Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [84]
“I stayed with a particular unit,” he explained, “and on Saturdays, these big, tough, rugged guys would take time to go up to a local orphanage, where the kids who were the result of American soldiers and Korean women were kept.
The Koreans were particularly against mixed marriages; the taboo was very strong. And I met one young girl who kept hanging around the orphanage. I got to talking to her, and it turned out that she had a baby who was there, but she couldn’t tell anyone at the orphanage or they wouldn’t take care of her baby. She said she was hanging around, waiting for her husband to show up and gather the family together. She told me her husband lived in a place called Harlem, and that he was a sanitation engineer. Of course, I knew her husband was never going to show up to take her away from the orphanage, because a young black man bringing a Korean girl home to Harlem in 1952 wasn’t likely to get very far. It was a sad moment.
Eisner’s harshest critics would accuse him of selling out to commercial endeavors when he could have used his time and talent to produce the type of creative work that had defined his time with Eisner & Iger and the twelve-year run of The Spirit, when he was young and hungry and bursting with the types of ideas that made him a leader in the comics world. Eisner scoffed at such criticism. He openly admitted that he enjoyed the art of the deal, the bantering and negotiating that accompanied each new contract. He had a family to support. Besides, he’d point out, sometimes testily, the work he was doing in instructional comics was groundbreaking.
If nothing else, his résumé was impressive, covering an astonishing range of topics and clients. Besides the government contract for P*S magazine, American Visuals produced materials for such corporate clients as General Motors, the American Red Cross, Fram Oil Filters, the Baltimore Colts professional football team, the American Medical Association, and RCA Victor. His Job Scene booklets (produced for the Department of Labor and designed to offer career guidance to people unaware of career opportunities) and his educational supplements used in grammar schools supported Eisner’s theory that comic art could be used in almost any kind of learning situation.
“I became far more interested in the use of comics as an instructional medium than I was as an entertainment medium,” he told the Comics Journal. “I felt that was a new channel for the use of comics. All my life, professionally, I’ve been really obsessed with the idea of trying something new. I’m in love with innovation and experimentation. It’s risky, but it’s really very exhilarating.”
Some of Eisner’s projects bordered on the bizarre and were nothing but manifestations of Eisner the businessman. Mike Ploog, an artist and Marine Corps veteran with a style so uncannily close to Eisner’s that it fooled even those close to the two, remembered the chaos he encountered when he joined American Visuals in 1970, late in the company’s existence. Ploog had been hired to work on P*S, but as he quickly determined, there was a lot more going on in Eisner’s Park Avenue offices than the army publication. “There were all kinds of goofy things going on,” he said, referring to the piles of old Spirit plates stored at the facility, as well as Eisner’s other business interests, including a program he called “World Explorer,” which found him buying and selling trinkets from all over the world to school-age children subscribing to his newsletter and ordering these items from advertisements he placed in the newsletter.
“We used to get these strange boxes full of exotic bric-a-brac,” Ploog said.
He used to bring in goofy things like pipes from Peru, and silk worms from Japan. They used to be stored in boxes all over the place, and they used to be shipped out in these educational supplements. I remember we had silk worms in the basement that the rats got. We ended up with boxes and boxes of empty