Why didn’t he fire me? Amazingly, he said, “If you think you can do better, why don’t you try your hand at one?” I asked him, “Seriously?” Whether he was telling me the truth or baiting me, I don’t know, but he said yes.
Heady with excitement, I began to make notes on my first Spirit story. My model was the prewar Eisners. I researched, although it wasn’t necessary. I knew the rhythms by heart—the slow build, the fixed camera over three or four panels that suddenly broke into dramatic crane shots, the pitter-pat back-and-forth development of plot meeting subplot, clues and coincidences coming together for the big payoff. After all, Will’s art of storytelling was like no one else’s in comics, and it had implanted itself in my head from the time I was eleven.
But I had a second influence: radio. I was an addict of radio drama, so much suggested so minimally, sound effects mingling with terse dialogue, movielike musical scores that heightened suspense. My favorite was the CBS drama Suspense, produced and directed by William Spier, who also directed The Adventures of Sam Spade, Detective, my second-favorite radio show, the one that got me to read Dashiell Hammett for the first time.
Using old Eisner techniques offset by settings of mood and atmosphere lifted from Suspense, I wrote a story about a young criminal off a Bronx-like street that could have been Stratford Avenue, robbing a candy store that could have been Pensky’s. In the foreground and background, throughout the mounting bloodshed, a little girl on the sidewalk, oblivious to the action, sang street chants to a bouncing ball: “A my name is Alice and my sister’s name is Alicia and we live on Alabama Street, B my name is Betty …”
While I had every intention of channeling Eisner, whose stories so affected me when I first came to love them seven years earlier, I managed to insert, quite without plan, significant chunks of my Bronx boyhood. This boyhood that I was so eager to leave behind so that I could move onward and upward in the world to which Eisner had opened the door. And to make good in that world, I had apparently decided that if I wasn’t talented enough to be Eisner the artist, then I’d be Eisner the writer.
My goal, at this, my first attempt at writing professionally, was to become a perfect imitation of my mentor, exactly the mindset that had screwed up my cartooning. But something went awry: my cartooning side had willingly coopted itself into self-destruction; my writing side, unbeknownst to me, was made of sterner stuff. What it actually did, without letting me in on its secret, was to pretend to be Eisner while actually showing off Jules doing his Bronx sidewalk shuffle before The Spirit’s sizable syndicated readership.
Actually I didn’t realize what I was up to until I just wrote this. Fortunately for me, Eisner didn’t realize it either. He read my eight-page layout with crude sketches and dialogue and, to my complete surprise (as well as his own, I’m sure), said, “This is good, we’re going to use this. Write more.”
And I wrote more. And soon I was writing more of them than Will. And soon after that, I was the sole writer on almost all The Spirit’s stories, never meaning for it to read like anyone but Eisner but always dropping in pieces of myself.
Coming into that office as a boy cartoonist on his way, I had, from the beginning, lost my way. Looking to make up for unintentionally insulting Eisner, who had been nothing but generous to me, I had written a Spirit story that was really a Jules story in Eisner drag. And he ran it. And he ran all the rest, or almost all the rest, over the next three and a half years. I had graduated, without trying that hard, into ghosting The Spirit. And I didn’t mean to do it. I had backed into it, my first experience with moving ahead by going in another direction.
I must step back from a surge of boastfulness here to modify and clarify: while I was the writer on The Spirit, I was by no means its auteur. That was Eisner. Every scene I conceived, no matter how it turned out, started out as if I were he. Later, when I was throwing in more and more pieces of myself, nothing went in that didn’t exist comfortably with Eisner’s sensibility.
He and I would first talk story. I’d do a layout of story line that was broken down into panels and dialogue. He’d okay it with changes, and I’d write in the copy. Next, I’d sketch a crude layout on sheets of bristol board that, when completed, would be the final art. Before the lettering was inked in, Will went over and revised, rewrote, and sometimes reconceived as he saw fit, seldom without discussion, sometimes even argument.
Though he could be acerbic at times, now and then sarcastic, even snide, these were minor asides that did nothing to detract from the astonishing fact that he had turned over to this eighteen-year-old who displayed more talk than talent the story line and much of the styling of this now-classic cartoon.
