on—to tell the story, so I had to bring the reader in very quickly, set the scene very quickly.”
Newspaper marketing analysts, their eyes set to increasing circulation numbers, weren’t impressed with Eisner’s unusual approach. Superman, they argued, had a standard, eye-catching logo that readers could immediately spot on the page. Newspapers carrying the comic could plaster the logo on the sides of their delivery vans, and in an extremely competitive market that found newspapers trying to find ways to bump up their readerships, advertising a popular comic strip could goose newsstand sales. The way Eisner designed his splash page, the words The Spirit seemed to be intentionally hidden on the page. They might be part of a building or a portion of a page designed to look like the front page of a newspaper; readers, Eisner’s critics complained, would find this confusing.
Eisner strongly disagreed. Rather than turn away from the feature, readers would look forward to each new way he’d spell out The Spirit on the splash page. This opening page would become the feature’s identity and its strongest selling-tool.
“My audience was transitory,” he countered. “I had to catch people on the fly, so to speak. So I began to design the front cover, the first page, as dramatically as I could, and in a way that would intrigue people into the story, and tell a little bit of the story to begin with. I would tell them the kind of story they were getting.”
The Spirit’s unique splash pages, such as this opening page for the December 8, 1940 entry, established Eisner’s reputation for being one of the most innovative comics artists of his time. (© Will Eisner Studios, Inc., courtesy of Denis Kitchen)
Eisner bore up under the criticism from Arnold and the papers, but he didn’t have an impenetrable shell. The artists in his shop watched for the telltale signs of Eisner’s mounting anger—he’d speak very softly, his pipe clenched in his teeth, then he’d speak even more softly—and the studio would lie low until it passed. He was far too busy to brood for too long.
On the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941, Will Eisner was in his Tudor City studio, munching on a sandwich and listening to an opera on the radio, when an announcer broke into the broadcast with the news that Japan had attacked the Pearl Harbor naval base. That the United States was now entering its second global conflict in a quarter century (something Jerry Iger had foreseen two years earlier) came as no surprise. Servicemen and civilians alike had been gearing up for it for a long time. Like all men eligible for the draft, Eisner knew that it would be only a matter of time before he was called into the service.
“I was ambivalent,” he confessed when asked to recall his feelings about being drafted. “Everybody was very in favor of the war, particularly because of the Nazis and because of the fact that the country seemed to be in danger. So I was kind of eager to be part of it. I felt that I’d want to be a part of the war effort. On the other hand, this was a year after I had started The Spirit, which represented a whole new career for me. And I knew that if I went into the Army the whole thing would kind of fall apart on me.”
Prior to his being drafted into the service, Eisner had been trying to find a way to get a deferment from the military, mainly on the grounds that without him an entire business would be in jeopardy. He had been interviewed by the draft board back on July 29, and he’d shown authorities samples of his work and explained his case. The draft board demanded more—proof that without Eisner, the Spirit newspaper section