Will Eisner Champion of the Graphic Novel ( PDFDrive )

Eisner’s remaining operations continued to go through mixed levels of success and corporate changes, merging in 1971 with Croft Educational. Eisner briefly served as chairman before resigning in 1972, taking Job Scene with him and forming Poorhouse Press for his new projects, shifting his focus yet again. Poorhouse was a smaller, more personal enterprise, and it allowed Eisner to continue to produce an eclectic mix of commercial projects as well as a handful that reflected his varied personal interests, such as tennis-themed calendars in 1977 and 1978. The ability to apply his wit to virtually any subject had been polished by decades of commercial comics and could now be turned to create comics that were more important to Eisner the artist than Eisner the businessman. The lasting legacy of the detour into commerce was not simply the expansion of Eisner’s comfort with using comics to communicate beyond the short-story format of The Spirit, but also the vital economic freedom it had given him. His success in business for over twenty-five years, sustained through corporate mergers and managing a public company, left Eisner in a position to consider what he wanted to do as an artist and as an individual, without having to feel the pressures of providing for his family. It was an enviable freedom to have achieved in his fifties, and he would use it well.

Next ten images: “The Job Scene” and “You’re Hired!,” 1969. Bringing people into the workforce was a recurring theme of Eisner’s commercial comics.









Original art for unpublished cover, 1983. The Spirit and Denis Kitchen meet about a proposed Kitchen Sink Press book being developed by FantaCo Enterprises that was never completed.

A WHILE EISNER HAD TURNED away from producing comic books as entertainment, comics had gone into the dark valley of the 1950s. Challenged by moralists creating a false causality between the near-universal reading of comics by young people and the rising presence of juvenile delinquency (while ignoring basic demographic shifts as a clearer cause), the distribution of comics had shrunk, publishers had gone out of business, and the remaining publishers neutered their content through the adoption of the Comics Code. But comic books emerged, if not thriving, at least surviving. When faced with comics artists bemoaning the imminent doom of their field again and again over the next decades, Eisner would inevitably answer with something along the lines of, “I’ve lived through the death of comics five times, and they never died.” The number in the remark kept changing, but his optimism didn’t. Carl Barks’s brilliant tales of Uncle Scrooge had fueled one company’s survival. George Reeves’s charm in television’s Adventures of Superman kept another flying. And without any resources behind them, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and Jack Kirby were creating a lineup of heroes that would propel Marvel into a billion-dollar entity. Lee, who was five years younger than Eisner and came through the same halls of DeWitt Clinton High School, was not only a good writer, he was the comics industry’s best promoter … ever. Lee linked his Marvel Comics to any popular culture engine he could, capturing the zeitgeist not only in his stories, but in the language he used to talk

capturing the zeitgeist not only in his stories, but in the language he used to talk to his readers in text pages, on campuses, and in any media whose attention he could grab. For a few months in 1965, Marvel briefly became Marvel Pop Art Productions. Comics were becoming cool. Cool enough that Dial Press editor in chief E. L. Doctorow, a decade before his fame as the author of Ragtime but already editing major writers such as Norman Mailer, invited Jules Feiffer to write the first book about the great comic book heroes called—what else?—The Great Comic Book Heroes. Feiffer wrote about the characters he grew up reading and, invested with the dual credibility of being an Oscar winner and an avant-garde cartoonist for the Village Voice, singled out Eisner and The Spirit for special notice. Above and next: New York Herald Tribune, January 9, 1966. the Trib’s New York magazine section devoted an issue to the comics phenomenon, including articles about Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes; the play It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman on Broadway; the Batman television show starring Adam West and Burt Ward that was about to debut; a joint interview with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby about their work at Marvel Comics; and, best of all—a new Spirit story by Will Eisner (the first one in fourteen years).



