Speaker 1: Sequential art is a valid medium. I called it sequential
Speaker 1: art for want of a better name. I've always been
Speaker 1: annoyed from the very first day of my involvement in
Speaker 1: comics of the use of the word comics. Comics is
Speaker 1: a misnomer. Comics should not be comical. They should not
Speaker 1: be necessarily funny, as in the case of funny papers.
Speaker 1: This is a valid medium of expression, equal in respectability
Speaker 1: if you will, to words without pictures or to film.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Amusing Jews, where we celebrate Jewish contributors and
Speaker 2: contributions to American popular culture. I'm Jonathan Friedman and I'm
Speaker 2: Joey Angelfield. Producer engineer Mike Tomren is working somewhere behind
Speaker 2: the scenes. Amusing Jews is a project of a Dot
Speaker 2: Cabareine Congregation for Humanistic Judaism, the Jewish Museum of the
Speaker 2: American West in Atheist United Studios, Hey, Joey. Graphic novels
Speaker 2: are a billion dollar industry, but they didn't really exist
Speaker 2: until nineteen seventy eight, when Will Eisner published A Contract
Speaker 2: with God. A magnificent new graphic biography tells Eisner's amazing
Speaker 2: story from lowly cartoonists to creator of the spirit to
Speaker 2: innovator of literary comics.
Speaker 3: We're excited to talk with Stephen Weiner and Dan Maser,
Speaker 3: whose latest book is Will Eisner, a Comics Biography published
Speaker 3: by MBM Graphic Novels. Stephen and Dan, Welcome to Amusing Jews.
Speaker 4: Thanked it's life to be here.
Speaker 5: Thanks.
Speaker 3: Will Eisner was many things, a pioneering comics creator, a
Speaker 3: successful businessman, an advocate for comics as a literary art form,
Speaker 3: and a terrific guy. How would you assess his cultural importance?
Speaker 4: Well, Will had a tremendous influence on popular culture really
Speaker 4: through the fourth of his own will no pun intended
Speaker 4: through the force of his own drive to succeed, and
Speaker 4: he chose comics as a way to succeed. So with
Speaker 4: a young man, he because he wasn't he tried to
Speaker 4: be an artist, a cartoon a cartoonist. Thing wasn't financially successful.
Speaker 4: So he created one of the first studios, and he
Speaker 4: actually was one of the first people to create the
Speaker 4: the way comics were actually made. And so because of
Speaker 4: that innovation, we really have the form that we have
Speaker 4: in terms of comics. That's one thing. But he was
Speaker 4: he was a very restless person, and so he he
Speaker 4: got bored with that studio, even though it was it
Speaker 4: was very well, very financially successful, and he left it
Speaker 4: because he wanted to push the boundaries of comics further
Speaker 4: and tell different kinds of stories. And one of for
Speaker 4: many reasons, one of them was he hated superheroes and
Speaker 4: he didn't want to he didn't want to get involved with
Speaker 4: that anymore, and so he left it and created a
Speaker 4: newspaper supplement that was like the Parade Magazine, and he
Speaker 4: did the and that you know, this was the spirit
Speaker 4: that that was still talking about today. And so he was,
Speaker 4: you know, in that way. He really pushed the medium
Speaker 4: forward with everything he did. And then when he went
Speaker 4: into the army, of course he's Will Eisner. So he
Speaker 4: found a way to make comics in the army and
Speaker 4: he created a comics that educational comics to educate the
Speaker 4: military and how these equipment and you know that kind
Speaker 4: of thing. And then he then when that later in
Speaker 4: the fifties, he started another company that basically built on that.
