Will Eisner Champion of the Graphic Novel ( PDFDrive )

What Feiffer did do was learn. “There are a number of people you meet as an artist, if you’re lucky enough, who give you permission, open doors for you, show you the way. They open a dark room and flash a light on in it. You say, ‘Oh my god, the stuff in this room. I had no idea there’s so much stuff in this room!’ Then you go into the room and you do your own thing in that room, but you could never have done it if that artist didn’t show you the light. And Will splashed just that kind of light.” Feiffer’s presence in the studio meant more than another pair of hands. Eisner had a disciple who truly appreciated his quest to elevate comics, and the process of teaching and talking about the art form would contribute to Eisner’s own understanding of his work, as all teachers learn by teaching. “When you were in a conversation with Will, you always knew you were in a conversation with a thinking man,” said Feiffer. “I don’t mean an intellectual, I mean someone who was deeply involved with process. One of the things I truly hated and resented as his apprentice, not yet even an assistant, was he insisted that I know how comics were made, and he took me down to the printing plant. He showed me the presses. I had no curiosity about the machinery at work. But Will had curiosity about how you do things, how you make things work.” Here was someone Eisner could talk to about his aspirations for comics and who would help make them happen. Eisner would recall, “We used to have long discussions about [comics] as an art form—not quite the same way as it’s done today; with no nostalgia, really groping. ‘How can we improve this?’” Feiffer himself pointed to another factor: “Look at the pre-war Spirit and the dramatic shift [after the war]. Noir film had come in; Will had seen Double Indemnity. He saw how the windows cast shadows on people’s faces, and he learned those lessons as nobody else did.” Or as Frank Miller, the writer/penciler of The Dark Knight Returns put it, looking back on Eisner’s return, “It was as if the handcuffs had come off.” EISNER HIMSELF ATTRIBUTED much of the change to the limits of his earlier days, saying, “Prior to the war, I had spent most of my life working and drawing within the walls of the studio—a pretty cloistered life. I had not really seen much of the world.” When you consider that Eisner started Eisner and Iger at nineteen and had been working incessantly at a drawing board from then until leaving for the army six years later, that’s a gentle understatement. It was a different man who came home, and a different artist.

Above and next: Selected panels from “The Origin of The Spirit,” The Spirit no. 294, January 13, 1946. Note the tremendous growth in storytelling and mood as the series evolved. Every element, including the lettering, is more polished and effective.

One change was his level of sophistication. The Eisner who had left for the army was long past being a virgin or a naïf. But the hours at the board, and a social world heavily weighted with aspiring cartoonists and family, had influenced his view of real and fantasy women. When Eisner came back, his women were different. The Spirit was still frequently challenged by tough women who alternated their murderous schemes by vying with Ellen for his affection, but Eisner was being less subtle about their sexuality. Silk Satin returns in his very first month back, but with the revelation that a little girl named Hildie, introduced in the strip a few episodes before, is her daughter—a revelation shrugged off with, “What are you all staring at? It happens in the best of families!” Silk was followed by Nylon Rose (at a time when nylons were famously the best barter goods for American soldiers in occupied Europe when the boys wanted a little R&R with the local ladies), and Olga Bustle (“the girl with the big, big … eyes …”). And then … P’Gell. “I am P’Gell … and this is not a story for little boys!!” she introduced herself in one of the most oft-reprinted Spirit splashes (October 6, 1946). Eisner’s most blatantly sexual villainess proceeded to serially seduce, marry, and murder her victims. A play on the Quartier Pigalle, Paris’s district with cabarets and sex shops, she’d dance through the life of victim after victim, acquiring diamonds and secret formulas and inspiring some of Eisner’s most interesting compositions. The change in Eisner’s own sophistication was uneven. Ebony’s dialect and facial features still seemed left over from a less enlightened Eisner. Ebony was spurned by a girl for talking like a “civil war minstrel man,” and decided to go off to school to get educated. Ebony still makes later-generation readers uncomfortable, but his temporary replacement, an Eskimo named Blubber, at least speaks precisely in his debut. By the time Ebony returned, he was still talking colorfully, but not in full “minstrel” style. Ebony—and the whole African American experience—would continue to be problematic for Eisner, as a 1947 episode incorporating references to bebop music showed. The younger and more politically aware Feiffer winced and closed his eyes. Eisner’s life was changing in his artistic circles, too. The cartoonists who had united to entertain the troops during the war formed the National Cartoonists Society following its end in 1946. Feiffer recalled, “The National Cartoonists Society wouldn’t allow a comic book artist in … I think Will was the first, because as original as The Spirit was, if it was only appearing in Police Comics, [his membership] would never have happened. It was only because it appeared in the newspapers. I’m not sure [Jerry] Siegel and [Joe] Shuster were in the

