This issue of the Journal honors Will Eisner's long career and achievements in comics. A warning to readers who think the Journal is insufficiently obsequious to artists of Eisner's generation and stature: We believe the best way to demonstrate our respect for artists like Will Eisner is to level the same high critical and historical scrutiny at him that we routinely do in this magazine to others, and to that aim we have covered every phase of his career with a minimum of gloss and spin and a maximum of critical thought -- an unusual tact if the recent "tributes" on the internet and the mainstream media are any indication. (One shudders at how platitudinous and sycophantic the specialty press will be, none of which I've seen by the time this issue was sent to the printer.)

Upon Poppa's death in 1961, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman wrote, "When a writer who has been important to you dies, if you want to get the taste of the tributes in the mass circulation magazines out of your mouth ("He was a cherished colleague of ours," said Life), the thing to do is to go back and read his best work."

To me, this means going back to Eisner's seminal creation, The Spirit.

I should admit at the outset that I'm full of ambivalences toward Eisner's work and career. First, I didn't grow up reading Eisner, so he was never an early enthusiasm; he never figured as prominently among my personal pantheon as three other giants of his generation: Carl Barks was a crackerjack yarn spinner whose work acquired deeper resonance on repeated readings; Harvey Kurtzman's satirical and dramatic work provided a moral compass that was rarely seen in comics at that time; and Jack Kirby was a furious presence in my formative years, blazingly original and authentic. Eisner's work wasn't readily available during the '60s, and when I finally read him in earnest in the '70s, I recognized that his work was masterful of its kind, but I wasn't taken by the content, which seemed to me frivolous and tepid compared to the underground comics I was also devouring at the time; the appeal of his easy-going genre-bending stories eluded me. Second, I had an antipathy to his exploitation of his fellow artists during the'40s, '50s, and '60s. He ran a shop, paid the artists on a work-for-hire basis, and owned everything they did -- just like all the comics publishers at the time who were routinely reviled while Eisner was given a pass.

That said, refamiliarizing myself with the Spirit strips recently, I came to a new, measured appreciation for Eisner's '40s creation. The Spirit, begun in 1940, was a hybrid comic book/newspaper strip -- at seven or eight pages per episode, it had the length of a comic book story but was delivered to readers in the form of a newspaper supplement, a scheme concocted by the comics publisher "Busy" Arnold, who asked Eisner to put it together. The idea was to capitalize on the spectacular success of the comic book, specifically the superhero. Eisner was evidently too creatively restless or mature to have any artistic interest in superheroes, so he created a character whose costume consisted of a blue suit, a Fedora, and -- as a sop to Arnold and commercialism -- a mask.

Even his early Spirit work, conventional as it was, was a cut above what was being done in comic books: The plots were more intricate, the tone more playful, the authorial hand more self-aware. Eisner refused to take the genre trappings seriously -- which was about the only intelligent way to approach a strip that was designed to imitate the look of comic books, which were at best semi-literate, yet appeal to the adult readership of newspapers. By the time Eisner was hitting his stride and the strip was loosening up, almost exactly two years after he'd started it, he was drafted into the Army. He served his stint at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and found that he simply didn't have the time to contribute to The Spirit. (For an excellent and detailed chronology of The Spirit's creative arc, his growing cast of characters, and stylistic evolution, I refer you to Steven Grant's "The Spirit of Will Eisner" in this issue.)

Like most readers, I prefer his post-war stories. Jules Feiffer, who worked for Eisner in the post war years and wrote many of the strips beginning with the June 5, 1949 installment, and who's no slouch in the Spirit expertise department, prefers the pre-war strips. "Eisner seems to think his golden period was after he got out of the Army. But I think the best days of the Spirit were from about six months after he began it until he got drafted and gave it over to Lou Fine. I mean, obviously, the strip was drawn better later on, and was probably better looking in a lot of ways, but I don't think that maters. It really has to do, I think, with the intensity of vision, and concentration, and love of what you're doing. Simply as a piece of art, as something out of a man's mind that was total and whole and absolutely right, I don't think it ever got better than those pre-war years."

Eisner was clearly on a roll in the pre-war years and the strips may have had a qualitative consistency the post-war strips lacked, but I still think the post-war strips at their best represent the inevitable and logical culmination of Eisner's creative temperament and the most unselfconscious and freeing example of his cartooning -- ever. They demonstrated Eisner's great strengths and his severe limitations, but at no other time in his long career were his aesthetic virtues and vices so winningly combined.