Speaker 4: I did educational materials. He did manuals for corporations he
Speaker 4: used them for in an educational capacity, and then later
Speaker 4: in the seventies when he was brought back into comics,
Speaker 4: and he was one of the very first people to
Speaker 4: do graphic novels, and he was one of the only
Speaker 4: person doing them. Like for his or really his demographic
Speaker 4: older people that he wasn't They weren't interested in and
Speaker 4: you know, sexual revolution and something. They were interested in
Speaker 4: their lives of that time and their experiences. So every
Speaker 4: time he changed, he actually changed what comics could do
Speaker 4: and and that way, I think he had a tremendous
Speaker 4: influence on our culture because he really showed people possibilities
Speaker 4: every time he made a change. And it's not of
Speaker 4: that he and I guess the other thing I would
Speaker 4: say is that he implemented his implementation. His execution was
Speaker 4: very good too, So it wasn't just he had an
Speaker 4: idea and someone else took the idea and did a
Speaker 4: good thing with it. He had an idea and even
Speaker 4: get how to make the idea work. So it's actually
Speaker 4: he was teaching people all the time, really what comics
Speaker 4: were able to do. That that's my opinion.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think, you know, he started in comic books
Speaker 5: really at the very beginning of comic book So his
Speaker 5: influence on culture as a whole. I think starts starts
Speaker 5: there because when Will Eisner started making comic book they
Speaker 5: were so new that really they were mostly reprinted newspaper
Speaker 5: comics put together and staple. And he was there at
Speaker 5: the very beginning of doing you know, long form comics stories,
Speaker 5: which had not been done before. And you know, he
Speaker 5: really created how the vocabulary of how to tell a story,
Speaker 5: you know, I think, in a very specific to the
Speaker 5: medium of comics way. And he went beyond that and
Speaker 5: added the whole cinematic style the comics that was very
Speaker 5: influential with angles and lighting and you know, the comics
Speaker 5: comic stories had been a very sort of theatrical thing
Speaker 5: where your imaginary camera is just staying fixed. And I
Speaker 5: think he really sunk his teeth into that form. And
Speaker 5: I think his influence on really every comic book artist
Speaker 5: afterwards can be can be felt. And the other thing
Speaker 5: I was thinking about it today and I thought he
Speaker 5: was kind of like, I know, this is a Jewish program,
Speaker 5: but he was kind of like the John the Baptist
Speaker 5: of serious comics. He was out there in the nineteen
Speaker 5: late thirties and forties saying this could be an art form,
Speaker 5: this could be in you know, like serious novels. This
Speaker 5: could be in museums, this could be in classrooms, and
Speaker 5: nobody believed him. And finally they caught up in the
Speaker 5: in the sixties. And interestingly, I think one of the
Speaker 5: one of the main figures in making comic more intellectually acceptable,
Speaker 5: let's say, was Jules Pfeiffer, who came out who was
Speaker 5: first hired by will Eisner and really learned his stuff
Speaker 5: from Eisner and then did this book on the history
Speaker 5: of comics that kind of reintroduced Eisner to a new generation.
Speaker 5: So I think he Eiser and that we kind of
Speaker 5: acted through through others and even when he did contact
Speaker 5: with God kind of the quote unquote first graphic novel
Speaker 5: it was. It was moderately successful, but I think it
Speaker 5: paved the way for what happened a few years later
Speaker 5: with Mouse and a few other books that really made
Speaker 5: graphic novel explode. So I think his ideas and his
Speaker 5: own innovations were very influential throughout the whole comics and
Speaker 5: graphic novel culture.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I know that the term graphic novel had been
Speaker 2: used before for other context. I think he maybe was
Speaker 2: the first to apply it to this comic book medium
Speaker 2: as I understand it, but also as you're saying, it's
Speaker 2: kind of the quote unquote first graphic novel a Contract
Speaker 2: with God. I think Jules Spifer is another candidate for
Speaker 2: first graphic novel with Tantrum, and it's it's kind of
Speaker 2: interesting that they both came from the same working relationship
Speaker 2: and we're both kind of pushing the envelope in that way.
Speaker 5: I think Eisner definitely pushed it to a new plateau
Speaker 5: with Contract with God and kept pushing for the next
Speaker 5: twenty five twenty seven years.
