The Summer of 1975: Working for Will Eisner
(The World’s Most Influential Comic Book Artist)
Fifty years ago, I was laid off (for the summer) by Will Eisner. He took off for a long vacation during the summer months. I had been hired early in the year after becoming homeless in late 1975. Harvey Kurtzman and Will had both been my teachers at the School of Visual Arts from 1973-74, and they both did a lot to help me get back on track after I was forced to drop out of the School of Visual Arts and couldn’t find enough work to pay the rent. (Long story for another day.) However, the time I spent working for Will Eisner was another giant step in my education in publishing. You know, the “Academy Awards of Comic Books” are named after Will: They are called “The Eisner Awards.” (And I have never even been nominated for one, much less won an “Eisner.”)
At the time, Eisner was repackaging his old Spirit comic strips, which first appeared as the main feature of a tabloid-sized comic book insert distributed in the Sunday edition of Register and Tribune Syndicate newspapers. Popularly referred to as The Spirit Section, the insert ran from June 2, 1940 to October 5, 1952. It had a huge effect on comic book artists and cartoonists at the time, since Eisner’s work was more sophisticated, with better writing and artwork, than your typical comic book. And those newspaper supplements got a lot of eyeballs! If the newspaper sold 5 million copies, a typical newspaper would be read by 2-5 more people. So Will Eisner was getting `a lot of attention!
The Spirit Section was commissioned by Quality Comics to help the Register and Tribune newspapers compete with the burgeoning comic book industry. Eisner (with the assistance of several ghost writers and artists), used The Spirit to reach a more mature readership compared to other comic books of the time. At the peak of its popularity, The Spirit Section was included in 20 American newspapers, with a total circulation of five million copies. "They gave me an adult audience", Eisner said in 1997, "and I wanted to write better things than superheroes. Comic books were a ghetto.”
Both Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman were always talking about how important it was to attract adult readers for comic strips during their classes at the School of Visual Arts, and discouraged us from dealing with the mainstream comic book companies like DC and Marvel. They would drum this into our heads on a weekly basis, as if we had a mission to save the comic book industry by aiming higher with our content. Naturally this was a part of my decision-making PUNK magazine a few months later. Since I also wanted to make comics more of an art form than “kiddie content” I always paid close attention to these two… Which is why they both helped me get my career going.
At the time I was hired to work for him, Will was reviving and reprinting The Spirit for two different comic book publishers: Kitchen Sink (a 1960s underground comic book publisher who was looking for new material as the hippie underground was disappearing) and Warren Publishing (who also published Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella magazines back in the day). From 1974 to 1976, Warren published 16 issues of The Spirit as a large black-and-white magazine, consisting of reprints with original covers (primarily by Eisner), concluding with a separate 1975 color issue: The Spirit Special. Kitchen Sink picked up the series beginning in 1977 with issue 17, eventually concluding with issue 41 (June 1983).
Another student from that first SVA comic book class, John Laney, had a slick, commercial drawing style that was totally suited to Eisner’s art style. For instance, when Eisner published a comic magazine with student’s artwork, John was selected to complete the cover artwork (see above). By 1975, John had been hired to do artwork for Will, so I would often see him at a drawing table in the “bullpen” section of Will Eisner’s office (which had several desks, but John Laney was the only person working there). We became good friends. I think we had a mutual respect for each other’s work, which is a big thing if you are a struggling artist trying to break into the business.
I also remember that John was working on a great cover for the Kitchen Sink Spirit when I was working there, it was an amazing image:
John Laney’s hiring by Will Eisner was inspiring to a lot of us younger students, since we were all hoping to find jobs in comic book publishing. So when Will Eisner tasked me with creating the cover artwork for the second edition of Will Eisner’s Gallery #2, I figured it was one more step on the road to becoming a successful comic book artist!
I’m not sure if this kind of “artist/apprentice” relationship exists anymore, which is a shame. Great artists have emerged from that relationship since the Renaissance, and even earlier. But digital media has sadly changed the game. “Interns” aren’t the same as “apprentices.”
This was the only time I truly collaborated with Will Eisner on anything. And I think you can recognize my art and lettering style. Will did the drawings of The Spirit and Commissioner Dolan, but I had to fill in the bricks, draw the art portfolio, paste up photostats of the comic book pages from inside the comic book, and create the color separations… For both the front and back covers:
There was interest from the mainstream comic book publishers and a lot of illustrators from the Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman classes ended up working in the business: Bob Wiacek became a successful inker, Ken Landgraf created the Thor comic strips for our favorite heavy metal guy, Batton Lash became a successful independent comic book publisher, artist and writer… We did alright.
When Will Eisner hired me as his apprentice in early 1975, I was paid minimum wage and performed odd jobs. Although Harvey thought I had a lot of potential as an illustrator, Will never thought my art style suited his character The Spirit (and he was correct). My first job was throwing away rooms full of photostats of old artwork and page layouts. It bothered me to do this, since I thought there was some value in keeping this stuff around! I had my orders (and nowhere to store it) so I did the dirty deed.
After a while, Will would throw me a bone, like filling in the black area of a drawing or adding a few bricks to the background of a drawing. I was also tasked with putting together the “dummy” for a book he was producing for Poorhouse Press, a small company that he was running from his floor-through office at 461 Park Avenue South (the sixth floor, located at 31st Street).
I learned a lot about how to put together a proposal, since Will had drawn rough sketches and supplied layouts for the book and had me mail several proposals for the book to different book publishers. I learned how to put together a “pitch,” or a book proposal. I learned about putting together a “dummy” for book publishers and how to write a cover letter, etc.
Although I admired The Spirit, I was surprised that Will was creating mediocre humor material like this. The book contained anecdotes about “how to avoid death” from different sources (murder, disease, obesity, etc.) and some weird stories about how some people avoided paying taxes. The book wasn’t very useful and not very funny.
But I also learned this: Will kept himself busy with a diverse product line. He always had a lot of different projects going on at the same time. He had been very successful: his office was a huge, floor-through space with a lot of different rooms (the he wasn’t using much anymore). Anyway, I learned that to be successful in publishing, it helped to try new ideas. (Something that often seems to be missing in today’s culture.)
Oddly enough, Will was also working on Contract With God at the same time. This 190-page graphic novel (among the first published in the United States, although the format had been popular in Europe for decades), was sold to Baronet Press instead of a comic book publisher because Will wanted to get comic book material featuring adult content distributed in bookstores and in libraries. It wasn’t published until 1978, and by then both PUNK Magazine and Contract With God were printed at Eastern Press, so Tom Hearn (the photographer who was handling us at the time) mailed a free copy of the first edition to me after it finally came out… Thanks, Tom!
Anyhow, once Will closed down his office for the summer, I had no way to pay the rent anymore. So when my old acquaintance/business partner/nemesis Eddie McNeil told me that Ged Dunn, Jr. was hiring kids to work for his house-painting business, and that I could sleep on the floor of his apartment in the center of town to save money, I figured I had nothing to lose at that point.
And this became part of the genesis for the creation of PUNK Magazine. Stay tuned for more! Lots of “50 Years Later” stories are on the way.
Wow! Thanks for the comment.
Thanks, Ace! Those were crazy years, I always enjoy telling stories about what they were like.