Eisner had evolved over the run of The Spirit a style that accommodated both the dramatic and comedic dimensions of the strip with one foot in the representational camp of, for example, Milton Caniff, and the other in the big foot camp of, say, Al Capp or Chester Gould. (Eisner drew a sample comic strip called Harry Carey in 1935 -- precociously, at age 18 -- in an E.C. Segar-influenced bigfoot style.) The Spirit navigated as effortlessly between humor and seriousness, between broad romantic comedy and melodrama, as The Thin Man movies of the same period (the first one of which he had probably seen in the theatre in 1934).

About these post-war stories, Mike Barrier wrote, "Because Eisner used heavy blacks and striking 'camera angles' in his post-war stories, some writers invoke film noir in describing them, and it is widely taken for granted... that his stories are the comic book equivalent of movies. Eisner has spoken of seeing lots of movies; but everybody did, in the '30s and '40s, and on the whole, movies seem to have been much less important an influence on Eisner than the short stories he read so avidly." True, Eisner's so-called "human interest" stories may have been inspired by short story writers such as Ring Lardner or de Maupassant, and he may have learned about concision and architectonics from them -- Eisner's Spirit stories were always exquisitely structured -- but all the most prominent iconography and idioms that Eisner juggled so exuberantly and transformed so expertly to the comics form come straight from the movies of the time. Barrier to the contrary, Crime, espionage, thrillers, and romantic comedy were the most important influence on Eisner's approach to The Spirit.

Romantic elements became more prominent in the post-war stories, his gallery of femme fatales more seductive, the Spirit's flirtation with them more dangerous and therefore a more compelling and integral component of the strip. Romance was always a part of The Spirit even though in the pre-war strips it was subordinate to the plots that revolved around crime plots, but Eisner always handled romance more deftly than crime. (Compare two consecutive weekly strips, for example: "Gorilla Gage" (1-4-42), a screwball comedy plot with a light battle-of-the-sexes touch, with a dollop of suspense, criminality, and violence, fast-paced and beautifully modulated, with "Mr. Fly" (1-11-42), a dim-witted, plodding, and heavy-handed crime story with an unfortunate dollop of philosophical attitudinizing.) Eisner had a light touch and a racy charm (and an unthreatening sensuality) that suited the romantic aspect of the strip whereas the criminal elements looked second-hand, rote comic-book conventions. The difference is that the one came from the more sophisticated movies of the time and the other from comic books. His post-war strips turned into romantic screwball comedies combined with film nourish plots, ambience, and characters. The Spirit was notorious for his ability to take punishment; he was routinely beaten and pummeled (think Alan Ladd at the hands of William Bendix in The Glass Key). The rapid-fire dialogue reflected the snappy patter of such movies as His Girl Friday, The Last Days of Mrs. Cheney and The Lady Eve, and was laced with dialogue such as the delectably ferine P'gell's "So, wipe your chin, junior, and get the piggy bank." The Spirit would have been played perfectly by Cary Grant in his Arsenic and Old Lace mode -- perpetually flustered, morally bewildered, and impossibly good-looking. The femmes fatale were conflations of various screen actresses who often played fast-talking, amoral but irresistible cutthroats. The Will Eisner Companion cites Skinny Bones' and Silk Satin's templates as Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn, but generally his delicious cast of conniving women characters, usually draped in clinging peignoirs or pelisses -- especially, of course, P'gell -- reminds me more of Marlene Dietrich from The Blue Angel or Miriam Hopkins from Trouble in Paradise, or Jane Greer from Out of the Past, or Lizabeh Scott from Too Late For Tears. One of my favorite Spirit stories is "Satin" (June 12, 1949). It has the rueful voice-over of Double Indemnity and the tropical menace of Key Largo. The story has everything: a murder mystery, a love triangle, adultery, expiation -- and it's all as light as a feather. Unlike Double Indemnity or Key Largo, it ends on a note of oxymoronic good cheer: "I watched Satin and Hildie disappear into tiny dots... and the adventure in Puerto Rico Que was behind me... Kurt was dead... the evidence against him could do no good for anyone now... I let the scraps of paper fly from the window and scatter in the wind. The sky ahead was bright and the day was young..." By the end, even the reader tends to forget that The Spirit was beaten to within an inch of his life, Satin was widowed, and her daughter nearly drowned. All is well and on to the next adventure!

It was precisely this frivolousness that gave The Spirit its charm. There is something to be said for this effortless-seeming balancing act between form and content, darkness and lightness, sense and nonsense. It never approached the delicacy and sophistication of Lubitsch or the labyrinthine loopiness and verbal dexterity of Sturges, but its level of wit, its formal visual innovations, and its good-natured parodic take on pop culture was more literate and mature than any other comic books of the time.