Gratitude can last only so long. After six months or so, I began to chafe under Will’s restraints, his revision of dialogue that I thought better before his changes, his editing out the left-wing slant that I tried not so infrequently to sneak in. Underneath my compliant collaboration, hostility bloomed. Nonconfrontational as always, I restricted it to my stories and, using The Spirit as a stand-in for Eisner, perhaps once a month I’d write our hero, overmatched in a fight, being beaten to a pulp. It felt good.
The Spirit is © and ® Will Eisner Studios, Inc.
ED
Eisner’s shop was the hub. Lunch hour was the time of the young cartoonists. The ambitious wannabes would show up at Will’s, just as I had two years earlier, to display their wares in the hope of picking up some free lance work, but beyond that to connect themselves, if only briefly, to the one studio in town where one could feel an atmosphere free of cynicism and exploitation. Eisner was cheap, he took pride in it, but he didn’t degrade or demean as so many editors in other comics houses seemed to enjoy doing. What you didn’t get in money, you made up for in the spirit of the studio, which embodied a sense of idealism, a sense of mission. Boy cartoonists under the impression that they were going to take over the world dropped in on Eisner with their samples because it was understood that this was the place to be.
Most comic books during my time with Eisner had lost much of their appeal. Artwork had steadily improved over the neoprimitivism of the early days, but the sense of innocence and boyish wonder that inspired this cruder work of the midthirties had matured by 1948 into a corporate slickness. Proficient and soulless draftsmanship ruled the day. Joe Shuster, the cocreator of Superman, had been forced off his own creation, replaced by illustrators who drew better but felt less.
It was to take years for Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster to receive proper respect (but never proper income). And as important as Will Eisner was, it was Siegel and Shuster, not Eisner, who gave us the superhero who, in one form or another, one unique attribute or another, was to seize the imagination of every generation from the midthirties to the present.
Jerry Siegel’s earliest approach to a supercharacter had been in a high school fanzine run off on a mimeograph. It was called The Reign of the Superman, but this fellow was a villain, not a hero, sticking to time-honored tradition that presented Evil as smarter, cleverer, and stronger than Good. Good prevailed only at the last moment, through tenacity and dumb luck.
One summer night in 1934 Siegel conjured up a switcheroo: what if his superman was not a villain but a hero? In a world rife with Depression, violent crime, Fascism, and war, Siegel saw that America was in dire need of a hero with superpowers who used them to rescue, not to subjugate or destroy.
The bare bones of the origin story came to him in a rush. In a far-off galaxy, a planet called Krypton explodes. The single survivor is an infant, shot aloft in a space capsule by a scientist father. The baby Superman crash-lands in the American Midwest, where he is nurtured and raised by the kindly Kent family, who teach him the American way and inspire him to go off in cape and leotard to protect the helpless against crooks, mad scientists, natural disasters, and dictators.
The significance of all this struck close to a Bronx boy’s heart. Jerry Siegel was a first-generation Jew reared in the Midwest during the burgeoning days of native American Fascism. He was
witness, with the rest of us, to the rise of anti-Semitism, the radio broadcasts of Father Coughlin, the Christian Front, the America First Committee … Siegel was not like the blond, blue-eyed hunks who stood out from the unprepossessing Jewish kids he went to school with. Everywhere in sight of this Cleveland Jewish high school boy were Gentile jocks projecting an image of iconic Americanness. How could he not sense the difference? He might as well have come from another planet.
Superman was the ultimate assimilationist fantasy. Siegel and his illustrator partner, Joe Shuster, were not mild-mannered, bespectacled, nice Jewish boys out of choice. Their mild manners and glasses signified a nerdiness that in no way represented their inner selves. Underneath their schmucky Clark Kent facades lived Men of Steel! Or so they fantasized. And if you’re a cartoonist, a mere story line and a couple of squiggles turn fantasy into reality.
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s accomplishment was to chronicle the striving Jewish boy’s goyishe American dream. If that flirtatious chorus line of Lois Lanes in high school had but known what they were missing out on. Jerry and Joe, schlumpy and undersized, held more promise than the cocky Gentile jocks cruising down school hallways, their beefy arms hammerlocked around the boy cartoonists’ dream girls.