Eisner was pleased with the recognition and with the public being reminded of his work while he toiled, essentially anonymously, on PS, Job Scene, and his various American Visuals projects. Feiffer’s book attracted the attention of Clay Felker, who was editing New York, not yet as a magazine, but then as the Sunday section of the New York Herald Tribune. Fittingly, it was in this Sunday section that The Spirit would return. Felker devoted the January 9, 1966, issue to this new phenomenon. Feiffer wrote about “pop-sociology,” and Eisner’s former office manager-turned- journalist Marilyn Mercer wrote about her old boss and The Spirit. The section also previewed an upcoming Broadway musical, It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman, as well as a TV program being hurriedly prepared for a premature debut three days later on ABC called Batman, starring Adam West and Burt Ward. Another article covered Stan Lee and the growing success of Marvel Comics (and may have contributed to the growing rift between Spider-Man creators Lee and Steve Ditko, by making their disagreement more public). And Eisner contributed a five-page Spirit story about a covert revolt against newly elected Mayor John Lindsay. This was a rewarding step forward for Eisner, who had never managed to get one of the New York papers to carry The Spirit section, and the political content made it, in a sense, an extended editorial cartoon, long one of the most respectable uses of the form. Unexpectedly, the show that ABC rushed to premiere as part of its “Second Season” (the first time a network broke with the traditional fall launch of a new series) became an instant hit and a cultural phenomenon. People actually danced the Batusi, and every possible Bat-object was licensed as a toy. Adding that excitement to the slowly growing popularity of the Marvel super heroes, it seemed that comic book characters were back. Publishers who didn’t have the strong casts of heroes that DC or Marvel owned scrambled to find costumed characters they’d published years before or that anyone could produce for them. Harvey Comics, subsisting on a diet of Richie Rich and other funny comics for early readers, made a deal with Eisner for two Spirit issues combining reprints from the postwar era with a new story in each. They were mostly notable for being the first taste of The Spirit for a new generation of cartoonists. Meanwhile, comics were changing in both obvious ways and some very subtle ones. In mainstream comics, still with circulations in the hundreds of thousands each issue, and published endlessly, creative people were gaining more influence over the content. Dangerous subjects, such as politics, race, and religion, were still kept far from the pages, but the characters became a bit more

human, and the art more adventurous. Younger artists such as Jim Steranko and Neal Adams had entered the field and were breaking panel borders and all the rules. Steranko also became a historian, writing of Eisner in his seminal 1970 History of Comics, “His graphic virtuosity remains unchallenged, like Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’s paramount cinematic achievement, to which Eisner’s work has frequently been compared.” Steranko, Adams, and others would recall Eisner’s legendary splashes and would incorporate those concepts into their own work, with Eisneresque title treatments beginning to show up as comic book covers that would build their logos into the artwork—an approach the traditional wisdom would have forbidden as uncommercial. Another change facilitated Eisner’s point of view influencing the mainstream. Comic book publishers made a cost-saving change in how their original art was prepared and their color separated, shifting the art boards from being drawn twice the printed size to one and a half times up. Theoretically, this should have had little effect on the art, except perhaps to save the artists some time with the physical drawing, but in practice a number of the most talented artists’ styles began to shift. Discussing the change decades later, Adams attributed it to the artists’ greater ease of seeing the entire page on their drawing board, instead of focusing on individual panels—the approach to the page that Eisner had begun to take with the postwar Spirit stories on the larger boards. Aquaman no. 42, DC Comics, November–December 1968; The Flash no. 174, DC Comics, November 1967; and Batman no. 194, DC Comics, August 1967. Eisner’s influence on his own generation of comic book artists became even more visible in the late 1960s, when previously ironclad rules about title logos going across the top third of a comic book cover were quite literally smashed. Eisner studio artist Nick Cardy drew the Aquaman cover, probably from a sketch by Carmine Infantino, who penciled the other two, with inks by Murphy Anderson.

Far from the mainstream, creativity was burbling up from what became known as underground comix. Done without financing, formal distribution, or marketing systems, and without creative constraint in the rebellious culture of the 1960s, the undergrounds owed much to the iconoclastic editorial approach of Harvey Kurtzman in MAD, Humbug, and Help!, where he published many of the pioneers of the movement at the beginning of their careers (and even reprinted a Spirit story in a 1962 issue of Help!). But if there was one comic book talent respected in this community, it was Eisner. As Mark James Estren commented in A History of Underground Comics (1992), “Many underground cartoonists cite Eisner’s ironic detachment from his character and occasional touches of black humor as influences on their own approach to cartooning.” Even as the movement began, one of the earliest protoundergrounds was a publication called witzend, launched by former Spirit contributor Wally Wood, which included respectful words about Eisner’s series in its very first issue, and an interview with Eisner a few issues later. The Incredible Hulk Special no. 1, Marvel Comics, October 1968. Jim Steranko, a significant influence on

the evolution of comics art, became one of the first to publish an important history of the field with The Steranko History of Comics, the second volume of which, published in 1972, included a lengthy sixteen- page appreciation of Eisner and The Spirit.