National Cartoonists Society, even [though] Superman was syndicated.” That brought new, sometimes complex relationships. Men such as Milton Caniff, who had been Eisner’s inspirations, were now peers. One of Eisner’s new peers was Al Capp, whose Li’l Abner was an incredibly popular strip. Capp himself was a public figure when he called Eisner in 1947 to suggest they stage a fake feud and crossover parodies of their characters. Eisner went for it and delivered on their agreement in his July 20 strip that year. But Capp never followed through by featuring a hint of The Spirit in his much more widely read strip. The bad blood lingered.

Original art for the splash of “A Legend,” The Spirit no. 321, July 21, 1946. Nobody in comics used weather like Eisner, particularly rainstorms.

Original art, Spirit Jam, 1981. MAD Magazine creator Harvey Kurtzman, arguably Eisner’s only peer in his generation as both a pioneer and a teacher, in this panel coined the neologism “Eisnshpritz” (later modified to Eisenspritz or Eisenshpritz) to describe Eisner’s energetic rainstorms.

“The School for Girls,” The Spirit no. 347, January 19, 1947. A pioneering example of a storytelling device that has become common decades later—a cutaway where the action proceeds from room to room as though in panels.

Original art for “Li’l Adam,” The Spirit no. 373, July 20, 1947. A murderous feud between Eisner and cartoonist Al Capp was born in the pages of this story, when Capp didn’t honor his deal to reciprocate by featuring the Spirit in his more widely read strip, Li’l Abner.

If cross-promotion didn’t attract readers to The Spirit, Eisner would pull them in with his attention-grabbing splash pages, which reached their peak in the postwar years. A highly arbitrary analysis of them shows that seven of the classic logo-integrated-into-a-scene splashes were on pre-draft Spirits, only two during Eisner’s service, and fifty after his return. If there’s a singular signature for The Spirit, it’s these pieces, and Eisner hits his stride much more often on his return. The art itself changed, too. Eisner retells the Spirit’s origin within weeks back at the board, but this is a very different cartoonist at work. The body language, the expressions, the subtlety of the drawing, is so much better than five years before. It’s possible that another effect of breaking out of the cloister was that Eisner had more of an opportunity to study different people in his army years, observing how they expressed themselves and filing it away for future reference. His ink line was smoother, too, as if Eisner decided that he could portray more as a cartoonist than an illustrator, using a bolder brushstroke. The better storytelling allows the art and dialogue to tell the tale without excessive narration. The dialogue, even the lettering, was now snappier than before. Physically, the characters and their staging changed, too. “The later Eisner did bodies that were real and thick, and when somebody threw a punch, you felt it, in a way you didn’t even with [Jack] Kirby, because Kirby’s realism wasn’t real,” Feiffer observed. “When a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound guy slugged the Spirit, you knew he was getting the shit kicked out of him. It comes right out of The Glass Key, when William Bendix is kicking the shit out of Alan Ladd, and Bendix is three times the size of Alan Ladd. When [Eisner] did someone who weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, you knew it, and when he did someone who weighed three hundred pounds, you knew that. He put weight on the page as nobody else did.” One of the other lasting signatures of Eisner’s art style manifests after his return: “the Eisenshpritz,” a term his fellow artists used for how he’d depict the rainy deluges in The Spirit. Weather is a notoriously difficult element for cartoonists to incorporate in their work: Besides the amount of detail involved in rain falling, it needs to affect the complex folds of clothing, the texture of the ground below, lighting sources … in short, almost everything. But the mood of a rainy day was perfect for the emotions of many Spirit stories, and Eisner changed the climate of his hero’s environment to take advantage of it. Take Eisenshpritz, and add the shadows cast in a night city, and that’s a perfect background for the postwar Spirit’s deadliest villain, the Octopus. Never fully seen during this period, he was consistently behind a great deal of mayhem,

with only his distinctive gloves marking his presence. On one level, the Spirit inhabited a deadlier city after the war, and yet the stories somehow were simultaneously heavier and lighter. Eisner was able to accomplish this by gently violating the syndicate’s guideline that the stories had to be complete in each supplement (even tougher now that the postwar episodes were shorter). Eisner, therefore, began using the tools of story continuity to work around the limits. Continuity was a subtler tool in Eisner’s hands than in the cliffhangers of the movie serials that played in theaters week after week. The Octopus’s plot would be foiled, and the Spirit’s eyes bandaged from the resulting explosion … but the audience is led to believe he’ll be able to see “in a day or so,” but it wasn’t. The next week, a still-blind Spirit solves an unrelated case, and the week after he manages to clear a dog accused of murder. Until finally, with the assistance of Silken Floss, and a miracle formula, his sight is restored. Over the cycle, Eisner plays with a wide tonal range, giving his readers variety but keeping the links that give the underlying story more resonance.