Speaker 4: And the other thing I was going to add to
Speaker 4: that was that the Eisnd's book preceded the Fire From book.
Speaker 4: But one thing's interesting is Eisen's book came up from
Speaker 4: a very small publisher, and Fire For I forget which house,
Speaker 4: but it was a major house that brought out Tantrum.
Speaker 4: So it was really the Fire For book was really
Speaker 4: aimed at the book trade, and the Eisne book was
Speaker 4: trying to get there, but it really didn't. It didn't
Speaker 4: have the inroads that the Fifer book had.
Speaker 2: I know. Another thing that Eisner introduced was this concept
Speaker 2: of sequential art as a way of sort of elevating
Speaker 2: the art form. Can you speak to that a little bit.
Speaker 5: He was always elevating the art form, and I guess
Speaker 5: he had the sense to know that terminology is important,
Speaker 5: you know. So you make a long comic book, you
Speaker 5: call it a graphic novel, and that's going to sound
Speaker 5: more respectable. You don't call it comics, you call it
Speaker 5: sequential art. I mean, it's all the same thing. I
Speaker 5: don't think conceptually these phrases change anything, but you know,
Speaker 5: he was a publicist in a certain way, and he
Speaker 5: knew that you had to, you know, you change the
Speaker 5: language and you change the way people see things.
Speaker 4: And the other thing that I think is important is
Speaker 4: at that time when the industry was trying to figure
Speaker 4: out a way to approach the mainstream that there were
Speaker 4: a lot lot of terms being thrown around. One with
Speaker 4: graphic album, one was sequential narrative, one with long comic book.
Speaker 4: But they term graphic novel was the one that stuck.
Speaker 4: And one of the reasons that did stick because he
Speaker 4: was so insistent on this term. So he he I don't, Mike,
Speaker 4: and he did not do the first graphic novel. Whoever
Speaker 4: did I'm not sure that's not important but the fact
Speaker 4: that he was so committed to it, it means to
Speaker 4: and that's the way he owns the term because of
Speaker 4: his commitment to the forum.
Speaker 2: Enjoining the show, Click like and subscribe. If anyone deserves
Speaker 2: a graphic biography, it's Will Eisner. Was there extra pressure
Speaker 2: to get it right?
Speaker 5: I think there was a certain amount of pressure because
Speaker 5: you know, there's a will Eisner family foundation that we
Speaker 5: didn't work with, we didn't have any formal relationship with,
Speaker 5: but we certainly wanted them to be happy with the book. Uh,
Speaker 5: there was, you know, nothing, No, we weren't. We weren't
Speaker 5: doing an expose of Will Eisner. We you know, So
Speaker 5: I think there was that and and I guess most
Speaker 5: of the people in the book are dead. But at
Speaker 5: the end of the book we do a scene with
Speaker 5: Dennis Kitchen, who was who we who We know he
Speaker 5: used to be Steve's agent. So so we had a
Speaker 5: lot of communication with Dennis Kitchen, and I think that
Speaker 5: we probably felt like we didn't want to it's a
Speaker 5: point Dennis either, especially when we introduced him as a character.
Speaker 5: But yeah, I mean, I I guess, uh, you know,
Speaker 5: there are a lot of people out there who know
Speaker 5: a lot about Will Eisner, and you know most of
Speaker 5: it is right, I guess. So you know, we we
Speaker 5: weren't trying to controversy or anything like that.
Speaker 4: I guess my answer to be would to that question
Speaker 4: would be that and I knew realized that I n
Speaker 4: him for about fifteen years, and I knew him fairly well.