Spontaneous combustion was also creating comics fandom, with an interest in the history of the form and the talented people who had contributed to it. Modeled to some extent on science fiction fandom, with some overlap in the participants, by the late 1960s there were a handful of comics conventions scattered across the country, with the largest in New York City. Some of the then-current writers and artists attended, joining a modest number of fans— perhaps a thousand or two. The New York event was presided over by Phil Seuling, a high school English teacher, mail-order retailer of back issue “collectible” comics, and a fan of The Spirit. Eisner recalled the incident happening in 1971, but it was probably in 1968 that Seuling first called Eisner’s office to invite him to be a guest of honor at that year’s convention. Eisner told the tale in his self-deprecating manner, quoting his baffled secretary as saying, “Mr. Eisner, were you once a cartoonist?” Eisner spoke at the luncheon of that show along with Burne Hogarth, the great Tarzan cartoonist and founder of the School of Visual Arts, probably to an audience of a few hundred convention attendees. Eisner must have found the gathering interesting enough to return the following year, and more memorably in 1971. On many occasions Eisner would recount the phone call as happening in respect to the 1971 convention, probably because it originally made a better story to connect the invitation to what happened there and how it changed his life. Or possibly because 1969 and 1970 included the darkest period in his personal life, a time he wouldn’t talk about even to friends for decades thereafter. In 1969, Eisner’s daughter, Alice, had fallen ill with leukemia and fought an eighteen-month battle with the disease before passing away. Ann had borne most of the burden, staying by their daughter’s bedside, while Eisner retreated into his work. But after the funeral, their older child, John, began a long journey through psychological troubles, and Eisner’s perfect suburban family was shattered. Luckily, the tragedy pulled the couple together rather than breaking them apart.

Original art for unpublished cover, 1983. This is the line art for the Kitchen Sink Press project by FantaCo Enterprises shown on this page, before color and the word balloon were added.

Cover, Snarf no. 3, Kitchen Sink Press, November 1972. The Spirit steps gently into the world of underground comix.

Original art, wraparound cover painting for The Spirit Magazine no. 20, Kitchen Sink Press, 1979.

The 1971 New York Comic Art Convention took place at the Statler Hilton Hotel (not the Commodore, as has been erroneously reported) across from Penn Station and Madison Square Garden, and it was clearly the country’s leading gathering of comics fans, attracting a couple of thousand attendees. These early conventions are barely recognizable ancestors of the massive Comic-Cons now held in San Diego, which sell out their 130,000 tickets in minutes and have spawned symbiotic events surrounding the giant convention center in which they’re held. There was a dealers’ room, with old comics and a few pieces of surviving original artwork available for purchase, as well as recent comics, fanzines, underground comix, and other related items. There were no “exhibits” from publishers or media companies, and writers and artists who traveled there were on their own dime, not a corporate expense account. There was no national media coverage of the event, only a local television station or two doing a short segment on the evening news about how odd the event—and its attendees— were. But there was a palpable love of the form bonding the people who were in attendance. One of them was a very tall, scruffy, and shaggy twenty-four-year-old hippie named Denis Kitchen, a cartoonist who had, like Eisner, shown a very early entrepreneurial streak. Starting by publishing Mom’s Homemade Comics in 1969, Kitchen went on to launch a syndication service and his own company at the heart of the underground comix movement, even if it was deep in the woods of Wisconsin rather than in the exciting streets of Haight-Ashbury. Kitchen was approached by Maurice Horn, organizer of a previous convention and co-author of A History of the Comic Strip, one of the early scholarly works to follow Feiffer’s book into print. Horn indicated that Will Eisner would like to meet Kitchen.

Cover sketches for The Spirit Magazine no. 7, Warren Publishing, April 1975.

Cover, “Special All Ebony Issue,” The Spirit Magazine no. 7, Warren Publishing, April 1975.

Cover, The Spirit Coloring Book, Poorhouse Press, 1974.

Above and next: Original art, wraparound cover and interior for The Spirit no. 1, Kitchen Sink Press, January 1973. Most of the content for the two underground comix editions of The Spirit consisted of classic reprints, but Eisner spiced up the covers with references to subjects he never could have touched upon in the newspaper supplements, and he contributed a few new pages with risqué themes.