“Li’l Adam,” The Spirit no. 373, July 20, 1947.

Detail, original art for “The Story of Gerhard Schnobble,” The Spirit no. 432, September 5, 1948. From the back of the first page of original art for the story: an unpublished Eisner doodle, a variation of the art for the first page of the story.

Overall, the tone grew lighter after the war, more playful. Whether it was reflective of Eisner’s own mood or his perception of the nation’s attitude, more episodes ended with a line to make the reader smile, even if a heinous crime had unraveled. And more and more often, Eisner would just go all the way for gentle laughs, whether with a struggle over the ownership of the acquitted dog, or even a bit of pre-MAD satire on the increasing commercialization of society—by doing an episode interlaced with commercials until the Spirit trashed Eisner himself, exclaiming, “How cheap can a cartoonist get?” (Perhaps a knowing bit of self-parody there, as Eisner’s upbringing had led him to be very careful with money, and his unusual business acumen for a cartoonist only exaggerated that part of his reputation among his colleagues.) As often as not, the stories still ended with a dead body. But Eisner clearly did feel that the “handcuffs were off,” and he began to do stories that only remotely fit the original definition of the strip. Decades later, in conversation with Milton Caniff, Eisner talked about one of the difficulties of syndication. “One initially enters the syndicate strip business with a new idea and a fresh idea and a fresh personality. And your strip becomes widely bought. A year or two later, being the inventive person you are, you want to add new things and do new things, and then your hand is stayed because they say, ‘We bought this particular strip. We want you to be what you were when we bought you.’” If Eisner really felt any of that pressure, he pushed his way past it. Eisner was comfortable enough to devote an episode to adapting an Ambrose Bierce short story, saluting one of the authors whose works consistently inspired him, and ending with the Spirit telling Ebony not to neglect books as part of his entertainment. A month later, Eisner followed with an adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe tale. Not content with staging short stories and slipping them into the format by a meaningful appearance of his nominal hero, for a moment Eisner was stepping away from constraints entirely and flying. Which leads, inexorably, to Eisner’s favorite Spirit comic over the twelve- year run: “The Story of Gerhard Shnobble.” Eisner pulled out all the stops on this installment, including introducing photomontage for backgrounds. In his own words: “It represents the first time I allowed myself to go flat out for a ‘literary’ theme. It epitomized the philosophical statement which I regard as the true distinction between the entertainment story and the story that makes comics literature.”

Next seven images: “The Story of Gerhard Schnobble,” The Spirit no. 432, September 5, 1948. Eisner’s favorite of the Spirit tales, it was perhaps a metaphor for his own frustrations, as his work “flew” but achieved little recognition outside the comics community.













Original manuscript page for “The Cigar,” an unpublished Spirit story, c. 1948, later reprinted in The Spirit Archives no. 26, 2009. Klaus Nordling’s original typed script for this episode is one of the few manuscripts from the entire run to survive.

On another level, however, it’s possible that Eisner’s love of the tale came from its echo of some of his own feelings about his work. Eisner described the story by saying, “People have moments of glory that nobody knows about.” By the time Shnobble was done, in late 1948, The Spirit clearly represented a unique achievement, something different from what had been done previously in comic books or comic strips in America; Eisner had flown. But in many ways, humankind hadn’t noticed. There were no reviews of comics paralleling those done of books or even films, no scholarly studies of the form; it would be two more decades before the first histories of the comic strip or comic book would be published in America. Comics had not gathered the critical regard Eisner had imagined they would in the seven years since his statement about the future of the medium in that Philadelphia Record article. Rather, it was the reverse. Since 1940, there had been a stream of criticism of comic books and their effect on young people. By 1948, the stream was becoming a rushing tide, with local laws restricting the distribution of crime comics, and with comic book burnings and crusaders trying to brand comics as the cause of juvenile delinquency. In general, newspaper strips didn’t feel the heat the way comic books did, in part because the newspaper editors had kept the boundaries far more sanitized than some of the comic book publishers, and in part because, as a stepchild of the papers, the strips were viewed as part of the media establishment and, therefore, less singled out for attack. Eisner wasn’t afraid, even having tweaked the censors in small print in a Spirit episode on July 13, 1947, entitled “Fairy Tales for Juvenile Delinquents.” He turned up the heat a bit more on February 2, 1949, with a story about a music teacher who salvages a comic from a comic book burning by the school psychiatrist, Dr. Wolfgang Worry (more than likely a nod to Dr. Fredric Wertham, a leading voice in the attacks on comics), only to be terrified by the small child who wants to reclaim it.

