Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [86]
(“It was kind of a massive ten-year oversight,” Eisner said of the Spirit’s socks. “I never paid any attention to it. Still to this day I don’t know what color socks he should have. Jules picked it up because he was concerned, and it was always very funny with him, because he would say, ‘Gee, look, he’s got no socks on!’ and we would laugh and think it was very funny.”)
Feiffer’s greatest enthusiasm was for Eisner’ technique:
Eisner’s line had weight. Clothing sat on his characters heavily; when they bent an arm, deep folds sprang into action everywhere. When one Eisner character slugged another, a real fist hit real flesh. Violence was no externalized plot exercise; it was the gut of his style. Massive and indigestible, it curdled, lava-like, from the page.
This was the stuff guaranteed to catch the attention of readers too young to remember The Spirit or to even know Eisner’s name. The Spirit was a notable contrast to other figures—Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Sub-Mariner, Captain America—discussed in the essay, and when the book was excerpted in Playboy, a huge audience in the magazine’s eighteen-to-thirty-year-old readership was introduced to a character that had slipped into the past. As for Eisner’s importance and influence in comic book history, Feiffer pulled no punches in his assessment: “Alone among comic book men, Eisner was a cartoonist other cartoonists swiped from.”
Despite his having no use for the work Eisner was doing for P*S magazine, or for his American Visuals productions, Feiffer felt that Eisner more than warranted inclusion in his book. “I knew Will had disappeared,” he said four and a half decades later, “and I felt this was a crime. He deserved the critical attention he’d never had. I wouldn’t have existed without him, without reading The Spirit, learning from The Spirit. He, along with Caniff, was an enormous presence in my life, long before I met him.”
The book pleased Eisner to no end. Over the years he and Feiffer had remained in touch, although only occasionally, and reading his analysis brought back fond memories of good work that somehow was accomplished under backbreaking deadlines. An entire Spirit story had been included in the book, leading to inquiries about the possibilities of reprinting some of the old stories. Eisner, who figured he’d put The Spirit to rest for good more than a decade earlier, entertained the idea and, in a surprise to the feature’s old fans, even produced a new story, a humorous swipe at New York City mayor John Lindsay for the January 9, 1966, New York Herald Tribune. Al Harvey of Harvey Publications saw the new Spirit and approached Eisner about issuing comic books with reprints and some new material. The first appeared in October 1966, with a new “origin story” for readers unfamiliar with the Spirit’s background. A second book arrived five months later, in March 1967, with a new story and several reprinted episodes.
Reception of the comic books was disappointing, and no further issues were published. Eisner, despite enjoying a new dip into Spirit adventures, retired the title again.
The Vietnam War assured Eisner of steady, if somewhat controversial, work on P*S. By the mid-1960s, with an antiwar movement springing up on college campuses across the United States, anyone over thirty and working for the military was a target for protesters. Eisner didn’t hear much directly from the antiwar factions, but as someone whose political views leaned left of center, he could understand how his work might be judged as contributing to the war effort. Nevertheless, he felt no internal conflicts over what he was doing.
I wasn’t training people