Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [76]
chapter eight
O U T O F T H E M A I N S T R E A M
I have to tell you how my father used to refer to my publishing business. “What you have here,” he would say, “is a wheelbarrow. Sure, it’s a machine, but if you don’t push it, it won’t go.”
When Will Eisner shelved The Spirit near the end of 1952, he vanished from public view. He would never again produce comics for newspapers, and two decades would pass before his familiar signature appeared in a comic book—and even then it would be in the form of Spirit reprints. For all his Spirit readers knew, he’d retired and moved to Florida. In reality, he was working as hard as ever, contributing art to P*S magazine and, through American Visuals, putting together a large variety of instructional and commercial comics for corporations and organizations. He was thirty-five years old, raising a family in upstate New York, traveling when his job required it, and conducting business as usual. The move to Florida would come later—much later.
His retirement of The Spirit came at an opportune moment, though he certainly hadn’t timed it that way. Comic book opponents were again stepping up their efforts to legislate against the medium, though they were finding it difficult to make significant headway. There had been studies, conferences, radio roundtable discussions, newspaper and magazine articles, editorials, church meetings, and public forums, all scrutinizing the popularity of comic books and influences they might bear on young readers. The New York State Legislature twice attempted to pass restrictive measures against comic book content, only to see the submitted bills thwarted by Governor Thomas Dewey’s veto. In 1950, the United States Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, chaired by Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee Democrat with presidential aspirations, included comic books in its investigation, with public hearings examining a possible link between comic books and juvenile delinquency. Exhaustive testimony poured in from all sides of the debate, including public officials, comic book publishers, psychologists, prison officials, and even FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. There was general consensus that the more extreme crime and horror titles stepped outside the bounds of good taste and acceptable reading material for children, but no one could agree on whether policing these publications and their creators was the duty of legislators or the comics industry. Lawmakers strongly suggested that the comic book companies exert peer pressure to discourage other publishers from issuing objectionable material. Not only was there resistance to this idea, but the major offenders, emboldened by the failed efforts to block or censor comic book content, published even gorier and more violent material. Their rationale was purely business: they were giving the people what they wanted.
Fredric Wertham, staging a ceaseless drive against comic books, added more combustible fuel to his campaign with the publication of Seduction of the Innocent, a bestselling polemic that bypassed what Wertham considered to be ineffective leaders and took his case directly to the public. Wertham was neither subtle nor scientific in his approach. Instead, he served up general but incendiary claims, which he then attempted to back with sketchy anecdotal examples that hit readers with the impact of a fist to the throat. Danger lurked everywhere. Comic books seduced young readers with depictions of violent crime, sadism, perverse sexuality, bondage and sadomasochism, cruelty, homosexuality, disrespect for the country and law enforcement officers, torture, and racism. Wertham claimed that his interest