Original art layouts for “The Cigar,” c. 1948. Klaus Nordling’s layouts for this unpublished Spirit script survives on the back of a page of “Gerhard Schnobble” originals.

Original art for the splash of “Il Duce’s Locket,” The Spirit no. 365, May 25, 1947. Eisner’s postwar women such as P’Gell were far sexier and more dangerous, perhaps reflecting the artist’s wider experience, and with a nod to the Quartier Pigalle, Paris’s red-light district.

If Eisner felt that his series and the medium weren’t getting the respect they deserved, that wasn’t stopping him from doing brilliant work. The Spirit continued at top form through 1950, with Feiffer growing into more of a collaborator and writing some of the scripts. Feiffer had even gotten the opportunity to do his own strip, Clifford, on the last page of the now-shrunken supplement. Part of the fun of working in the studio was the conversation: “Will and I were the two smart Jews in the room who read books and had ideas. Then [letterer] Abe Kanegson came along, who was like that, too,” Feiffer recalled. And part of the fun was continuing to push the limits of the form. One of Feiffer’s favorites was done in the style of a child’s primer, “The Story of Rat- Tat, the Toy Machine Gun” on September 4, 1949, written around the time that some stories began to be produced from his scripts without significant rewriting by Eisner. Eisner was devoting some of his prodigious energy to new ventures through American Visuals, but The Spirit continued to soak up most of the energy in the studio and generate most of the income. Even if Eisner wasn’t scripting a particular story, he would be constructing it by providing the layouts in rough pencils, doing the work of a director, cinematographer, set designer, and the actors. It’s difficult in a studio collaboration to tell where the specific credits for any piece of work belong, but because Eisner was both the leading talent in the room and the creator of the characters and the format, it’s impossible to understate his influence. As the forties ended and the fifties began, he was increasingly distracted by new opportunities and projects, but the exceptional quality of The Spirit was maintained by a homeopathic solution of Eisner magic … a moment of advice, or encouragement, or a redrawn line. The series wasn’t setting new standards, but it was continuing at a high level. Until it wasn’t. Part of the change was due to a new balance in Eisner’s life. He began his romance with Ann Weingarten with a Labor Day 1949 friendly lift to Maine, which matured into a lifelong partnership. But Ann was a life partner, not a comics partner (not even stepping into his studio until after they were married on June 15, 1950), so there was now a strong force pulling Eisner away from his board. Weekends, at least, would no longer be ink-stained. Ann Eisner’s family were German Jews, a distinction that, at the time, meant they had been in America longer and were more economically established and secure than Eisner’s family of Eastern European Jews, a group they often disdained for their comparative lack of education, wealth, and sophistication. Ann’s father, Melville Weingarten, was a successful stockbroker and he demonstrated no respect for Eisner’s work as a cartoonist. His attempt to lure Eisner into his field failed, but it was one more factor adding to the pressures

Eisner into his field failed, but it was one more factor adding to the pressures encouraging Eisner the businessman to take over from Eisner the artist. As 1951 went along, even the magic drop of Eisner’s contribution to the mix of talents that was creating The Spirit was growing hard to spot. His other commitments were absorbing his creative energy, and there is little of Eisner in The Spirit’s last year or year and a half besides the skills he had passed on to Feiffer and others in the studio. One telltale sign of this is the virtual disappearance of the signature splash pages, a visual puzzle for which Eisner had a unique genius: Only three truly original ones appear in 1951, and the last two at the very beginning of 1952. Eisner’s personal life had grown fuller with the birth of his son, John, on April 19, 1952, but his cartoon child was showing real signs of neglect. A last-ditch effort to bring in the very talented Wally Wood to reenergize The Spirit in late 1952 was probably doomed from the start by Wood’s other commitments. Wood crafted a story taking the Spirit to the moon, but he left Eisner picking up the deadline slack when Eisner had less appetite for that than ever before. Although The Spirit was still financially viable, its time had come. “I wanted to leave while the show was still a success,” Eisner said in retrospect. But the reality was that he’d already left. By the end, Feiffer felt, “Will was dying to give up the cartoons, the comics, and The Spirit, and be a businessman. He wasn’t getting the respect. He was Rodney Dangerfield, except that Dangerfield was a kind of a thug. Will was an intelligent, thoughtful man, working at something he was as good or better at as anyone else in the field, who wasn’t getting the payoff he believed he deserved because society and the culture didn’t value that product.” From the perspective of the twenty-first century, of course, Eisner got that respect, and on an extraordinary level. If history is written by the victors, then the cultural proponents of the possibilities of comics have clearly triumphed over their detractors. And as it is written by Eisner’s successors, the business model he developed for controlling his own property and profiting from it is looked back upon as a prescient precedent that would be emulated successfully several decades later. But although Eisner was about to step away from comics, probably expecting to do so for the rest of his career, his return would prove vital to achieving both of those triumphs.