Seen in this light, we can now discover Superman’s true origin story. His actual place of birth was not the planet Krypton. That’s a fake, a deception, a Potemkin village. In truth, Superman came down to us from the planet Poland, from Lodz maybe, possibly Crakow, maybe Vilna …
The commercial success of the Man of Steel opened the floodgates for an onslaught of superheroes in comic books, drawn by a new generation of kids off the street, Jewish boys out of the Bronx and Brooklyn, mostly. In newspaper strips, an older generation of Irish Catholic cartoonists held sway. The only Jewish newspaper strip artist who made a serious dent was Al Capp with his two popular strips, Li’l Abner and Abbie an’ Slats.
But in comic books Siegel and Shuster with their superhero, and Eisner with his bravura off-the-page dramaturgy, encouraged a migration of young Jewish cartoonists who perceived comic books as their port of entry, an Ellis Island to the big time. Next stop, the open-ended and glamorous frontier of syndicated strips and magazine illustration. Bob Kane with Batman, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby with Captain America, Mort Meskin with The Vigilante, and Joe Kubert, Jerry Robinson, Alex Toth, and Irwin Hasen, inspired the admiration and envy of the next wave of young talent, who learned from these overnight Jewish boy icons the stylistic thrill of operatic overstatement, dramatically lit swashbuckling action laid out in converging chaotic panels.
This next wave, or some sizable portion of it, hung out at Eisner’s shop, meeting one another for the first time, mingling, gossiping, eager to make an impression. Eisner’s studio was turned into a bar without booze. Comics, with its nerve-jangling jumpiness, substituted for booze. The wisecracks, the sentimentality, the naïve excitement of being in the right place at the right time. Each young man brought back to say hello after showing Will his samples knew in his bones that he was fated to be the next success story. What none of them understood was that I was in line ahead of them.
Wally Wood, maybe a year older than I, was brought back to our office by Will, who was impressed by his samples (no threat to me, he drew backgrounds). Woody was from the Midwest. Enviably handsome, he had a squinting, tousled, mischievous charm. His squint let you know that he knew a lot more than he was saying, which was good, because he was at a loss for conversation. He seemed to be wary of speech; his prolonged silences made him formidable. While Abe and I wisecracked like smartass New York Jews, Woody, in no way Jewish, made sly elliptical comments that were possibly profound had we only understood what he was saying.
He shared studio space in a rundown walk-up in a Puerto Rican neighborhood in the Sixties on the Upper West Side (now Lincoln Center) with two other cartoonists and a couple of writers for comic books, already in training, with the help of beer, Chianti, and cheap rye, to make it to the top as the next generation of comic strip roustabouts. In the mid- and late forties, the first step to success for ambitious young men in the low arts was to make a mark in comic books as illustrator or writer and break into syndication with your own daily strip before you were thirty.
Cartoonists like Woody saw this as the end of the road, although some others who had the facility dreamed of moving further upscale to magazine illustration. That market was still flourishing with the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Liberty. A writer’s ambitions, beyond comics, leaned toward breaking into the sci-fi market. And then more than a few had serious literary pretensions, becoming the next Hemingway by beginning in pulps as Dashiell Hammett did, then selling to the slicks, establishing a reputation for hard-boiled prose, then on to the real challenge, the semiautobiographical first novel. Norman Mailer had just been introduced by his publisher, Scribner’s, as the next Hemingway. But why should there be only one? There might be two, three, four, any number of next Hemingways. Or Hemingway mixed with other tough guys: Hammett, Jack London, Raymond Chandler, James T. Farrell.
Woody introduced me to one of his studio mates, a lettering man named Ed McLean, who within minutes let me know that comics were not his end game, that his plan was to write the Great American Novel. Ed’s heroes, besides Hemingway, were John O’Hara and James T. Farrell, whose novel Studs Lonigan was devoured by every pubescent city high school kid in America because of its steamy sex talk. To give a little context: this was at a time (hard to believe) when more than a few novelists had the glamour and stature of movie stars, with Hemingway the king, a near equal to Clark Gable or Gary Cooper.
