Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [53]
If Marston and DC believed they were issuing a superhero comic book geared to older male readers who might pick up this strange message, or to young female readers looking for an alternative to the male superheroes, they learned otherwise very quickly. According to the market numbers, nine out of ten buyers of comic books containing Wonder Woman stories were teenage boys.
Girls apparently wanted something more wholesome, featuring characters they could identify with rather than fantasize about, and they were rewarded with two such characters at almost the precise moment Wonder Woman was taking off. The two girls, named Betty and Veronica, while attractive enough, looked and dressed a lot like typical high schoolers, dealt with teenage problems like parents, teachers, and dating, and wouldn’t have known what to do with superpowers if they had them. The girls were the brainchild of cartoonist Bob Montana, who cast them as competing love interests for his main character, Archie Andrews, a redheaded teen who took his first comic book bow in December 1941 in MLJ’s Pep Comics. Archie, Betty, Veronica, and Archie’s bumbling friend, Jughead, caught on as soon as they were introduced to readers, and by the end of the war, Archie had his own eponymous comic book. If Robin, Bucky, and other teenage sidekicks to superheroes were the good-looking, athletically built, street-savvy teenagers that kids wished they could be, Archie and company were the teenagers they already were—and, increasingly, they were the success that some superhero comics wished they could be, too.
Will Eisner tracked these developments from his Washington, D.C., office. Even though he was nose down at work, producing a mass of material for the army, he made a point of checking out the daily strips and monthly comic books, watching for trends, trying to calculate the next big thing. This would become a personal trademark, a practice he would employ well into his eighties. While colleagues might be content to complete an assignment and move on to the next one, or stick with one character or style for decades, Eisner wanted to be nothing less than part of the cutting edge defining the direction of comics. His colleagues had laughed at him when he insisted that comics could serve a higher purpose than mere entertainment, that they could be a new form of literature, and he was determined to prove them wrong. To do this, he had to fully grasp both art and market, and the war couldn’t be a deterrent to his education. He’d be going home someday, and he wanted to be ready.
His work in Army Motors and, in Washington, D.C., Firepower (a publication used to boost morale, issued by a citizen group, Army Ordnance Associates) prepared him for his return to civilian life in ways he never could have predicted. Before the war, from his experiences as a businessman, Eisner had learned how to work with customers with whom he didn’t always agree, with know-it-alls who knew very little about art but pretended they did. In civilian life, strangely enough, the chain of command was clearly defined, and Eisner worked well in it. The army was different. Personal ambition and politics could make dealing with different offices a challenge. No one knew a lick about art—or even wanted to know about art—but that didn’t prevent an officer from weighing in on how a new type of art—comics—could be applied to a new type of policy: preventive maintenance.
“During the war, I had continually been in a battle with the adjutant general who was in charge of all technical manuals,” Eisner would remember. “He regarded me as creating a kind of blasphemy because I was introducing comics into what he regarded as a very stabilized form of technical manual. Every time they tested what I produced, however, we came out way ahead of what they would produce.”
The testing was an important victory, affirming Eisner’s faith in comics as an educational tool. The adjutant general had sent copies of the standard