Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [97]
In future speeches and interviews, Will Eisner would remember his visit to the 1971 New York convention in a much more favorable light. He would joke about running into a group of hippie artists who smoked strange-smelling cigarettes and laughed at all the wrong times, and he would remember admiring their work for the way it addressed social issues and confronted the Establishment. “That’s exactly what I felt comics should do as a literary form,” he’d say.
That’s probably how he wanted to recall it, given the way things turned out, but in reality, he might not have connected with Denis Kitchen again if Kitchen hadn’t kept his business card and contacted him. Not long after the convention, Kitchen initiated a reconciliation by sending Eisner a letter and a sampling of comix. The carefully chosen selection, taken from Kitchen Sink Press catalog, included copies of Bijou, R. Crumb’s Home Grown Funnies, and Kitchen’s own Mom’s Homemade Comics.
“Enclosed is a sampling of our line of underground comic books,” Kitchen wrote in his July 14, 1971, cover letter. “I think you will find them generally more tasteful than the unfortunate titles you happened to pick up in the dealers’ area of the Comic Art Convention.” Those titles, Kitchen made a point of mentioning, had been the products of a competing publisher, not of Kitchen Sink Press.
Eisner responded favorably. “You are quite right!” he told Kitchen of the comix he’d sent him. “They are more tasteful and much more professional than most. I’m particularly impressed with your own work and I was glad to see that your books have something more to say than fornication! There’s a lot of exciting promise here.”
Eisner’s enthusiastic response summed up in a very few words the basic difference, then and in the future, between Eisner and some of his contemporaries. Comic book artists, often afflicted with egos surpassing their talents or importance, could be quite dismissive and snarky in their comments about the works of others. Eisner possessed a substantial ego of his own, but with only an occasional, surprising lapse here and there, he tempered it into the kind of self-confidence that permitted him to be open-minded without the poison of negative competitiveness. He might not have cared for an artist’s style or the theme or content of an artist’s story, but he remained open to the possibilities of almost any form of expression.
Scott McCloud, graphic novelist and author of Understanding Comics and Making Comics, would recall a time, years after that New York convention, when he was sitting in on one of Eisner’s classes at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He had approached Eisner before class with a book by Japanese manga artist Osamu Tezuka and wondered what Eisner thought of it. “He liked it instantly,” McCloud said. “He really was quite fascinated by what he was seeing. He picked it up and held it aloft to his students and said, ‘There, you see, this guy’s not a slave to the close-up like you guys are.’ I showed the very same book to another very accomplished artist. He picked it up, flipped through it for no more than fifteen seconds, put it down, and said, ‘That’s enough for me.’ It really did point out the difference between the two men. Will was eternally curious. He could just turn on a dime when exposed to new ideas, even if he began with one idea in his head. He was always open, always ready to change, always ready to accept that there might be something else that didn’t previously belong to his universe or perception.”
Denis Kitchen reminded Eisner of his own youthful ambitions. Kitchen was as much an outsider as Eisner had been back in the 1930s, when he decided to enter a field with very little past and no predictable future. As a businessman, Kitchen showed the same type of gumption that Eisner himself had shown when he’d formed Eisner & Iger and, later, his