Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [5]
The movies always influenced me … The early Man Ray films interested me tremendously. I used to go down to the New School and spend hours looking at these old Man Ray experimental films; and it gradually dawned on me that these films were nothing but frames on a piece of celluloid, which is really no different than frames on a piece of paper. Pretty soon it became to me film on paper, and so obviously the influence was there. But timing, sequences—I think I was influenced by almost any film.
Young Billy, of course, wasn’t aware of how movies would influence him while he was sitting in a darkened theater and watching action stories of the Wild West or swashbuckling tales of pirates on the high seas, but readers would see evidence of his interests in his early work, just as journalists would later remark on the heavy influence of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane on Eisner’s Spirit adventures. Billy only knew that he favored the stories, much the way he liked the ways stories were told in the pulp magazines. This interest in story would ultimately set him apart from most of his contemporaries when, as a young adult, he picked up a pen and brush and successfully found a way to work his narratives on paper.
Stickball was the popular street game in Billy’s neighborhood, and Eisner might have made friends more easily if he’d been any good it. He was a big kid, tall for his age and sturdily built, but he was a poor athlete, the kind of boy picked last when sides were chosen. His athletic prowess wasn’t going to make him a neighborhood hero. Instead, he relied on one skill that his schoolmates and the kids in the neighborhood envied: he could draw. He could take a stick of chalk and in no time make beautiful sketches on the sidewalk or in the street. Airplanes were his specialty. Charles Lindbergh was a national hero at the time, and Billy Eisner was able to draw a convincing likeness of the famous aviator’s Spirit of St. Louis, impressing his friends and making his life in the neighborhood easier.
Eisner had been exposed to art for as long as he could remember. Sam Eisner had artwork all over their many apartments, and as a very young boy, Billy occasionally accompanied him to work. Sam Eisner, self-taught and with no formal training in figure study, couldn’t paint people, but he could do just about anything else. Billy idolized his father, and it was only natural that he would try to emulate him, much to his mother’s mounting disapproval. Fannie Eisner had seen how little money an artist could earn and wasn’t about to stand by and watch one of her children take her husband’s wayward path. Sam, on the other hand, was pleased by Billy’s apparent talent, and he gave him art supplies and encouraged him to continue. Billy, at least early on, wasn’t thinking about a future career. He simply loved to draw, and he loved the attention that his artwork gained him.
Sam Eisner’s money woes were worse than ever by the time Billy was finishing his elementary school education. He held a series of odd jobs, including housepainting; each evaporated, for one reason or another, until Sam became a fixture around the Eisner apartment, spending more time looking for employment than actually working. The Eisners cut corners to hang on to what little money they had. They bought day-old bread and milk on the margins of spoiling. Billy wore clothes handed down from an older cousin. Even with these economies, what little Sam Eisner had left disappeared when the stock market crashed, banks failed, and the Depression rolled in, uncompromising and by all appearances indefinite.
Billy Eisner was old enough to appreciate the gravity of his father’s plight. He would vividly remember the drama of the Depression, played out on the streets of his city, in the hallways of the tenements buildings, in his own living room—as clear as newspaper clippings saved for future reference.
“As always, my father seemed to be right in the eye of the