The wedding of Will Eisner and Ann Weingarten, June 15, 1950. Eisner settled down with someone less murderous than his fictional women but strong enough to prove a successful life partner in their almost fifty-year marriage.

Next three images: Original art layouts by Jules Feiffer for “Outer Space,” The Spirit no. 635, July 27, 1952.



Detail, cover of PS: The Preventive Maintenance Monthly no. 2, July 1951.

A ALL LIVES HAVE THEIR Robert Frost moments, when two roads diverge in a wood, and late at night many of us lie in bed reconsidering our choices. Will Eisner was never an uncertain man, nor given much to dreams that looked backward, but it’s fascinating to examine the turn his life took toward commercial comics and consider what the road not traveled might have looked like. What if Eisner, at the first peak of his creative ability, had chosen to concentrate fully on storytelling for the sake of art rather than for commerce? It’s easy to imagine some glorious results … or an explosion of frustration and anger that could have ensured that his later graphic novel work never came to pass. It’s also possible that the long detour into commerce was part of the secret of his later work, building up a desire to pursue his art while learning the craft required to use it for communication of ideas that were not his own. The answers are impossible to pin down with any certainty, because Eisner did choose what, for artists, anyway, was the road less taken. After his return from the army, and the renewed vigor of his work on The Spirit, Eisner began to reach the point where he was in need of new challenges. There wasn’t room in the marketplace for another newspaper comics section like The Spirit. Indeed, no one else would ever manage to make such a project successful for an extended period of time. The shop model for producing comic book stories for publishers was vanishing, as the publishers exercised more direct control over their freelancers. Even for a star talent like Eisner, the economic opportunity in working directly for a comic book publisher was

dramatically worse than he had already achieved—and in the late 1940s, it was getting worse month by month. So the paths he’d pioneered were either well trod or exhausted. Eisner needed to find new opportunities. There was one other pioneering experience Eisner could build on: Even before Eisner and Iger had met, Eisner had produced a comic to sell a product called Gre-Solvent, a little eight-panel tale on yellow paper (to match the packaging of the soap compound). The printer who had the deal to create the comic had hired Eisner to do the content. Using comics as advertising or marketing tools had grown in the ensuing decade, and there were any number of players producing what would ultimately become known as “commercial” or “custom” comics, including major publishers such as National Comics, the publishers of Superman and Batman, and advertising agencies such as Johnstone and Cushing, which had used comics characters to promote products since the early 1930s. In most cases, commercial comics were sure moneymakers for their producers: The corporate client would provide free distribution along with their product or at a retail point of sale as a promotion, buying out the entire print run. The challenge was finding clients and convincing them that you were capable of creating and delivering a solution for their needs.

“Gre-Solvent,” 1936. Eisner’s earliest attempt to use his cartooning skills to sell a product shows only a hint of the talent he would later demonstrate.

Cartoons from The Flaming Bomb, c. 1942–43. After Eisner entered the military, he began contributing cartoons to existing army publications. Some were just to make soldiers smile, while others carried messages similar to those he would employ in PS.

