Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [80]
Ironically, things improved when the baby boomers, the ones the Comics Code was designed to protect, came of age and challenged the strict standards by producing comics that were bold and relevant, addressing the issues of the times. Underground comic books, preferring to go by the title “comix,” the product of the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll counterculture of the sixties, would gleefully thumb their collective nose at the code.
When these times rolled around, Will Eisner would be ready.
Eisner might have welcomed the opportunity to exchange his ongoing problems with P*S magazine for a censorship tussle. The magazine had jumped off to a good start, at least in terms of the press runs and continuity, but after appearing six straight months between June and November 1951, production halted completely for the next seven months owing to problems with budgeting and infighting among the staff. Only nine issues would reach GIs over the next twenty-five months. By the summer of 1953, P*S was in such disarray that its future was in doubt. Seven years later, Eisner would sit down with Paul Fitzgerald, the magazine’s managing editor, and characterize the period with disarming candor. “I have never known personal distress to equal the gloom, doom, despair, frustration, betrayal, and helplessness that enveloped me during that horrible summer of 1953,” he told Fitzgerald.
His troubles had begun much earlier, with the breakdown of his working relationship with Norman Colton. Eisner, stubborn whenever his work was questioned or criticized, found himself locked in personal and professional battles with Colton that left him seething in frustration. Both Eisner and Colton wanted control of the magazine’s direction, and neither was inclined to budge in a disagreement, especially after Eisner rebuffed Colton’s demands for part ownership of the publication. Eisner was accustomed to working to order, to making changes in his work to accommodate the wishes of his customers, but on far too many occasions the dispute in the early years of P*S struck him as being petty or nitpicky. When he’d served in the army, he’d been a celebrity artist, highly regarded by his Pentagon superiors, who were more apt to defer to his knowledge and background than to set their jaws and demand changes. He’d endured some raw-nerve moments, but they were nothing in comparison with the battles he encountered as a civilian working for the military. Everybody in the army seemed to have something to say about the magazine.
As Eisner—and the army—eventually determined, Colton had issues that explained his behavior. One could have forgiven Colton his ambitions if he hadn’t been so adept at working all sides against the middle for his own benefit. A master of office politics, Colton knew when to schmooze with the right people, how to drop the right piece of information guaranteed to create disputes that would place him in a favorable light, when to brownnose and when to plant his feet, and perhaps most important of all, how to plan for his own advancement. Eisner detested these calculating qualities, but he was living in suburban New York and P*S was coming out of the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. So as long as he could limit his personal contacts with Colton and the army, he couldn’t have cared less about Colton’s machinations.
Then Colton began making more frequent visits to New York, supposedly to consult with Eisner on the magazine’s content. As it turned out, Colton had other things on his mind. Eisner resisted Colton’s attempts to obtain part ownership in P*S, growing more uncomfortable with each of Colton’s visits, until one day he answered his door and was greeted by two government agent types, dressed in black suits, demanding