Eisner himself probably did less than 50% of the hands-on work over the course of the strip, which makes its success and stature all the more remarkable; Eisner's contribution had to compensate for a lot of mediocre work done in his name. There was the huge gap between May 1942 through December 1945 when the strip was written by reliable hacks Manly Wade Wellman and William Woolfolk and drawn by Lou Fine. The daily newspaper strip, begun by Eisner in October 1941 was continued by Jack Cole in Eisner's absence and was probably the best of the ghosted drawing. When Eisner returned from the service (his first post-war strip was December 13, 1945) he rarely did the entire strip by himself. He was distracted by an array of commercial and business interests after the war and unable to devote as much time to The Spirit as he had. Jules Feiffer came on board in 1947 and, according to Eisner, began working "as a clean-up, paste-up, background man" and talked out stories with Eisner; eventually Feiffer would take over the writing of he strip entirely. Feiffer attributes at least some of the more sensual quality of Eisner's femmes fatale to John Spranger, who penciled some of the strips (which Eisner inked). Between '46 and approximately '48, Eisner described his work week as being divided between overseeing production of The Spirit and "some business affairs, other publishing, [and] a trip here and there." By the 1950s, "The Spirit began to become very burdensome because I was doing hundreds of other things" -- which included the conceptualization and production of the monthly P*S Magazine for the Defense Department, his failed attempt to publish newsstand comics such as Baseball and Kewpies, and failed efforts to sell comic give-aways such as Sears Roebuck Comics to clients.

By the late '40s, Eisner's participation in the strip had dwindled to a largely supervisory role. John Spranger, an excellent artist, would ocassionally pencil strips that Eisner would ink. Eisner hired Jerry Grandenetti and Jim Dixon to occasionally ink his pencils. By 1950, Feiffer was writing most of the strips, and Grandenetti, Dixon, and Al Wenzel were drawing them. Compared to the stories Eisner drew entirely on his own, theirs looked like barely competent hackwork; three May 1952 strips drawn by Jerry Grandenetti are particularly grotesque. The Spirit supplement was losing papers and in a last-ditch gambit to keep the strip alive, Eisner turned the storyline into an outer-space adventure and hired Wally Wood to draw it. Feiffer hated the idea and wrote it under duress; it must have been agonizing. It was a betrayal of everything The Spirit represented: the noirish shadows and atmospheric rainstorms, the urban crime milieu, the carefree romance -- all gone. Wood's drawing is so technically brilliant it's positively stultifying. It ended ignominiously on September 28, 1952.

Eisner's career between 1952 and 1978 is hazy. Even the usually helpful Will Eisner Companion (edited by N.C. Christopher Crouch and Steve Weiner) is emphatically unhelpful. It appears as though Eisner's creative work took a back seat to business and administrative duties. From what I've been able to piece together, this is an outline of those 26 years -- or, rather 30 years, beginning in 1948, when he founded American Visuals, a company he started to produce "educational" comics for what he called "industrial training" with clients that ranged from government agencies such as the Defense Department to corporations such as General Motors and lobbying interests such as the AMA and the American Trucking Association. In 1951, he pitched the U.S. Army a training magazine called P*S, got the contract, and produced the magazine through 1972 when he lost the contract (another comic book artist, Murphy Anderson, took it over). Throughout this period he produced technical manuals for what he called "'client' countries that were receiving foreign aid" -- such as South Korea and Vietnam. In 1952, he started producing pamphlets and reading matter that were used to fill the racks that corporations placed in factories for their employees. In 1958 or 1959, he merged American Visuals with Koster-Dana, "which was the largest reading rack company then in the business." He became president of the company. This company then bought Bell-McClure Syndicate, which circulated comic strips and features to newspapers, "and I became head of that." In 1961 or '62 he "bought out American Visuals and a couple of other small properties from the [Bell-McClure Syndicate]." In 1965, he got a research and development contract from the Department of Labor to produce a magazine for disadvantaged youths called Job Scene. In 1967 he started publishing something called the "World Explorer Program" for elementary-school kids, which he described as "a multi-media kit of enrichment materials for social studies." At some point he created another company called Educational Supplements, which in 1971 he merged with Croft Educational" and "I became board chairman there." He sold his share of the company in 1972 and started another publishing company called Poorhouse Press "and turned out some satirical stuff," albeit satirical stuff with the unpromising titles How to Avoid Death and Taxes... and Live Forever, Gleeful Guide to Living With Astrology: An Everyday Manual for Coping with People, Events and Afflictions through Astrology and Gleeful Guide to Communicating with Plants to Make Them Grow. Somehow, he also found the time to produce such books as Dating & Hanging Out (1966; Scholastic), 101 Outer Space Jokes (1979) and Star Jaws (1978) -- the latter two from Baronet Publishing, not coincidentally the publisher who released A Contract With God in 1978.

