Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [59]
André LeBlanc, who would go on to work on such features as The Phantom and Rex Morgan, M.D., was skilled at drawing animals—something Eisner could not do well and a deficiency in the studio since Bob Powell’s departure. One of the period’s memorable stories, “Cromlech Was a Nature Boy,” in which Ebony befriends a boy capable of communicating with animals, would never have happened without LeBlanc’s contributions.
“There’s always been between André and myself a really good rapport creatively,” Eisner noted. “That’s strange, because his stuff does not concentrate on action. His work concentrates largely on strong draftsmanship and a warm quality of art. His animal drawings are marvelous, as are his depictions of children.”
The Cromlech story grew out of Eisner’s observations of a street poet and musician known as Moondog—“the first visible hippie,” as Eisner would describe him. Eisner would see him hanging around Forty-second and Broadway, selling a paper called the Hobo News, and from there he let his imagination roam. He penciled a rough splash page and showed it to LeBlanc.
“I said, ‘Let’s do a Nature Boy story,’ because there was a Nature Boy song that was built around Moondog,” Eisner said. “I roughed out the story idea and André took over … We passed it back and forth.”
Eisner’s willingness to let others tinker with his ideas—another personal trademark—led to some of his most extraordinary work during the 1947–1948 period, including adaptations of two stories Eisner had enjoyed in his youth: Ambrose Bierce’s 1894 horror story, “The Damned Thing,” and Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 classic, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Eisner’s love of adaptations dated back to his Fiction House days, although, ironically, he usually assigned adaptations to others. In his first studio, Jack Kirby had drawn The Count of Monte Cristo, and Dick Briefer had handled The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Eisner had adapted “Cinderella” and “Hansel and Gretel” in recent Spirit entries, with only marginal success. He assigned these two more recent adaptations to Jerry Grandenetti, a relatively new hire at the shop who’d expressed interest in doing a Spirit on his own.
“I was always faced with hiring somebody almost brand new in the field, who had basically good talents, but who was inexperienced,” Eisner said. “The assistant would go along working in the shop, and then very suddenly, he blossomed into a man of his own.
“Typically, the assistant began to make more demands, which is normal, which is acceptable. The assistant was working on my feature, but he wanted to stretch out, to break out of the so-called enslavement that he perceived working in my shop.”
Eisner had discovered Grandenetti while searching for a background man for The Spirit’s cityscapes. Grandenetti, ten years Eisner’s junior, was then working as a draftsman with a landscape architectural firm, but he wasn’t happy with the job. He wanted out, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted to go into comics, which appealed to him, or become an illustrator for a magazine such as the Saturday Evening Post or Cosmopolitan, which promised to be much more lucrative but was also cutthroat. He decided to give comics a try. He packed a portfolio with samples and headed up to Quality Comics, but instead of landing a job with Busy Arnold, he was referred to Eisner. He felt blessed to have been hired by someone of Eisner’s reputation and even more fortunate to be given a lot of freedom to learn on the job.
“I don’t think Bill ever pushed anybody,” he said, remembering the shop as being quiet and professional but easygoing. “He would let us do our thing, which was a tremendous break for me. I was dumped into the world of comics from the world of architecture, and here I was, trying to figure out how to do that. Bill wouldn’t tell me; I did it. Bill would literally write the story right onto the page itself, and then we’d take it from there.”
The two adaptations were almost entirely Grandenetti’s. Eisner, as always, supplied the direction, penciling