Ed intended to impress me, and he did immediately. We met on my first visit to Woody’s studio, a long room that deepened and darkened as your eyes failed to get used to it. Artists and writers sat like galley slaves at desks and drawing tables jammed close enough together to constitute a single piece of furniture, an intimidating world of cluttered comic pages and pounding typewriters, dingy and roach-rich. The no-frills ferocity of the place was intoxicating.
All my life I’d been drawn to good talkers—men and women like my sister Mimi who loved and needed to report on what went on in their lives from one moment to the next and were gifted with a combination of style, intelligence, and storyteller charm to make one happy to listen to their recitations, which managed to upstage and trivialize one’s own sensibility. My envy of these raconteurs was palpable.
Ed was short and stocky, a big head with thin red hair, built like an Irish workingman, not a writer. But his bright blue eyes sparkled with irony and mischief and his constant half smile engaged and warned at the same time: Don’t come too close. Unlike my Bronx Jewish friends, he gave off a presumption of danger—that, and he read books.
Ed was from the South Side of Chicago, Studs Lonigan territory, and like Farrell’s hero and Farrell himself, he stemmed from Irish Catholic working-class roots. When we met in Woody’s studio, he had been in New York for six months, on the lam from faith and family. Ed was an itinerant. He hopped around, getting fed up with one place and moving on to another. The kind of writer he fancied himself to be was the sort whose book jackets recorded biographical information, none of it literary: bellboy, dishwasher, longshoreman, lathe operator, merchant seaman …
Ed called himself a communist, but with a small c. He expressed nothing but contempt for the Party my sister worshiped. The Communist Party wasn’t radical enough for Ed; it was too theoretical for force and violence, it was too soft. Ed believed in the violent overthrow of capitalism. He lacked the patience to simply allow monopoly capital to wither away and die. He wanted to take up a club and beat it to death.
It thrilled my unquenchably equivocating psyche to befriend someone who made my sister and her comrades change before my eyes from red-hot Reds to wusses. Talking to Ed about his left-wing heroes—John Steinbeck, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Jack London, Dashiell Hammett, the Wobblies, Big Bill Haywood, Eugene Debs, C
larence Darrow—names until then barely known to me, drove me to read and become a convert to an indigenous American radicalism that owed nothing to Mimi’s Bolsheviks. Until Ed, I had never heard of Clarence Darrow or John Peter Altgeld or the Pullman strike or the Haymarket Riot or the L.A. Times bombing or Debs, in and out of jail, organizing, protesting, running for president, and getting more votes than anyone could have possibly dreamed. Ed introduced me to the romance of American radicalism, very different from the Soviet-inspired party and its “progressive” popular-front offshoots that I had learned about from Mimi and her lefty friends.
Though Ed and I worked in comics, Ed lettering script copy at any comic book house he could freelance at, our conversations centered not on comics or sci-fi, with writers other cartoonists liked to name-drop: Ray Bradbury, Arthur Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon. Ed preferred to talk about early Hemingway, The Torrents of Spring, the Nick Adams stories, writing as a way of recording truth, simply and directly, and then feeling it resonate on the page. Hemingway’s alter ego, Nick Adams, a middle-class WASP from the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, was, inexplicably, our fantasy figure. Reading “Big Two-Hearted River” made a fisherman of me. I, who could not give thought to baiting a hook without a rush of nausea.
Hemingway’s way with words, or rather his way of eliminating words, made sense to a cartoonist’s imagination: “Less is more.” Less was, in fact, plenty. The air between words was like the silent panel in an adventure strip: it told the story by not telling, by giving over to the reader the job of filling in the writer’s gaps. The reader imagines and thus becomes a collaborator with the writer in telling the story.
So for me it wasn’t that much of a distance between the blank verse of “The Killers” and the blank universe of Bernard Baily’s comic The Spectre or the deadpan bloodletting of Charles Biro’s Crime Does Not Pay comics. Each took a spare and functional approach to his art, although neither Baily nor Biro thought what he did was art.
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