Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [90]
Eisner loved to tell the story about a day in June 1971, when his secretary took a call from a man named Phil Seuling.
“I want to invite him to a comic convention,” Seuling said when he asked to speak to Eisner. He went on to explain that he was running a convention that would take place on July 4 at the Commodore Hotel in New York City. Eisner, he mentioned, would be a most welcome guest.
The confused secretary paused for a moment, put her hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone, and called out to Eisner in his office:
“Mr. Eisner, were you once a cartoonist?”
That innocent question illustrates how far Eisner had withdrawn from the comics scene. His secretary knew nothing about The Spirit. Eisner had stored that past life in his home in White Plains, and he never spoke of it at the office.
Eisner had to be talked into attending the convention. He couldn’t imagine what relevance he might have in such a setting. The Great Comic Book Heroes had put his name back in the spotlight for a brief period, but Eisner felt no compelling reason to bring back the Spirit for a series of new adventures. Comic book heroes had been reinvented in the nearly two decades that had passed since the Spirit made his last appearance on a regular basis, and Eisner seriously doubted that young readers would be interested in a detective who wore a fedora, gloves, suit, tie, and mask—a hero without superpowers or, at the very least, a utility belt packed with cool gadgets.
Seuling, however, could be very persuasive. “Come on down,” he insisted.
Eisner finally agreed.
Meanwhile, half a country away, a tall, angular, long-haired Wisconsin comic book artist and publisher named Denis Kitchen was about to embark on his first trip to that same New York convention. Although only twenty-four, Kitchen had put a lot of mileage on his artistic odometer, as a cartoonist and publisher, co-founder of a college humor magazine and, shortly thereafter, an alternative newspaper. He’d “met” Phil Seuling about six months earlier, when Kitchen and fellow Wisconsin cartoonist Jim Mitchell, broke and hungry, decided to sell some of their original art to pay bills and buy groceries. They placed an ad in the Bugle-American, the Milwaukee paper that Kitchen had co-founded. SAVE A STARVING ARTIST, read the ad’s headline. The two received one response—from someone named Phil Seuling, who had somehow run across the ad even though he was out on the East Coast. In lieu of placing an order for artwork, Seuling sent Kitchen a Coney Island salami with an attached card that read, “Never let it be said that Phil Seuling let cartoonists starve.” The two corresponded, and in the months following the Great Salami Episode, Kitchen had drawn some comic strip advertisements for Seuling, repaying Seuling’s generosity and bartering some of his ads for original Al Capp artwork.
What Kitchen lacked in money he compensated for in ambition, chutzpah, hard work, talent, good timing, resourcefulness, and luck—the ideal recipe for a successful artist (or at least a constantly working one) in any field. Born August 27, 1946, Kitchen had been raised in the state known for its political extremes, for Fightin’ Bob La Follette and Joe McCarthy, whose political ideologies were debated on the University of Wisconsin campus and in smoky corner taverns, where Friday night fish fries were treated like sacraments and the Milwaukee Braves and Green Bay Packers like seasonal deities. Like every kid growing up in the fifties, Kitchen loved comics, but unlike other kids at the time, he wanted to create them. Since art school wasn’t an option, he’d taught himself to draw. He loved Mad magazine, particularly the work of Harvey Kurtzman, whom he tried to emulate when, as an undergrad, he started up Snide, the first (and only) humor magazine ever to come out of the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. According to Kitchen, the magazine failed after one of its editors, a New Yorker with some street smarts, took the magazine’s profits and tried to invest them in pot, only to