Above and next: Sketch and original art for “The Last Vote: A Fable,” c. 1985. Created for an international anthology on “the Rights of Man,” this story was eventually published in the United States in Heavy Metal no. 12, Summer 1988.



As Kitchen tells the tale, he knew Eisner’s work and was amazed that someone of that generation could be interested in his. But Eisner, his suit and tie a visual contradiction to Kitchen’s bell-bottoms, had heard about the undergrounds, as well as their different business practices, and was deeply curious. Kitchen tried to talk to Eisner about the early days of comics, but the older man was all about the future. They formed a bond that would last beyond Eisner’s lifetime. It didn’t begin seamlessly, however. Kitchen walked Eisner over to Seuling’s tables within the dealers’ room to show him some comix that might interest him, but Eisner started with an issue of R. Crumb’s Zap—in particular, one with an S. Clay Wilson tale of Captain Pissgums and His Pervert Pirates. Eisner was speechless, and nearby cartoonist Art Spiegelman joined the conversation to defend Wilson and the comix. Spiegelman was a Swedish-born Jew whose family had moved to New York after the war. Although he was as young as Kitchen, he had already come through a series of family tragedies and emerged as both a significant contributor to the undergrounds and to popular cartooning, with his work on Wacky Packages and other satirical products for Topps, the chewing gum company. It wasn’t the last time Eisner and Spiegelman’s lives would intersect, or that they’d disagree, yet their common goals for their chosen medium would probably prove more alike than those of any other people in the room. THE COMBINATION OF EISNER’S curiosity and Kitchen’s tenacity led to an ongoing correspondence and the lure of new creative possibilities. The growing scale of both the undergrounds and older fans for mainstream comics opened up new opportunities for Eisner. Between doing his other Poorhouse Press projects, he began reconnecting to The Spirit. A few inexpensively produced, black-and- white reprints of the series began to be published by a small press in bagged sets; Poorhouse even did a coloring book; and Kitchen convinced Eisner to do the cover for Snarf no. 3 (November 1972) while they began discussing an ongoing series of Spirit reprints in the underground format. Here, Eisner began to have a more active role in influencing the undergrounds, not simply as an artist whose work many of the contributors had read, but by shifting the business model. Kitchen was ready to restart The Spirit, and Eisner was comfortable with the business terms as well as with the approach of his new partner. But Eisner insisted on a written agreement, which initially baffled Kitchen; the undergrounds had rejected all those formalities. Eisner was

persuasive, even drafting a contract himself to avoid legal fees for either, and it would soon serve as a model for other deals. While the relationship between the two men would continue to grow over the decades, the eponymous Kitchen Sink Press’s initial reprinting of The Spirit was short-lived. It was very successful in the scale of the undergrounds, so much so that it attracted an offer from magazine publisher Jim Warren to bring Denny Colt to a wider audience. Warren had a passion for the great comics of his youth and had patterned several of his successful magazines on the E.C. Comics horror line, reincarnating the approach of Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror as Creepy and Eerie. Warren had been less successful producing Blazing Combat in the vein of Kurtzman’s Frontline Combat, but the quality of the material he published in the 1960s had been high. Competition from Marvel in the magazine format, and from DC’s mystery and war line, was pressuring him in the mid- 1970s, and The Spirit seemed like another way to connect to the greats. Despite some contentious moments between the two men over color and other creative matters, the series ran for over two years and introduced a new generation of comics fans and future creators to Eisner’s work.

Educational poster, 1971. Eisner continued to use comics to teach a wide variety of subjects.

Original art, “Odd Fact,” 1975. A series of one-panel cartoons, “Odd Fact” was a short-lived Eisner experiment in syndicating comics in a nontraditional shape to fit different spaces in the newspaper.

Above and next: Original art, Gleeful Guide to Occult Cookery: The Saucerer’s Apprentice, 1974. Eisner dabbled in self-publishing with his own Poorhouse Press.

Above and next: Original art, tennis-themed calendar, 1978 and 1977. Creating a calendar of tennis gags connected Eisner’s love of drawing to his love of the game, which he played energetically into his eighties.



