Ed Meares Remembers Will Eisner

The very first exposure I had to Will Eisner was the Harvey Comics' attempt to cash in on the super-hero craze generated by Julie Schwartz' initiating the Marvel Age of comics in the early 1960's (yeah, that's what I said, Julie's resurrecting the Justice Society of America and changing it into the Justice League gave Stan Lee the goosing he needed to start up the Jack Kirby creation, the Fantastic Four).

The company that ran Richie Rich, Casper, Huey, the fat baby duck, etc., managed this in part by their publishing a book on Eisner's character, the Spirit, in 1968. It was an "oversized" book, as I recall --56 or 80 pages, one of the two-- and Harvey wasn't all that committed to it, as only three issues ever came out (give a book a chance to find an audience, why don't ya?).

Knowing nothing of the Spirit's history (or any comics history, at that point), I was deeply impressed by such a strange book -- strange, because in those days, super-heroes were the only books a self-respecting kid could read. Harvey, Archie, and most of the Dell/Gold Key books, you see, weren't written/drawn for us kids, and we all knew that fact. Those books were done to make our parents happy, only they were even less interesting, less intellectually challenging than even the very stiff, incredibly rigid, Classics Illustrated comics .... Classics would at least print stuff that was fantastic, weird, or even gory. And, even if the art in all those books were totally unmemorable, it was still stuff that a kid could read without thinking, "Ah, this $#!+'s for my little brother!".

There were a couple pages of new material that Eisner himself had done for the occasion. I wouldn't see then the significance of the short-story where a black radical-looking type dude was interviewing Denny Colt/the Spirit and giving him a hard time about Ebony; how the Spirit's sidekick was a demeaning image of black people everywhere (and all the while this's going on, Ebony comes in dragging a clearly villainous --and thoroughly beaten-- felon that he'd evidently just captured all by his lonesome).

All politics of race would fly over my head completely for only a year or two longer (I was also personal friends with Yolanda King, Martin Luther King's daughter, at this time, as we attended classes at Henry Grady public high school in Atlanta, and his assinsination was only a few months in the future at that stage), but, right then, all I could do was read and re-read a couple'a books that were leaving me feeling that there was an entire UNIVERSE of storytelling that could be created in a comic book, if only the proper title(s) existed that'd carry such tales.

Graduating high school would lead me to the West Coast, the Hippie Movement, Free Love (which I never got ANYWHERE near enough to make me happy), and personally experimenting with Federally proscribed pharmaceuticals and their amazing side-effects.

I was the art director for the Puget Sound Partisan, a Seattle-based radical newspaper (which was called "the New York Times of the undergound free press" by the TV show, 60 Minutes, in case you were wondering, and even if you weren't) by the summer of '69. I'd created my own single-panel, "gag-a-day," political cartoon, "Sgt, Simian," a male gorilla wearing Seattle PD riot gear, when I began encountering the underground comics of Robert Crumb (Mr. Natural), Gilbert Shelton (the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Wonder Warthog, Spain (Trashman), Williams, Trina, etc. Still as naive as the country boy with cow$#!+ between his toes, I didn't make the connection of how much some of these artists/writers had been (and were still being) influenced by Will Eisner (alongside Harvey Kurtsman, among other, earlier WWII-era giants of the comics industry).

By 1975, I was in New York, a Buddhist, married with one-and-one-on-the-way, and looking to make my name in the "art world," whatever the hell THAT meant. I'd begun working for a small, mom'n'pop sized book store in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan by then. A major portion of our stock were comics and I was as happy as a Republican knee-deep in graft as I read, read, and read the stuff. The latest books from all the major publishers, and back issues, as well as trade journals and histories of the industry.

And, of course, among the back issues and some of the most glowing, most deeply in-awe-of stories in the trades, there was Will Eisner.

By '77, I was ready to go art-school. I selected SVA (School of Visual Arts), mainly 'cause they were cheaper than Parsons and some of the others, but also because Eisner was one of the teachers there.

In fact, I consider myself extremely lucky for attending SVA at that time; not only did I study under Mr. Eisner, but Harvey Kurtzman, Art Spigelman, as well.

One thing I'd been curious about from almost as soon as I picked up that first Harvey "Spirit," was why Eisner had dropped the Spirit title around '52, and chosen to not return to it.

The short answer, from Eisner himself, was a.) after a certain point, that there was no where else to take the characters; b.) other projects arose that offered much more interesting avenues for his sense of creativity, design, and accepting a challenge.

Both parts of that explanation were perfectly reasonable, totally logical, .... and wholly unacceptable to me.

How ANYBODY could imagine that there was a limit to any character or set of characters, in the storytelling potential was beyond me at that time. yet, being in his class, seeing how his emphasis for his students was so completely focused on their learning the fundamentals for good storytelling, then maybe breaking those rules if/when/whenever the need arose, that was the singlemost important I took away with me.

Thinking about our discussions then, reading Eisner's books (both the prose ones, that were really extensions of his classroom instructions, and his illustrated works, like "A Contract With God"), as well as interviews he'd give over the intervening years, I finally figured out my personal understanding of his leaving Denny Colt, Ellen, Commissioner Dolan, and the others, alone.

Will Eisner's first fascination with storytelling, in my estimation, has nothing to do with the "Hero Myth," the one truly essential element of all the superhero stories.

No, to Mr. Eisner, the important thing was the writer/artist's ability to delineate the "little" story, the tales of the people and situations that are SO mundane, so obviously in front of our eyes, that the overwhelming majority of us miss them completely, and probably always will.

Mr. Eisner didn't miss them. He found them, focused our attention on them, made us realize that these were stories worth telling.

I honestly believe that that is a beautiful legacy to leave behind.

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