If Eisner weighed the pros and cons of this venture, he would have tallied several factors in his favor: His work on Army Motors showed his experience in reaching the very men who, as they demobilized, were becoming the key customers and workers for the expanding American economy; The Spirit reached an audience in the millions, larger than any single comic book, and demonstrated his skill as a communicator with the hard numbers that businessmen preferred; and, best of all, the growing stigma that was becoming attached to comic books was not battering the newspaper comic strip world—and The Spirit was part of the newspaper. There were cons, too: The men to whom Eisner would have to sell his services were a very different sort than the editors and publishers Eisner and Iger had as customers. They were more sophisticated, more confident, and more part of the establishment. But another virtue of Eisner’s military experience, as it had been for many others during World War II, was that it had taken him out of his largely immigrant-centered community and made him interact with a wider range of people. Overall, he was ready. In his own words, “I decided I’d rather be an entrepreneur than an artist.” And so was born American Visuals. IN 1948, EISNER BEGAN TO develop ideas, pitching to companies such as Sears, Roebuck & Company, the massive retailer of the period, and creating programs for industrial training and employee relations for the burgeoning workforce. The industrial training was a direct descendent of his Army Motors work and in some cases even came about because his old military contacts were now in the publication departments of large corporations such as General Motors, and they recalled Eisner’s dexterity at communicating information. With unprecedented numbers of men reentering civilian employment, arriving with limited education and skills, employers faced challenges absorbing them even as demand soared and factories retooled for consumer goods. The eleven million military personnel being demobilized would change the dynamics of the country’s workforce. At the end of World War II, veterans’ programs offered many opportunities for the returnees, but they weren’t focused on the specific needs of companies hiring for a revitalized economy. Employers would have to come up with their own approaches to assimilate the vets.

Cover for Baseball Comics no. 1, Spring 1949. Eisner struck out with his brief venture into comics publishing.

But as has been the case for commercial comics throughout their existence, success was only achieved when a good idea matched a particular need of a client, and its executives were open-minded enough to accept this unconventional alternative to more traditional tools. While Eisner was at the drawing board, spitballing ideas, he began to develop some projects that he felt would work as regular comic books, too. From his earliest days at Eisner and Iger, he was used to negotiating face-to-face with publishers, and he felt both that his taste was better than theirs and that if they could master the process of comic book publishing, then he certainly could master it, too. Nor was Eisner the only cartoonist at the time to make the move to being a publisher. Al Capp, taking control of the comic book rights to his hit newspaper strip Li’l Abner, launched Toby Press in 1949. Given the complex relationship between Capp and Eisner, it’s not impossible to surmise that word of Capp’s decision spurred Eisner on. Regardless of the motivations, becoming a publisher was one of Eisner’s rare business misjudgments. “There’s a lot to magazine distribution that does not meet the eye; it’s like an iceberg,” Eisner would comment, looking back on his brief stint as a publisher. Kewpies; Baseball Comics; The Adventures of Nubbin, the Shoeshine Boy; and John Law all vanished as fast as they were launched, taking with them considerable amounts of Eisner’s money. He’d blame the distribution system, or the fact that his few titles were swamped by the larger lines of other publishers, but those were structural concerns he’d simply underestimated. This was a very different comic book market than the one Eisner had been most familiar with almost a decade before; successful new publishers were no longer springing up one after another and finding ways to compete. The iceberg had sunk Eisner’s publishing ambitions. Eisner would step away from taking the publishing risk on his projects at American Visuals and would stick to producing material to order for others.

“Nubbin, the Shoeshine Boy,” 1948. This never-before-published sample issue of Tab (i.e., “Tabloid”) featuring Will Eisner’s “Nubbin, the Shoeshine Boy” on the first page, was an attempt by Eisner to sell “ready-made” Sunday comics sections to smaller newspapers that could not afford to assemble their own via syndicates. Subscribing clients would add their paper’s logo at the top of this page. There were blank spots on the inside between comics so the newspaper could sell local advertising to offset the cost of buying Tab in bulk. Eisner’s mailing pitch failed to attract enough customers, and he dropped the idea.

Detail, Fireball Bambino, c. 1949. The only surviving daily from a newspaper-strip pitch developed by Eisner, playing off the nickname of the legendary Babe Ruth. Above and next: Idaho Fish and Game Commission Posters, c. 1952. Eisner created cartoon campaigns to sell products and ideas, addressing political and social issues as well as simple public safety measures such as these.