Eisner was going through a time of change in his own work and priorities. Poorhouse Press was providing him with the opportunity to do an eclectic mix of books (from the Gleeful Guide to Occult Cookery: The Saucerer’s Apprentice [1974] and the Gleeful Guide to Communicating with Plants to Help Them Grow [1974] to How to Avoid Death & Taxes … and Live Forever [1975], and even packaging completely cartoonless books for other publishers). And he was finding more allure in a new role in the classroom. Teaching, working on these projects, and doing hands-on work on The Spirit for Warren (even if that was mostly revising old work and creating new covers) were becoming more emotionally rewarding, if not economically important. After the declining sales of comics in all formats on the newsstand led Warren to drop The Spirit in 1976, Eisner was pleased when Kitchen stepped back in to reformat it for the smaller but growing comic shop market and in several different formats, continuing those reprints from 1977 until 1992. The publishing program with Kitchen would provide other opportunities as well, when Eisner was ready to pick up the pencil for more than a new cover or a few illustrations. And that time was drawing near.

Above and next: Detail and page 2 of a five-page story, “The Invader,” 1972. This Spirit story was created by Eisner following a lecture in cartooning he gave at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario. It was first published as an oversize twelve-page booklet by Tabloid Press in 1973 and reprinted in the Will Eisner Color Treasury, Kitchen Sink Press, 1981.



A EISNER’S INTEREST in the changing world of comics wasn’t stimulated only by his growing friendship and collaboration with Kitchen, however. With the shift from his work with American Visuals to the less demanding Poorhouse Press projects, Eisner had time to explore possibilities that had been impossible for him before. He got a small taste of teaching in November 1972, at Sheridan College in Ontario. Treating the lecture as a practical demonstration, he started a new five-page Spirit story, which he then completed and allowed to be published by a small local press, including some of his roughs. The story was designed for a larger, tabloid format and shows the influence of his exploration of the undergrounds, if also the limits of how far he was willing to go even in that unrestricted atmosphere. The opportunity for Eisner to do more as a teacher opened up in a most unexpected fashion. Burne Hogarth was only a few years older than Eisner, but that age advantage and a powerfully distinctive illustrative style as a cartoonist had established him as a major force in the newspaper strip field, culminating in a legendary run on Tarzan Sunday strips from 1937 to 1945. Even as a young

man, Hogarth grew interested in the theory of his craft and passing it on. As World War II ended, Hogarth founded a trade school, one mostly for returning G.I.s who might want to follow in his footsteps. Originally called the Manhattan Academy of Newspaper Art, then renamed the Cartoonists and Illustrators School, and finally the School of Visual Arts (SVA), for decades it provided a focus for Hogarth’s teaching. SVA’s cartooning faculty had included many luminaries of the field, from Golden Age comics artist Lee Elias to the multitalented Jerry Robinson, who had been legendary in comic books with his work on the early Batman issues and later went on to newspaper strips and editorial cartooning. Robinson would even write his own history of the field, The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art (1974). The SVA students also contributed to the quality of the experience, with such talents as Steve Ditko, Nick Meglin, and Archie Goodwin (award-winning writer/editor of comic books and strips). Yet while Hogarth was there, he was incomparably the star cartoonist in residence. And when he finally retired from the school in 1970, he left a seemingly impossible-to-fill hole in the cartooning faculty. At least it felt that way to the students over the next few years. Or, even worse, it felt as if SVA was surrendering its traditional dominance in the field of teaching cartooning. SVA was still a small school in two buildings in Manhattan and was about to be accredited as a full four-year college, so the gap created by Hogarth’s departure was very noticeable—cartooning wasn’t simply one department among the many in which SVA would offer degrees a generation later. The 1970s were the waning years of a period of student activism that had swept across America’s colleges and universities, and while SVA’s young artists weren’t ready to stage sit-ins, they wanted to make their views known. The students admitted in the fall of 1972 included a number of aspiring—and demanding—cartoonists. Students such as Batton Lash, John Laney, and John Holmstrom had chosen the school because of the successful comic book artists and cartoonists who had cited it as their alma mater. They arrived to find no one teaching comics. Looking for an understanding ear, they cornered Tom Gill, who had done the Lone Ranger comic book before coming to SVA. (Bob Wiacek recalled showing him DC’s new title, Swamp Thing, and Gill commenting on how Berni Wrightson’s art was reminiscent of Eisner’s.) Gill took their case to management—Silas Rhodes—who had founded the school with Hogarth and led it afterward. Rhodes asked for a petition and a list of people the students would ideally want to teach the classes. It may have been a unique moment in the history of academia, but it wasn’t totally implausible. At that time the vast majority of American comic strips and

