Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [99]
In recalling the conversation nearly four decades later, Kitchen could only laugh at the irony. “I had this notion that publishers force oppressive contracts on artists,” he’d say, “and here was the artist forcing the contract on the publisher.”
Eisner agreed with Kitchen on one point: He didn’t like paying attorneys to review contracts, either. So he offered to draw up a contract using his own boilerplate language. If Kitchen agreed with the wording and terms, he could sign the contract and it would be a legally binding document.
Denny Colt, the detective who’d risen from the dead to become the Spirit, was about to be resurrected once again.
*“Comix” was an informal term, adopted by publishers, artists, and fans to signify the difference between the usual mainstream comics of the day and the alternative publications springing up across the United States in the late sixties and early seventies. In Comics in Wisconsin comics creator and historian Paul Buhle wrote: “The x factor that changed comics to comix was first seen in San Francisco, in the poster shops where Day-Glo images and photos of very angry-looking Black Panthers pioneered a poster print business with advertising big enough to keep Ramparts magazine, then master of muckraking journalism, going for years. Young Robert Crumb was the foremost artist, by a long shot, but along with him came a dozen highly talented, definitely leftwing comics veterans, the oldest of them still not thirty, a pack of them (including Art Spiegelman) from New York. There were a handful of comix in traditional comic book form, but they had twenty-four to forty-eight pages, black-and-white insides, and a pricetag of fifty cents or a dollar.”
chapter ten
R E S U R R E C T I O N
It’s a literary dream to think that a character you created is going to live on. It’s more than anybody in this field could ever ask for. So I’m very proud of it and very grateful for it.
Eisner caught the New York convention and met Denis Kitchen at the perfect moment. He liked people to believe that he was snug and happy with his life in educational comics and P*S magazine, that he was using these opportunities to further the growth of comics in other types of media. And although this was true enough, by 1971 he’d had enough of P*S and was ready to move on. In reality, some of his corporate experiences had been nightmares that he’d just as soon forget. He had applied his art to all sorts of endeavors and could feel accomplished at it, but he wasn’t truly happy. For as creative as he could be in enterprises such as American Visuals, P*S, and A. C. Croft, a Connecticut-based firm that produced educational materials that Eisner purchased, he’d been removed from the comic book scene long enough that he missed the shop environment and the camaraderie among the artists, the energy of the comics industry, the joy of entertaining, and the challenge of finding new ways of writing comics for adults. The convention had brought all this home. He discussed this with Ann from time to time, until one day she encouraged him to divest himself of his business interests and do what made him happy.
Eisner had no interest in starting up new Spirit adventures; he was insistent about that from the onset of his relationship with Denis Kitchen. He would create new covers and add some interior artwork involving the Spirit character for the Kitchen Sink books, but he had no desire to reprise the old grind of coming up with complete, all-new stories on tight deadlines. He’d been on that treadmill nearly all of his adult life, at the cost of having to turn down other projects that demanded more time than his weekly or monthly commitments would permit. Reprints would have to suffice.
As it was, he had another Spirit reprint commitment, this one with Dave Gibson, a California comics publisher and packager who was issuing reprints as small comic books, packaged in polybags and aimed