Speaker 4: It wasn't uh, And I wanted to write by him,
Speaker 4: and by that I mean this, this whole book. That
Speaker 4: the idea of this book came because it was a
Speaker 4: response to his graphic novel called The Dreamer and which
Speaker 4: which he recounts his own his own childhood and the
Speaker 4: early days of the the industry. And I always thought
Speaker 4: that was fake. I said, it couldn't have worked out
Speaker 4: so well, and so so I so I thought I
Speaker 4: wanted to do a book that would say what it
Speaker 4: would be really like for him, how hard it actually was,
Speaker 4: and how and what a risk it really was for
Speaker 4: him to to commit himself this one. There was no
Speaker 4: there was no industry what he started. And so my
Speaker 4: answer is that I wanted to write by him, by
Speaker 4: his memory, and I really wanted to show people that
Speaker 4: it wasn't just as it wasn't as he presented it.
Speaker 1: It.
Speaker 4: Was a much harder road and he had a much
Speaker 4: harder battle to fight. And you know, I feel that
Speaker 4: we're that we who love comments were is so indebted
Speaker 4: to him for his vision and his commitment, and that's
Speaker 4: so in that way, that's what I wanted to write,
Speaker 4: and I hope we succeeded.
Speaker 3: Early in his career, Eisner dow comics under five different names,
Speaker 3: in five different styles simultaneously. Damn you mastered a bunch
Speaker 3: of styles and putting this book together, including spot on
Speaker 3: Eisner like drawings.
Speaker 2: What was your process?
Speaker 5: I guess the first step of the process was to
Speaker 5: decide that I did not want to draw this book
Speaker 5: overall in the style that was going to get compared
Speaker 5: to Will Eisner. First of all, that just wouldn't be
Speaker 5: my natural style. But also I think that, you know,
Speaker 5: I'm more in the world of of indie comics, so
Speaker 5: I think I wanted it to, you know, feel like
Speaker 5: it would naturally feel for me, which is more of
Speaker 5: an indie style whatever that whatever that means, but a
Speaker 5: looser style and faster style in a way, except we
Speaker 5: had to draw a lot fast, but you know, like
Speaker 5: the way I the way I colored. It especially was
Speaker 5: intentionally kind of loose, kind of rough, more expressive than
Speaker 5: uh than than detailed. So there's that, But then then
Speaker 5: there's like art within the art, you know. We definitely
Speaker 5: wanted to make Eisner's drawing process a big part of
Speaker 5: the book, which meant drawing his art, which because I didn't,
Speaker 5: I thought it would look weird if we just sort
Speaker 5: of shrunk down ages of Eisner and and and slotted
Speaker 5: them in. So yeah, I readdrew a lot of pages
Speaker 5: by Eisner and you know, not pages but handle sections
Speaker 5: of pages and some other artists, and and that was
Speaker 5: just a matter of you know, kind of close looking
Speaker 5: and and then sort of learning how he put together
Speaker 5: his his pages and his panels, which was which was
Speaker 5: fun and I think I learned a lot. Every time
Speaker 5: I would do one of those, I would feel like
Speaker 5: this burst of confidence when I went back to drawing
Speaker 5: in my style because I had just done something so
Speaker 5: so challenging, you know, to to to render the way
Speaker 5: he did, you know, his what he could do with
Speaker 5: light falling across a drapery or across a face cast
Speaker 5: shadows was so incredible that it was really like like
Speaker 5: a little bit like going to school, just copying all
Speaker 5: that Eisner first.
Speaker 2: In his biography Will Eisner, A Spirited Life. Bob Anlman
Speaker 2: notes that the book began as an autobiography with him
Speaker 2: as Eisner's helper, but Eisner soon realized the project was
Speaker 2: too big and handed it over to Alman. How did
Speaker 2: you decide what to leave in and what to leave
Speaker 2: out of your graphic biography?
