Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [68]
All this led to the 1948 founding of American Visuals, a company that would put out a line of Eisner’s own comics and explore other commercial and educational comics possibilities. Planned titles for the comic book line included Baseball Comics, Kewpies, The Adventures of Nubbin the Shoeshine Boy, and John Law. Not one of them enjoyed even a hint of success.
You didn’t have to search far for answers for why these comics didn’t work. Kewpies, the comic book adventures of characters based on the famous Rosie O’Neill characters, was too attached to a fad—and geared to consumers not inclined to buy comic books—to stand a chance on the market. Eisner undoubtedly hoped they would appeal to the same readership that followed the Walt Disney cartoon characters, and to simulate this, Eisner hired former Disney artist Lee J. Ames to do the art. One issue of the comic came out, did poorly at the marketplace, and Kewpies disappeared.
Baseball Comics suffered a similar single-issue fate. Written by Jules Feiffer, with artwork by Eisner and Tex Blaisdell, Baseball Comics followed the exploits of Rube Rooky, a talented but naive baseball phenom that Eisner hoped would catch the public’s fancy similar to the way Ham Fisher’s Joe Palooka had reached a large readership twenty years earlier. It didn’t. The first issue bombed on the newsstand, and the title was discontinued. A second issue had been planned, written, and drawn, but it wasn’t published until 1991, when Kitchen Sink Press resurrected the two books as part of its reprint operations. More than four decades after publishing the first issue, Eisner still seemed befuddled about the comic book’s failure.
“Baseball Comics was a specialized comic book, a book devoted to one topic,” he told Kitchen Sink editor Dave Schreiner. “Such books sold well in the pulp magazine field, and I didn’t think there was any reason it couldn’t work in comics.”
The Nubbin and John Law comics, inextricably connected from the onset, had a longer history. Originally conceived to be a daily comic strip, Nubbin went nowhere. Eisner then thought he might be able to create another ready-print, Sunday newspaper insert similar to The Spirit, with Nubbin as the feature story every week and the John Law story to be included, much the way Lady Luck and Mr. Mystic had rounded out the original Spirit comic book supplement. Newspapers weren’t interested in Nubbin, an orphaned shoeshine boy in the tradition of Little Orphan Annie, or John Law, a pipe-smoking, eye-patch-wearing detective with an unmistakable resemblance to the Spirit. Finally, Eisner considered just converting the insert idea into a monthly comic book before ultimately deciding to give each character his own book. Neither got off the ground. Eisner eventually converted the John Law stories into Spirit entries, though this was more a matter of his hating to see work go to waste than any great value they held.
Eisner lost a bundle producing his own line of comics, although American Visuals enjoyed success in other endeavors, as when the company produced one-off public service titles such as The Sad Case of Waiting-Room Willie and A Medal for Bowzer, with Eisner writing the scripts and doing the covers and Klaus Nordling, one of his shop’s old standbys, taking the interior art. These books, though nothing special in terms of art or story, would serve as templates for a career waiting around the corner. Eisner, tiring of The Spirit even as the feature was reaching its zenith, had found his new direction, one that would take him away from entertainment and into instruction, giving