Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [47]
With the declaration of war, Eisner was called up, and he was operating on borrowed time, having been granted time to make arrangements for others to cover for him while he was away. All during this period, Eisner struggled with his emotions. As a Jew, he felt strongly about Hitler and his murder of European Jews; had they not emigrated, his parents—and he himself—could have been these very people. As an American—and an artist involved with such projects as Uncle Sam Quarterly and Military Comics—he was caught up in the national furor of patriotism that immediately followed America’s entry into the war. Still, he couldn’t help wondering what would become of him and all he had worked so hard to achieve if the war dragged on for a lengthy period of time. Would he even have a career when he returned?
chapter five
A P R I V A T E N A M E D J O E D O P E
Comics—sequential art—is my medium. I regard it as much my singular medium as a writer who writes only words or the motion-picture man who writes only in movies. This is a definable, singular medium: it has perimeters and it has parameters; it has grammar; it has distinct rules; it has limitations; and it has possibilities which have not really been touched.
Prior to his induction into the army in May 1942, Will Eisner had been living, in essence, the life of a hermit in the largest city in the United States. He went from home to office to home again, with very little time for play or socializing. He had few friends away from the office and no serious romantic involvements. His family’s money woes had robbed him of much of his adolescence, and now his young adulthood was disappearing under the avalanche of work. When he reported for processing at Fort Dix in New Jersey, he was about as far from home as he’d ever ventured. He was more mature and advanced in his adult career than most of his fellow inductees, yet at the same time far less worldly on a social level. The army gave Eisner his first real taste of freedom.
Not that the army removed him from The Spirit and other work demands. Before leaving for basic training, Eisner visited Busy Arnold at his Quality Comics offices in Connecticut, and the two discussed the best way to continue while Eisner was away.
“[I] talked to him about the problem of going into the army, and he said, ‘Well, we’d better move the studio up here to Stamford, to the Gurley Building,’” Eisner recalled. “So we took space right next door to Busy’s office on the same floor and began moving the shop. As a matter of fact, I remember we set up a fund to help the artists who wanted to move up there, to pay a down payment on mortgages for houses.”
Eisner’s official army portrait. (Will Eisner Collection, the Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum)
Not surprisingly, Eisner wanted to maintain some measure of control over The Spirit—or at the very least the Sunday installments—while he was away. He reasoned that he could write the episodes and leave the penciling and inking to others. Eisner favored Lou Fine for The Spirit’s artwork, and he helped Fine and his wife find a house in Stamford.
After checking in for a brief period at Fort Dix, Eisner was assigned to Aberdeeen Proving Ground near Baltimore, where he was pleased to discover that he enjoyed some celebrity status. The Baltimore Sun carried The Spirit, which impressed his fellow recruits but left his drill sergeant sour. Eisner, the sergeant scoffed, didn’t look anything at all like the Spirit, nor was he anything like his creation. “The Spirit was a heroic character and I looked a little less than that,” Eisner cracked.
Eisner remained conflicted about the war. In the months leading up to his being drafted, he and Busy Arnold had tried to find a way to get him classified