Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [8]
Billy had no recourse but to hear out everything his parents said—to him or to each other. His mother, he knew, was utterly correct in her pleas for practicality; Billy was selling newspapers because his father couldn’t find work as an artist. On the other hand, his father loved his art, and he presented a compelling case for the argument that life, when the final ledger was tallied, was defined more by joy and experience than by numbers in a bankbook or material possessions.
Both arguments made sense. Billy hated to disappoint either of his parents, so he listened again and again to his parents’ ideological tug-of-war, unaware that in less than a decade he’d be having it both ways—the aesthetic and the practical, the seemingly incompatible pair, married into a career that would set him apart from all of his contemporaries and establish him as a model for artists in the future.
Billy’s choice of high schools wound up being a good one. DeWitt Clinton High School, an all-boys’ school located nearby in the Bronx, would become, over time, an incubator for great achievers. Its alumni would include an incredible range of talent: James Baldwin, Arthur Gelb, Paddy Chayefsky, Ralph Lauren, Richard Rodgers, George Cukor, Fats Waller, Burt Lancaster, Avery Fisher, Martin Balsam, Neil Simon, and A. M. Rosenthal focused on the arts; basketball Hall of Famers Dolph Schayes and Tiny Archibald starred on the school’s team; and comics artists Stan Lee, Bob Kane, Bill Finger, and Irwin Hasen walked the school’s halls. And this is only a partial list. Stan Lee would one day joke about how film and television creator, producer, and director Garry Marshall would beam every time he met someone who’d attended his alma mater. “Garry is so proud of the fact that he went to DeWitt Clinton that it’s like the biggest thing in his life,” Lee quipped.
Eisner, now calling himself “Bill”—or, if he was feeling really formal, “Will”—wasted little time in establishing a reputation at the school. Although only a marginal student, he was an excellent artist and writer, much more advanced than his classmates, and he signed on to work on the Clintonian, the school’s student paper, for which he did illustrations and a regular comic strip. His first published art for the paper, an illustration for an article entitled “Bronx’s ‘Forgotten’ Ghetto Revealed; ‘Is School for Crime,’ Doctor States,” a drawing of Bronx street vendors operating out of carts and entitled “At the ‘Forgotten’ Ghetto,” appeared on December 8, 1933.
“Peddling at the Wrong Door”: This one-panel cartoon was published in the Clintonian, Eisner’s high school newspaper. (Will Eisner Collection, the Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum)
Over the course of the next three years, his work seemed to be everywhere. He worked on set designs for Clinton’s “Class-Nite” variety show, designed posters for the school, appeared in Magpie, Clinton’s literary magazine, and, with classmate Ken Ginniger, started an independent literary magazine, the Hound and the Horn. When Ginniger ran for class president, Eisner designed his campaign posters. The workload wasn’t just a matter of beginning a portfolio; each assignment or activity exposed him to new areas of art, from cartooning to art deco to commercial design, giving him remarkable range for someone so young. Clinton couldn’t afford expensive metal plates for its publications’ illustrations, so Eisner learned to make cuttings out of wood and linoleum. Later, while