Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [55]
“When I came out,” he explained, “I had seen the elephant and talked to the owl. I had my own life experience and I began to apply it to what I was doing. I was dealing with more realism after the war than I had dealt with before.”
But there was more—more than Eisner would care to admit. His drill sergeant might not have seen much of Denny Colt or the Spirit in the young draftee who stood in front of him in those dreary days of boot camp and practice on the firing range, but Eisner’s connection to his creation was intense. Indeed, there was no physical resemblance, but the two were identical in their point of view, outlook on their world, and sense of place in it—before and after the war. The prewar Spirit, like Eisner, saw the world in dualistic, black-and-white terms; a lot of gray had been added between Eisner’s bus trip to Fort Dix and his return to New York. If asked, Eisner would admit that there were many autobiographical touches to The Spirit. The Spirit’s mask, he’d state, had actually served as a buffer between the creator and his creation.
“Those who are working in the medium with superheroes and so forth—we always hide behind the costume,” Eisner told an interviewer long after he’d quit working on The Spirit. “I was hiding behind the Spirit’s mask all those years. I was always saying, ‘Well, this isn’t me—it’s him!’”
For Eisner, regaining control of The Spirit was nothing less than a reclaiming of his own identity as a civilian, businessman, and commercial cartoonist. His break with these identities during World War II had been a clean one: when he returned to New York, he had no office, none of the familiar artists working under him, and only vestiges of the character he’d created half a decade ago for the Register & Tribune Syndicate. It was just as well. Eisner needed to rebuild The Spirit, and to accomplish this, he needed new people with new ideas around him.
His first order of business was finding a place to work, and the office that he leased at 37 Wall Street had a special feeling of familiarity. Just over a decade earlier, when he was trying to help pay bills Sam Eisner couldn’t cover, he had sold newspapers outside this very building. It was here that he’d begun seriously to study comics; now he was creating them in the very same place.
The Spirit weekly section, as written by Bill Woolfolk and penciled and inked by Lou Fine in Eisner’s absence, was still being produced in Connecticut at the Quality Comics offices, and it continued that way while Eisner settled into his new office and hired a skeleton staff capable of assisting him with the feature. Martin DeMuth, who had been lettering The Spirit since December 1942, was retained in the same capacity; but Lou Fine, who wanted to go into commercial art, was out. He was replaced by John Spranger, who penciled over Eisner’s layouts and rough pencils while Eisner himself did most of the inking and coloring. Compared with the staff Eisner had been working with at his old Tudor City studio, this was a small group, but Eisner was comfortable with it—enough so that he’d never again employ so large a staff to work on The Spirit section.
His first postwar Spirit entry appeared in the papers on December 23, 1945—a Christmas entry that continued a Spirit tradition that Eisner had begun before the war but had been discontinued while he was in the service. When asked how he, as a Jew, felt about writing his annual Christmas installments, Eisner answered that he had no problem with it, that it wasn’t as much a business decision based on catering to a largely Christian readership as it was a matter of taking advantage