Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [7]
Linoleum block illustration for the Medallion, a politically charged
high school magazine. (© Will Eisner Studios, Inc., courtesy of Denis Kitchen)
Billy wasn’t happy about having to work every day, but he didn’t resent it much, either. He could dismiss any feelings of resentment with the knowledge that his family needed the money. Besides, New York had a lot of newspapers at the time, and all but the New York Times published comics, which Billy would read religiously whenever he found some downtime. He’d been reading comic strips for years, but now, with far greater supply, he began to study them more seriously. His favorites included E. C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, and Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates. He studied the comics, trying to dissect each artist’s methods. Later, at home, he would try to imitate the style of each in his own sketches, based on what he had learned.
Art was becoming the big priority in Eisner’s life. Using a makeshift drawing table fashioned out of a board angled against a small stack of books, Billy (with plenty of encouragement from Sam Eisner) would draw whatever captured his fancy. There was no doubting his talent or enthusiasm. On occasion, father and son would head to a park and sketch landscapes or take the train to Manhattan and visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they would study the classical painters or, if they managed to eke out the fee, take advantage of the Met’s policy of allowing artists the opportunity to copy the classics in their own sketchbooks or paint them on their own canvases.
Comics artist Nick Cardy, although a few years younger than Eisner, grew up during the Depression years, and he too learned many of his basic sketching and painting skills from sessions at New York’s famous art museum. “We couldn’t afford my going to art school,” he recalled. “What I used to do is go to the library and look at the art books. Then I started walking to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’d go there at certain times of day and they’d put their easels out and paint. I used to look at the paintings. I’d look at the painting at the weakest part of the painting, to see what he painted over. I’d be about a half inch away, trying to find out what the undertone was, of what he did on that. People thought I was crazy.”
High school study: “Man in Russian Cap.” (Will Eisner Collection, the Ohio State
University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum)
Like Cardy, Eisner was either too young or too poor for the better art schools. In a scene depicted in To the Heart of the Storm, Sam Eisner scraped together enough money to enroll Billy in a cut-rate art school, located in a run-down old building and hosted by an eccentric teacher who used a strange contraption to teach students to draw. The machine had two arms, one attached to the teacher and the other to the student, and art would be “taught” when the teacher drew: the student had no choice but to let his arm and hand be guided in whatever direction the teacher chose. The teacher promised to make Billy an artist in three weeks; Billy fled the school after one session.
Fannie Eisner watched her son’s growing interest in art with skepticism at first, and later, when his talent was apparent, with increasing alarm. Her husband hadn’t been able to parlay his talents into a decent living, but here he was now, with a nation mired in economic crisis, encouraging his oldest son to chase a dream. And that, to a practical woman like Fannie Eisner, was all that art was: a dream pursued by talented people doomed to fail. Some of the greatest musicians and painters and writers in history had created immortal work and died in poverty. While he was painting scenery for the Yiddish theater, Sam had met such