Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [93]
The following year, the convention moved to the Broadway Central Hotel, and each ensuing year saw the convention growing in popularity. Bubnis dropped out of the business, and Seuling graduated from soda salesman to convention organizer. As Seuling saw it, the convention was too provincial for its potential: “In 1968, I said, ‘Hell, why are we doing this on such a small scale? Let’s get some people here from Oshkosh, Peoria, and Podunk.’ We ran it at the Statler Hilton Hotel and called it the International Hotel.”
Attendance rocketed, expanding exponentially, as Seuling knew it would. By 1971, the convention was pulling in sixty-five hundred attendees and still growing. Seuling was now earning enough money off his former hobby to seriously consider giving up teaching and pursuing a career in distributing comics and presenting conventions. His annual convention, held on the Fourth of July weekend, became a fixture in the industry.
After he started attending them in 1971, conventions energized Will Eisner through the rest of his career. He loved looking over the new books and chatting with their creators; he enjoyed the talk about the business of comics, from contracts to sales figures. He had a keen understanding of the evolution of comics, and he tried to anticipate the directions in which they were heading. To Eisner, conventions were sensory overload, and he would walk away from them with a newfound enthusiasm for the future. Over the years, he would repeatedly mention how, after attending a convention, he couldn’t wait to get back to work. It wasn’t just a matter of a collision between ambition and inspiration; Eisner hated the thought of being outdone by the upstarts that he’d just met, regardless of how friendly and encouraging he could be toward them on the convention floor.
Eisner’s self-portrait appeared in the Kitchen Sink Press series of “Great Cartoon Artists” buttons, issued in 1975. (Courtesy of Denis Kitchen)
He hadn’t seen any underground comix prior to attending the New York Comic Art Convention in 1971, but he’d heard more than enough about them to spark his curiosity. Something was happening, and it was happening away from New York, Eisner’s home base and the traditional epicenter of comics operations. Marvel and DC were still at the top of the charts in terms of sales and influence, but they were earning their keep in the superhero game, even if such young writers and artists as Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams were pushing the boundaries of superhero entertainment by adding heavy doses of social consciousness to their work. Eisner wanted no more to do with creating superheroes than he had while he was working on The Spirit. From everything he’d heard, the undergrounds were entirely different, from the topics they addressed between their colorful covers to the way they were being marketed and distributed. They had shelf life. They weren’t being issued every month or so, only to be pulled from the racks and replaced when a new issue came out. They stuck around until they were sold, and in the cases of really successful ones, additional printings were issued. This was radically different from anything Eisner had ever experienced.
He’d heard of Denis Kitchen and his continuously expanding operations, Krupp Comic Works and Kitchen Sink Enterprises, which in just a few years’ time had grown from publishing a handful of titles per year to moving into merchandising and recording. Robert Crumb, the most recognizable name in comix, was publishing regularly with Kitchen; his Home Grown Funnies had been Kitchen Sink’s first bestseller. When Eisner learned that Kitchen was attending the convention, he asked French comics historian Maurice Horn to set up a meeting. Horn ran across Kitchen in the dealer