How could Eisner abandon genuine creative work for 28 years of producing what he called "attitude conditioning" and "product procedures" for corporate and government clients? This is not merely different in degree from creating art, but different in kind. The "educational" or propagandistic work he did was by its nature utilitarian, instructive, didactic, narrowly purposeful. Art necessarily stands foursquare in opposition to the very qualities that a client demands of such products. It's possible Eisner saw no other creative options (though Pogo and Peanuts both began in 1950, so the newspaper strip was still open to unique, imaginative vision; and Eisner's assistant, Jules Feiffer began to take off in the '50s, and flourished in the '60s while Eisner was running a succession of companies and turning out commercial assignments). Still, Eisner was always entrepreneurial and, obviously, adaptable. He appears to have been as passionate about business as he was about art. According to Denis Kitchen, when he and Eisner spoke for the first time at a comics convention in 1971, Eisner didn't want to talk about art, he wanted to talk about business: "My attempts to interject questions about The Spirit were handled graciously, but Will Eisner was not at the convention to bask in nostalgic reverence. He was there to learn something new about the most mundane, and yet essential, of publishing topics: distribution." It is hard to fathom how he could cease doing imaginative work of such high caliber so completely and decisively.

Eisner's resurgence began when Feiffer lauded him in The Great Comic Book Heroes in 1965 -- 13 years after the last Spirit story appeared. In 1966 the New York Herald Tribune commissioned a new Spirit story from him. Harvey Comics published two Spirit comics in 1966 and 1967. In his 1983 interview with another entrepreneurial comics pioneer, Phil Seuling (reprinted in Shop Talk), Eisner relates how he rediscovered his identity as a cartoonist: "I came back into the field because of you. I remember you calling me in New London, where I was sitting there as chairman of the board of Croft Publishing Co. My secretary said, 'There's a Mr. Seuling on the phone and he's talking about a comics convention. What is that?' she said, 'I didn't know you were a cartoonist, Mr. Eisner.' 'Oh, yes,' I said, 'secretly I'm a closet cartoonist.' I came down and was stunned at the existence of the whole world. ...That was a world that I had left, and I found it very exciting, very stimulating. ...That, plus a number of incidents that occurred, got me back."

Indeed it did. He published A Contract With God in 1978 -- 26 years after the last Spirit story appeared. It was a serious, mainstream "novel" of interlocking stories. He published a succession of serious literary "novels" from then until now (his last one is due out any day now from W.W. Norton). He published two academic books on storytelling. The Eisner Awards were named after him. He was a ubiquitous presence at conventions. He was an indefatigable spokesman on behalf of comics as a serious art form.

In 1989, I wrote a dissenting critique of two of his books -- The Dreamer and The Building. Eisner had by then cemented his reputation as the elder statesman of comics. He was impervious to criticism; I don't think he'd gotten a single bad or even luke-warm review in the fan press (the only press reviewing comics at the time). I felt that his reputation and stature had cowed the critics and that his work had become increasingly solemn, humorless, ostentatious, arid and mechanical. It was burdened by a specious magniloquence. In other words, it was exactly the opposite of the breezy, tongue-in-cheek lightheartedness that characterized The Spirit and made it so much more vibrant and alive. The review was harsh (I winced a couple times upon re-reading it), but it was honest, accurate, and, of course, utterly politically suicidal. I was pilloried, as expected. My motives were, predictably, impugned. The usual. In his essay in this issue, Dave Sim suggests that Eisner took the review to heart and in answer to my criticism created the more honest Dropsie Avenue. Sim has the same rose-colored view of Eisner that Eisner had of Eisner in The Dreamer: "It was just another inconceivable facet of the multi-talented Mr. Eisner. In what other medium has anyone who has attained the stature of living legend continued to be -- not only open to criticism -- but responsive to it?" While flattering (to both of us!), I don't believe it for a minute. Eisner was in fact offended and pissed off by the review -- which is, after all, the more logical, plausible and human response. My relationship with Eisner, which was casual, turned icy. I regretted this, but I can't say I regretted writing the review. I am pleased to say that Will and I broke that ice during the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund Cruise in 2000. We had several long, genuinely pleasurable (and pleasurably genuine) conversations in the bar in the evenings. The ice was not broken quite enough for Will to grant me an interview in the Journal, though; he routinely but politely declined the request I made annually from the time I saw him on the CBLDF Cruise. I regret that. I would've enjoyed talking to him about the movies we both apparently love, the touchy subject of his shop (run like an Egyptian Galley as he cheerfully put it), details of the Spirit's chaotic production, the lost 28 years, and (another touchy subject, at least as far as I'm concerned) his later, serious work. That was not to be, but as his harshest (his only?) critic, I thought it only right that I try to explore the man and his career more fully and explain what delighted me about his work.

Gary Groth is the Executive Editor of The Comics Journal and co-founder of Fantagraphics Books.

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