totally implausible. At that time the vast majority of American comic strips and books were created by people living in the New York metropolitan area, and, unlike so many other disciplines, their work was signed and well known. Imagine, by comparison, a group of medical students being asked to pick surgeons to train them, or the challenge of identifying who were truly master teachers to shape future educators. The students made a very short wish list, and two of the names from the top of the list said yes—Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman. Looking back, SVA film major Mitch Berger said, “If you were a student and heard Picasso was teaching an art class down the hall, you’d go.” Eisner and Kurtzman weren’t simply titans of the field; over the years they also became friends in a way that Eisner wasn’t with most cartoonists of his own generation. “Harvey and he had a great relationship. There was mutual respect and admiration,” Ann Eisner recalled about the times they shared at their Westchester homes during those teaching years. As with most part-time college teaching positions, the lure was not the salary: Adjuncts, as they are termed, are compensated far less than tenured or staff professors, and SVA was not a rich, Ivy League institution. But there was a raw energy in the room, and it provided Eisner with a second way to tap into the changes that were going on in his chosen field. His students would simultaneously be his readers, an intense focus group, and his successors, exploring aspects of the field that might not have come to his notice otherwise. And it’s possible that Eisner was recovering emotionally from the loss of Alice to a degree where being with young people was once again not only possible, but desirable.

Original art, Comics & Sequential Art, Poorhouse Press, 1985. In Chapter 5: Expressive Anatomy, Eisner discusses “The Face,” illustrating “the adverbial effect of the posture of the head on the movement of features on the surface of the face. Together they communicate the emotional reaction to an unheard (by the reader) telephone message.”

Above and next: Original art and pasteup mechanicals from Comics & Sequential Art, Poorhouse Press, 1985. From Chapter 5: Expressive Anatomy, Eisner discusses “The Body” (above), and from Chapter 8: Teaching/Learning Sequential Art for Comics (next), he illustrates the concept of light and shade, explaining: “Light from its source should be perceived as a flow of water. The absence of light is darkness. An object interrupting a flow of light is dark on the side facing away from it. All objects of a group under the same will have a side (or shadow) on the side away from it. All objects in a flow of light throw a shadow onto whatever is behind it—wall, floor, or another object. Shadows conform to the surface of the shape upon which they fall. The employment of light has an emotional effect. Shadows evoke fear—light implies safety.”



An exercise in storytelling, c. 1974. Eisner shows Bob Wiacek, one of his students at the School of Visual Arts, how hands alone can tell a story.

Eisner gathered his prospective students and spun a chair around to sit on it backward, like a bull pen coach ready to deliver a pep talk. He spoke about his aspirations for comics in education and entertainment, and he set goals for the students to create their own comics, but in a working environment where the expectations would remind them that comics was a business, too, and that the workers in his “shop” would perform accordingly. It was a gifted bunch that would hear Eisner lecture over the next few years: Lash would go on to do a self-published series titled Supernatural Law that has been running for over thirty years; Laney would work for Eisner at American Visuals; Holmstrom would create Punk magazine; Wiacek would be a noted inker; Drew Friedman would be a master caricaturist; and Mike Carlin would be the editor famed for killing Superman in the comics in the early 1990s. Of Eisner’s students, Joe Quesada would have the most impact on the culture, revitalizing the Marvel Comics line as its editor in chief and going on to serve as the company’s chief creative officer working with their cartoons, television shows, and blockbuster films. Quesada abashedly remembers failing Eisner’s course, however, for not turning in the all-important final project, and reminding him of the incident at a comics convention years afterward. Not every student would be so fascinated or go on to prove so accomplished; in every college class, some would be there simply to fulfill a requirement. But there was a lot of talent in each year’s class. In the classroom, Eisner went from the personal, hands-on instruction he had so often given in his studio to a more structured teaching. The process of codifying his lessons as well as interactions with students and fellow teachers, must have focused his thoughts more. Eisner was a lifetime autodidact and had the added benefit of teaching with Kurtzman, exchanging ideas and enthusiasm. Moreover, he was teaching at a time when the potential for change was in the air.

Original art, Amazing Spider-Man no. 638, Marvel Comics, September 2010. Joe Quesada selected from his illustrious career this cover as an example of the lessons he learned from Eisner.

