Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [94]
Kitchen wouldn’t have been more surprised if he’d just heard that a head of state was requesting a private audience. Kitchen knew Eisner more by his reputation than by his work, but that was more than sufficient for him to know that he should be the one requesting a meeting, not the other way around.
Eisner and Kitchen met in a hotel room, where they could talk without interruption or having to shout over the din of the convention floor. Kitchen, in a ruffled shirt, purple tie-dyed pants, and tan corduroy jacket, and Eisner, in his gray three-piece suit, were the generation gap personified. It didn’t take long, however, for both to realize that their interest in each other’s work and experiences in comics transcended their age difference. Kitchen, quite naturally, wanted to know all about Eisner’s exploits in the Golden Age of comics and about his work on The Spirit. Eisner had other interests. Through Phil Seuling, he had been briefed about Kitchen’s operations, of the way he distributed his comix on a no-return policy, how he paid royalties to his artists (as opposed to flat page rates), how he returned all the original art to the artists, and how the artists retained their copyrights. All this differed from the way the big companies conducted business, and Eisner, who was toying with the idea of starting his own magazine of Spirit reprints, wanted every bit of information Kitchen could supply. Eisner, Kitchen determined early in their conversation, had little interest in talking about his past. He would politely answer a question or two about the old days, then redirect the exchange back to the present and, ultimately, the future.
Bridging the generation gap: Denis Kitchen created this sketch of his first meeting with Eisner in 1971. The two became close friends, working together from their initial meeting until Eisner’s death in 2005. (Courtesy of Denis Kitchen)
“I was impressed,” Kitchen noted later. “This straight-looking fellow seemed to be a kindred spirit. I had been under the impression, like the rest of the industry, that Eisner had more or less retired from comics. In retrospect, we couldn’t have been more wrong.”
Eisner later admitted that he, too, had to dismiss his first impressions.
“To a buttoned-down type like me, this should have sent me running in the other direction,” he said of his initial impressions of Kitchen. “However, it didn’t take great genius to see that what was afoot was a reprise of the frontier days of 1938.”
The more Eisner heard, the more he appreciated what the undergrounds had to offer. In the past, he’d always had to conform, one way or another, to firms purchasing his work, whether it was Fiction House buying work from Eisner & Iger or the Sunday newspapers picking up The Spirit supplements. The army had rigid restrictions for P*S magazine, and his bosses there wouldn’t have considered returning his art. For all he knew, it was being destroyed as soon as the magazine appeared. Eisner and Kitchen talked and talked, and when Eisner eventually admitted that he had never actually seen one of these underground comix, Kitchen offered to take him back to the convention for a look. Kitchen was thrilled. When he’d left Wisconsin for the East Coast, he couldn’t have predicted in his wildest fancies that he would be making friends with one of the most influential figures in comics history.
Unfortunately, the Eisner-Kitchen meeting ended abruptly, and on less than favorable terms, when Kitchen walked Eisner to the dealer area, to a grouping of several long tables stacked with nearly every underground book on the market. Kitchen intended to select a few titles that Eisner might appreciate, but before he could do so, Eisner reached down and grabbed a copy of Zap, which contained one of the most over-the-top shock entries in early comix history, an S. Clay Wilson number, Captain Pissgums and His Pervert Pirates, in which a pirate cuts off the tip of another pirate’s penis and