Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [60]
The shop worked so efficiently that, in time, Eisner couldn’t remember the exact contribution each artist made to a given Spirit entry. This was especially true of his collaborations with Feiffer, which led to some interesting and occasionally testy discussions in later years, after Feiffer had established his reputation and interviewers asked about his work on The Spirit. One particular story, a 1949 Spirit classic called “Ten Minutes,” brought out the possessiveness that each man felt about his own finer work.
The clever conceit of “Ten Minutes” was to tell a story in real time. “It will take you ten minutes to read this story,” a voice-over narrator informs the reader at the onset of “Ten Minutes.” “But these ten minutes that you will spend here are an eternity for one man. For they are the last ten minutes in Freddy’s life.”
Giving away a story’s ending up front takes a lot of moxie, but doing so before a seven-page comic book story posed the challenge of making a reader care about a character in very short order. To give the reader a sense of the passing time, Eisner placed a clock in the opening panel of each new page. In a more subtle move, the reader also sees two little girls playing a game with a ball on the sidewalk outside Freddy’s tenement building. The girls are running through the alphabet. The story opens with the letter “A,” and by the fifth page—six minutes into the story—they have reached the letter “R.”
The Spirit plays a marginal but important role in the story, appearing in the last minute of Freddy’s life. The rest is about a down-on-his-luck gambler trying desperately to find a way out of his dead-end life. In holding up a candy store run by a kindly neighborhood icon and unintentionally killing him, Freddy sets in motion the last few minutes of his life. By this point, the reader sees Freddy as an unlucky loser but not evil, and his violent end is both poignant and sad, underscoring how a very brief period of time can change the direction of a person’s life.
“That was mine,” Feiffer said of the story. “That was simply an autobiographical fantasy based on my Bronx upbringing. And the fat candy store man was based on a candy man that I remembered from my childhood.
I suppose what so interested me in that kind of approach was that I was living that sort of life in the East Bronx: painfully dull and painfully dismal, and painfully poor. Lower middle class; not poverty, but poor in spirit, certainly. And that one could take off from that vantage point and enter into all sorts of danger, which was fascinating.
Eisner, as Feiffer remembered, wrote Freddy’s death scene in the subway, but the rest was his creation.
Eisner, of course, had a different memory.
“The philosophy [of “Ten Minutes”] is essentially mine,” Eisner maintained, “as differentiated from Feiffer.
Feiffer to this day doesn’t think in terms of that kind of philosophical concept, like the ten minutes in a man’s life. You look at my body of work, you’ll see I always seem to build on that theme. On the other hand my dialogue isn’t as crisp and as sharp and sometimes as incisive as Feiffer’s is. Feiffer has—he always did have—an incredible ear for dialogue and in the way people talk, particularly. Now in the matter of this little girl bouncing a ball … Remember, too, that Feiffer and I have the same background, ten years apart. We both lived in the same area so we both came up and lived the same kind of childhood, except, perhaps, that his parents were half notch or a notch higher on the social scale than mine. So we would tend to say—probably, I might have said, “Hey, remember ‘A, my name is Alice; B, my name is—’” “Oh yeah,” he said,