Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [89]
Will, Ann, and John Eisner in an undated professional family photograph. (Courtesy of Ann Eisner)
Will Eisner enjoyed fatherhood. His creativity spilled over into his domestic life, when he added artistic touches to his children’s lives, such as the time he brought home a rowboat and converted it into a sandbox or when he painted scenes and cartoon figures on the walls of his children’s bedrooms. John was bright, extroverted, and athletic, and he showed enough artistic promise that Eisner wondered if he might join him one day in the studio. Alice, the more introspective of the two, shared her father’s keen powers of observation and his sensitivity toward the less fortunate. Ann remembered a time when Alice was watching a television program or commercial about impoverished children and demanded that they send a donation. Eisner was the soft touch, slow to scold his children and easily amused by them, and Ann often found herself in the role of disciplinarian in the raising of their children.
Ann remembered a time when Alice was about fourteen. She wanted a pair of expensive, fashionable boots that Ann deemed to be a little excessive. Alice waited until that Saturday, when her father was home for the weekend, and talked him into taking her to the mall for the boots. Ann hadn’t discussed her prior refusal to get the boots with her husband, but she was fairly certain, in retrospect, that he knew the situation. “He did whatever the kids asked him to do,” she remarked, adding with a laugh, “He was a patsy.”
That incident, very insignificant in the grand scheme of a person’s lifetime, became a kind of photograph—one that Ann and Will Eisner preserved in their memories when life changed for all of them a year later, when Alice, now fifteen, began complaining of not feeling well. Ann took her to the family physician, and after the usual battery of tests, she and Will learned that Alice had leukemia and wasn’t expected to live. Ann and Will decided not to tell their daughter how gravely ill she was, and for the next year, they struggled with her declining health in their own ways. Will buried himself in work, unable to confront the horrific reality that he was about to lose his daughter; Ann spent almost all of her time with Alice, in and out of the hospital. When Alice passed away at age sixteen, it was on her mother’s birthday.
Alice and John Eisner. (Courtesy of Ann Eisner)
Eisner was overwhelmed, not as much by grief as by rage. Although he was not a religious man, he felt as if some kind of agreement had been broken, as if he had lived a decent, moral life only to be punished all the same—or, worse yet, that Alice had been punished.
“He said, ‘She didn’t get a chance to live! She didn’t have a life! She was given nothing! Why?’” Ann recalled.
Eisner’s anger peaked at Alice’s funeral, when a rabbi spoke of her as if he had known her when in fact he barely knew her name. He raged at the cemetery when Alice was laid to rest on a hillside a short drive from the Eisner home.
“He didn’t cry when Alice died,” Ann recalled. “He was just very, very angry. He would not talk about it to anybody—anybody. There were times when somebody in the shop would say that Will was different. Of course he was different. You never recover from something like that.”
Eisner internalized his daughter’s death to such an extent that some friends and business associates didn’t even know that he had a daughter who had passed away. Grief, he felt, was private—a family matter. His work was his therapy, and later, when the time was right, he would creatively combine his work and grief into a sequential art form that would help change the direction of comics.
chapter nine
B A C K I N T H E G A M E
It’s a little bit like being Rip Van Winkle. I go to a convention now and I stand there and look around, like in San Diego, at thousands of people milling about and hundreds and hundreds of comics and comic book booths and I think to myself, “My God, in 1937, who would have dreamed