MEANWHILE, THE RELENTLESS rhythm of The Spirit sustained Eisner’s studio, even if it captured less and less of his attention and passion as the forties ended. American Visuals began to acquire a momentum of its own, producing projects across a very wide spectrum of subjects. Customers as different from the army as the American Medical Association commissioned comics, and even comics touching such far-reaching problems as soil erosion in Pakistan were pitched with the Eisner treatment, if not produced. Different visual approaches were used, but all with roots in the comic strip technique. Eisner had come to “the exciting realization that comics are a teaching tool,” and he began to perfect ways to convince clients to pay for them. It’s characteristic of commercial comics that long-term customers are the rarest for a producer to find. Most users of commercial comics either have a very specific short-term goal, such as a product promotion or marketing tie-in, or they want something that can be used and reused over and over again, such as employee training guides. So when the U.S. Army reconnected with Eisner, in the person of Norman Colton, it became a turning point for American Visuals. Colton knew Eisner from Army Motors, and he reached out because the new war in Korea would require new educational tools for the draftees to master their new equipment. Eisner took elements from his old Army Motors work, renamed the publication PS: The Preventive Maintenance Monthly, and began creating a dummy issue for testing. American Visuals would be responsible for the overall design and creation of the artwork. Unsurprisingly, given the massive bureaucracies that exist within an organization as large as the U.S. military, there were conflicts over the direction of the magazine—and over its very existence. But the need was genuine, and Eisner was uniquely qualified to answer it. It wasn’t immediately clear that the army contract would be a lasting relationship: The first contract was for only six issues, and, as with all government contracts, there was a complex bidding process when it came up for renewal. There were behind-the-scenes maneuvers as well, with Colton attempting to get a piece of equity in the project. Ann Eisner recalled, “We never anticipated the aggravation that would follow … twenty years of machinations that went into the annual negotiations regarding whether or not to renew Will’s contract.” But Eisner had grown up negotiating with the first generation of street-tough comics publishers, and he held his own through all these complications.

PS (meaning “postscript”) launched in June 1951 and immediately became the most significant program in the Eisner studio. “[It] actually helped me build an enterprise, which is the way it often happens with companies that get military contracts,” Eisner later recalled. American Visuals had hundreds of projects, since many pitches had to be developed beyond the ones that actually sold. PS alone grew to an eight-person staff within the studio, in addition to the army’s far-larger contingent that was producing the prose section and interacting with Eisner’s team. Besides the magazine itself, the studio produced work translating technical manuals for the allied nations that were fighting alongside American forces, using equipment provided by the United States. Eisner’s communication skills were very much in demand. Original art for Joe Dope poster, November 1966 Humor and sexy ladies were key to Eisner’s approach to communicating with American soldiers—a virtually all-male and mostly young audience.

The Spirit continued for a few more months, but by the time the second PS contract began, what the Octopus and the killers of Central City couldn’t do, the U.S. Army could: Denny Colt vanished into Wildwood Cemetery. Eisner was now solidly entrenched in the most business-focused period of his professional life, commuting to the city from suburban White Plains in Westchester, New York, where his family had grown with the birth of their daughter, Alice, on October 21, 1953. PS continued to thrive through the Korean conflict and survived crises, tests of its efficiency at the University of Chicago, and the war itself, becoming a steady stream of pocket-size information throughout the Cold War. PS achieved monthly status in 1955. Looking back at this body of work, graphic novelist Eddie Campbell pointed out that “humorous drawings have a long history of use as mnemonic devices, going back to the marginal drawings in medieval illuminated prayer books.” He observed that Eisner’s style on the magazine was a throwback to his earlier work, indicating that in the early days of PS there’s more pure Eisner than in the later Spirit, where the studio team had taken more of a role. The body of work produced by American Visuals reflected Eisner’s emphasis on humor as a learning tool and also represented a learning opportunity for him. Because commercial comics and the other communication projects going through his studio represented different challenges each time, Eisner continued to distill his thoughts on storytelling. Whether Rip Roscoe was extolling the joys of the new touch-tone telephones for New York Telephone, or Joe Dope was disassembling a rifle properly, Eisner preferred that you smiled as you absorbed the information. The difficulties of balancing a client’s demands, the intrinsic needs of the information to be presented, and finding an appropriate way to communicate complex ideas briefly and palatably became an opportunity for Eisner to develop his approaches. And the need to lead his staff in the execution of these projects meant that he had to explain his approach repeatedly —always a useful way for a teacher to polish a theory.

Excerpts from PS: The Preventive Maintenance Monthly no. 53, 1957 (left) and no. 26, 1954 (right).

