Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [57]
Now Eisner had two reasons to hire the kid: He would work for free, and he was Eisner’s biggest fan.
“He had no choice but to hire me as a groupie,” Feiffer cracked, “and that was my first job: to hang around the office.”
The law wouldn’t permit him to hire Feiffer for nothing, so Eisner paid him a pittance—between ten and twenty bucks a week, as Eisner remembered—to function as an office gofer, number pages, ink in blacks, and, every so often, attempt backgrounds. The results were a testament to Eisner’s patience.
As Feiffer recalled, “Every time they put a pen or brush in my hand, I screwed up, so they quickly learned not to do that, but I was useful as a loudmouth and cheerleader for the work, and as a kind of unofficial archivist and historian, because I knew everything about the art form.”
Eisner agreed with Feiffer’s assessment of his early contributions to the studio. Feiffer, he remembered, might have been a mediocre artist, but he liked the kid’s spunk, the “intensity” that he brought to his studio. Although they were nearly twelve years apart in age, they had come from the same background, the same part of the city, the same kinds of experiences. Feiffer’s father, like Eisner’s, had struggled to support the family, and his mother, like Eisner’s, was a strong figure, a pragmatist, the person who somehow managed to hold things together when the Depression threatened to yank everything in all directions. Feiffer grew up reading the comics, from Caniff and Segar to, later, Eisner and The Spirit, and in his youthful arrogance, he believed that he would grow up to be an important comics artist, even if he showed no evidence of artistic talent. He had a hunger for comics that Eisner rarely saw in the artists passing through his studio, and Eisner decided that there was something to this wisecracking kid.
Feiffer improved, and over the ensuing months, Eisner entrusted Feiffer with more work on The Spirit, including the coloring. Feiffer grew very comfortable talking to Eisner about his work, especially the writing end of it. In Feiffer’s opinion, Eisner’s best writing on The Spirit had occurred shortly after he began the feature in 1940. Feiffer preferred the art in the postwar Spirit issues, but he didn’t think all that much of the writing.
“If you think you can do better, write a story yourself,” Eisner challenged his young critic.
Feiffer did just that, and both came away surprised by the results, Eisner because the kid could really write, Feiffer because Eisner then gave him more story work. The resulting collaboration, the most productive during Eisner’s years of working on The Spirit, was one of those instances of two very different talents coming together at just the right time and producing work that neither could have accomplished as well individually.
The two worked well together, batting around ideas and editing each other to the benefit of The Spirit in general and their individual careers in particular. Eisner trusted Feiffer’s judgment. Feiffer had an uncanny knack for capturing the way people talked, and he had no patience for anything that seemed contrived. “He had a real ear for writing characters that lived and breathed,” Eisner said. “Jules was always attentive to nuances, such as sounds and expressions, that he could work into a story to make it seem more real,” he said.
But there were sore points and disagreements as well. Eisner, who liked to compare his shop style with that of a chef in charge of a kitchen—“I can’t keep my hands out of the pot”—could irritate Feiffer with some of his meddling on stories that Feiffer had written, and as Feiffer’s confidence