Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [85]
For all the business pouring in, money could still be tight. Overhead and payroll rose in proportion to the company’s increasing number of artists, needed office equipment and supplies, telephone and postage costs, and insurance and other expenses, and Eisner often found himself scrambling to balance the books. Profit margins could be razor thin. Eisner never had trouble generating work; the issue, as it is with all small businesses, was to produce the work, bill the client, collect payment in a timely fashion, and move on to the next project before cash flow became problematic.
The challenge was apparent in the different permutations of American Visuals—and other Eisner companies—through the 1950s and 1960s. At one point, American Visuals filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and merged with the Koster-Dana Corporation. However, this turned out to be a big corporate headache for Eisner, who was unaccustomed to answering to stockholders. Koster-Dana was a media conglomerate with syndicated newspaper and radio companies to go along with its popular Good Reading Rack Service, which produced instructional pamphlets for schools and corporations; while he never admitted as much, it could be that as president of the company’s communications divisions, Eisner had spread himself too thin. The company thrived under his leadership, doubling the value of its stock, but Eisner clashed with its board of directors as much as he’d clashed with the army over P*S. Ultimately, he broke with Koster-Dana and went back to running a small company.
The frenetic pace could be grueling. In addition to his obligatory travels for P*S, there was other work-related travel that kept him on the road more than Ann would have liked—on top of the long days he spent at his Manhattan office before commuting home to White Plains.
Eisner’s career—or at least the public’s awareness of it—received an unexpected boost with the 1965 publication of The Great Comic Book Heroes, a book-length essay that was part memoir, part comics history, and part appreciation, written by Eisner’s onetime protégé Jules Feiffer. E. L. Doctorow, then working as an editor at Dial Press before embarking on his renowned career as a novelist, had contacted Feiffer about writing the book. Doctorow wanted a serious look at comics, something that went outside the usual comic-book-bashing screeds that popped up on publishers’ lists from time to time. Superman and Batman were now on their second generation of readers, comics had withstood stiff challenges from their opponents, and it seemed like a good time to revisit the past.
Feiffer was a good candidate to write the book. He had been creating Sick, Sick, Sick (later entitled Feiffer), some of the edgiest, most intelligent cartooning in the business, for the Village Voice since 1956. Besides being a recognizable name helpful in the marketing of the book, and a talent giving him a voice of authority in analyzing comics, Feiffer had a history in the business dating back to the early years.
The Great Comic Book Heroes began with a brief description of Feiffer’s own childhood love of comic strips, and from there he took a workmanlike approach to dissecting comics history, detailing the development of early comic books and covering the births of Superman and Batman. Never one to withhold an opinion, Feiffer offered caustic commentary about the superheroes’ sidekicks, and he took a few potshots at Fredric Wertham and his theories about homosexuality and lesbianism in comics. His passage on the studios and sweatshops was as thorough as anything published to that point.
Will Eisner and The Spirit warranted a chapter, and Feiffer was generous in his appreciation of his former boss. He praised Eisner’s use of German expressionist cinematic techniques in The Spirit and of his use of humor—a rarity in superhero comics at the time. Feiffer’s wisecracking style,