While PS continued to be the common thread from year to year, American Visuals grew and changed several times. The company expanded into producing material for “reading racks” (as the name suggests, racks of pamphlets usually placed on a factory floor for employees to peruse during downtime, or for placement in school guidance offices to suggest career paths), and merged in the late 1950s into a publicly traded company named the Koster-Dana Corp., which was a leader in that field. Eisner became the company president, the first (and to date, six decades later, only) comic book creator to head a public company. This was a role Eisner didn’t look back on fondly, commenting, “I was a lousy man to be working in a public company and for a board of directors … they were doing things I didn’t like, for reasons I didn’t approve of.” Koster-Dana, in turn, acquired the Bell-McClure Syndicate around 1960, which reconnected Eisner with the newspaper strip business, if only briefly. Original art for a Joe Dope training poster for the Bureau of Special Services, c. 1941–45.

Ann Eisner doesn’t recall her husband aching for the creative side of comics during these years, just serving the business side of his own personality. “Will was doing things to make a living,” Ann said, noting that he was providing for his extended family and was even able to bring his younger brother, Pete, into the business. At the beginning of the 1960s, Koster-Dana was shifting its focus from storytelling into more industrial directions. So Eisner bought back American Visuals, using the leverage that the army contract (which was with him personally, not the larger entity) gave him. New projects continued to attract his attention, and he developed a publication called Job Scene for the Department of Labor, reaching five million disadvantaged youths (a particularly restive group in the mid-1960s). Not content with telling stories in cartoon form, Eisner led American Visuals into multimedia approaches and in 1967 began to publish the World Explorer Program to teach social studies in elementary grades. PS continued, and many of its readers were now fighting in Vietnam, as the American involvement in that war expanded. Eisner felt no guilt about that, explaining to interviewer John Benson in 1968, “I’m a teacher; I’m turning out instructional material,” and “I’ll teach anything with [comics]. I’d teach how to conduct a peace march in [comics] if we had a customer for it, or if I felt it was useful, or if I had a place where it could be distributed.” He visited Vietnam (as well as most of the zones where the U.S. military was active or entrenched during his years doing PS), and, while he described himself as “not being a dove,” he was clearly comfortable with what he viewed as the politically neutral task of teaching good maintenance, listing it, along with comics about democracy for Latin America, as just another in the litany of subjects he dealt with as he expanded the use of comics as a teaching tool. Looking back on the American Visuals period, some of Eisner’s critics, and even some of his friends, continue to question choices he made at the time, from his PS work to producing material for the American Medical Association against “nationalized medicine” (in the form of Medicare). As Ann Eisner commented after his death, Will had felt “that the war was a mistake. But with PS he tried to help the troops.” It’s clear, however, that Eisner the businessman took precedence over Eisner the individual on these decisions. It’s also clear that Eisner’s search for respectability for himself and his chosen medium had increasingly focused on the educational process. Teaching was eminently respectable, even echoing his mother’s importuning for him to become an art teacher. He defined himself as an educator rather than a communicator or an entertainer (though he continued to fulfill all these roles to some degree simultaneously), and using comics as educational tools was a path

some degree simultaneously), and using comics as educational tools was a path to transferring that respect to his work. That he’d moved into this aspect of comics as the medium hit its overall low point in respectability was perhaps not as coincidental as he preferred to recall. But while these new, more definably educational projects were absorbing more of Eisner’s personal attention, there were voices within the army that were interested in seeing how PS might fare with new blood, and Eisner ultimately decided it was time to walk away from PS after two decades and 227 issues. Ann recalled, “He was just exhausted” at the end. An attempt was made to shift the contract to a new, separate company quietly set up by Eisner and the people who had been producing it on Eisner’s staff, including artist Mike Ploog, who would go on to greater fame drawing for Marvel Comics. But the new company proved short-lived, and PS went into new hands in 1971. Eventually, PS would be produced by Joe Kubert, who had gone from an adolescent apprentice erasing pages at Eisner’s studio to being one of comics’ star talents and founder of his own school for cartoonists. The Joe Kubert School has been producing PS now for over two decades and continues even after its founder’s death in 2012.

Covers from PS: The Preventive Maintenance Monthly no. 1 (June 1951), no. 2 (July 1951), and no. 3 (August 1951). The colors available in the printing of PS magazine were different from the comics sections Eisner had previously produced, and the ink and uncoated paper reacted differently as well. Even among these three covers, there’s evidence of a clear learning curve to making these ingredients work effectively. After the first year, Eisner switched the cover stock to a slicker paper that allowed for more nuanced coloring.

Original art for U.S. Army poster, November 1966.

“The Sad Case of Waiting-Room Willie,” 1950. A campaign for the Baltimore City Medical Society argued against the imposition of “socialized medicine,” ultimately adopted as Medicare. Eisner family album: Will and Ann Eisner with children Alice and John. Color photos, c. September 1958. Middle photo, c. 1955.