Cartoon by Zapiro, July 19, 1998. Jonathan Shapiro was born in South Africa but came to New York to study at SVA with Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, and Art Spiegelman. Shapiro returned to his native country and became a major editorial cartoonist under the nom de plume Zapiro. Here he chronicles the world- shaking life of Nelson Mandela.

The underground comix that Eisner had discovered with Kitchen as his guide were a major topic of discussion and debate. Students were passionate about the types of comics they loved, with advocates for the mainstream super-hero comics or the undergrounds, and even the teachers introducing the diversity of material being published in Europe, trying to open students to the possibilities of artists such as Moebius. Eisner brought in Neal Adams, who was just segueing from a period as a star artist at DC and Marvel to a career in advertising, and who (incorrectly) predicted the end of comic books by 1980. Eisner summed up his own, more optimistic attitude: “The view is far from gloomy. The ‘market’ is there, the need is urgent, and the opportunity is limitless.” The classroom was at the top of a building on 23rd Street, with odd light—an almost Spirit-like set. Eisner couldn’t stand in the front of the room some days when the light struck there. But the brightest light was in the students’ eyes. They heard about Eisner’s new Spirit magazine for Warren not from the creator, but from advertisements. Only when importuned would Eisner bring in original pages from the publication, and the students saw that their teacher was making corrections to stories he’d created decades before. “I could do better,” he explained simply.

Will Eisner’s Gallery of New Comics no. 1, School of Visual Arts, 1974. Each year Eisner had his students at SVA create their own comics, which were collected at the end of the semester as an instant portfolio to help them market their work. On the left, a photocopy of his very generous cover note.

Will Eisner’s Gallery of New Comics no. 7, School of Visual Arts, 1980. Among the students in this year’s class were future cartoonist Drew Friedman, whose “stippling” style became his trademark despite Eisner’s criticism of the technique; and Mike Carlin, whose cartooning career was superseded once he became a comic book editor, presiding over the headline-making “Death of Superman” storyline from DC Comics in 1992.

Eisner wanted his students to try to be complete cartoonists, learning everything from lettering and coloring up to the writing and artwork. Even if their strengths were specific to one area, the closer they could come to being able to do the whole comic, the greater the potential for their work, in his view. Eisner also wanted the students to learn to be businessmen, and he gave them early practical opportunities: Mike Carlin remembers when Eisner was doing joke books for Scholastic through Poorhouse Press and offered students one dollar per joke he’d accept. Carlin made three hundred dollars, his first freelance income. And when Eisner brought in his latest book, he sold copies to his students. Friedman recalled the goal Eisner offered as being “particular about the artist being in charge of his own fate.” The philosophy of the course was to “permit a maximum freedom of creativity, encouragement of experimentation, the testing of new ideas, all within the framework of the practical requirements of publishing,” in the words of Eisner’s first syllabus. Most of the work was the practical effort of creating a story, but Eisner would use exercises such as showing how to tell a story entirely through the hand gestures of card players (recreating the impact of his mysterious Octopus in The Spirit, whose face was never seen but whose gloved hands gave the clearest hint of his menacing moods). Guest speakers weren’t only such stars as Neal Adams, but also those who reflected the changing range of the field, such as barefoot cat yronwode, who would be part of the new, independent Eclipse Comics, balanced by the towering figure of John Verpoorten, Marvel’s famously terrifying production manager. Maximum freedom didn’t mean freedom from professorial feedback. Drew Friedman remembers Eisner leaning over his comics-in-progress, reacting to what would become the student’s trademark “stippling” technique and comparing it to Zip-A-Tone (a prepared sheet that could be applied to give a grayscale effect), saying, “Friedman, you can buy it by the barrel.” This was Eisner’s shop all over again. The culmination of each year’s cartooning course was having some of your work reproduced in Gallery, the showcase magazine Eisner and the students would assemble. Batton Lash recalled that the original goal had been to do two issues a year, but Eisner had overestimated the students’ organizational ability, and it became an annual. But showing your work in it, and mentioning these stellar teachers, opened a lot of doors. Eisner’s handwritten notes to prospective buyers of his students’ work didn’t hurt, either. Eisner’s lessons went on to reach artists long after his own classroom presence at SVA ended. Joey Cavalieri went from being Eisner’s student to