Speaker 4: I think it was kind of intuitive because what we
Speaker 4: were following his story, but we wanted to focus on
Speaker 4: the you know, the moments when he had to take
Speaker 4: risks and when when he when he when those moments
Speaker 4: really when he actually changed the industry. So that was
Speaker 4: that was the big part. And then the other part
Speaker 4: was we wanted to we really wanted to present him
Speaker 4: as a human being, because he's not just this He's
Speaker 4: not just this guy that gave us comments. He's a
Speaker 4: person with a whole life, And that was that was
Speaker 4: the real In a lot of ways, that was a
Speaker 4: bigger challenge than the other thing, because it's so he
Speaker 4: was a very private person and it's really hard to
Speaker 4: get a lot of personal information. That's but we were
Speaker 4: we were determined to show were the sacrifices that he
Speaker 4: made to succeed, and I think that's we tried to
Speaker 4: show that repeatedly because it was a theme throughout his life,
Speaker 4: the sacrifice. He was just so driven to succeed in
Speaker 4: this industry that really wasn't industry yet. So I think
Speaker 4: that that's how we so that really was the impulse.
Speaker 4: Betweend behind the choices that we made, would.
Speaker 5: You agree, Yeah, definitely. And there's there's a couple of biographies,
Speaker 5: there's his semi autobiographical graphic novels, and lots and lots
Speaker 5: of interviews with will Eisner. He liked to talk and
Speaker 5: talk about himself, and he had a repertoire of of
Speaker 5: anecdotes which he read over and over, and they're good anecdotes,
Speaker 5: some of them. I think we felt like some of
Speaker 5: the people might be surprised if they really know Eisener.
Speaker 5: It's like, why isn't the story about Jack Kirby standing
Speaker 5: up to the gangster over the linen story in the book.
Speaker 5: And there were some stories I think that we felt
Speaker 5: were almost had just become cliches through Eisner's retelling of them,
Speaker 5: and we left him out. Yeah, that's the main one.
Speaker 5: But like little anecdotes in the Comics Studio and some
Speaker 5: of his you know, probably most of his repertoire of
Speaker 5: anecdotes are in there. But you know, as Steve said,
Speaker 5: parts of his life that he didn't talk about as
Speaker 5: much or talked about more in generalities, especially his childhood.
Speaker 5: You know, the scene where he and his brother are
Speaker 5: confronted by the anti Semitic bullies and he ends up
Speaker 5: telling his to change his name. You know, that's one
Speaker 5: of his famous anecdotes. But there were scenes that we
Speaker 5: kind of had to invent, you know, based on how
Speaker 5: he talked about his parents and his childhood. So there
Speaker 5: are you know, scenes that they they they are fictionalized inventions,
Speaker 5: but they certainly are scenes that could happen, and they
Speaker 5: they bring out like, you know, his mother taking him
Speaker 5: shopping gross in the at the pushcarts. You know, he
Speaker 5: talked a lot about his mother being a hard nosed businesswoman,
Speaker 5: but he never gave an example, So so we invented
Speaker 5: an example. And then and then there's a whole question
Speaker 5: of of of where the story. You know, the story
Speaker 5: was going to begin basically before his birth with his
Speaker 5: parents' immigration, but where is the story going to end?
Speaker 5: So when Steve first came to me with the idea
Speaker 5: he had a he had a kind of an endpoint,
Speaker 5: which I'm sure you remember, Steve, you know, and it
Speaker 5: was going to end when Eisner was much younger than
Speaker 5: where we took it to.
Speaker 4: So then with him being drafted, and then we're gonna
Speaker 4: follow that with a pro section saying he went on
Speaker 4: to do the graphic novel blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 4: So what I in my own mind not it was
Speaker 4: a little bit like the movie A Complete Unknown. It
Speaker 4: would just like this this picture of the early years
Speaker 4: that was That was the original idea. But then what
Speaker 4: actually happened was that Dan, you know Dan Dan became
Speaker 4: interested and Dan was actually was also an expert on
Speaker 4: this period, and so we just started to expand the
Speaker 4: story and it became a much bigger story.
Speaker 5: But we did kind of we speed through, I guess
Speaker 5: from about nineteen really from the time that he's drafted
Speaker 5: to nineteen seventy right to the seventies, so like thirty
Speaker 5: five years are kind of a montage. We felt like
Speaker 5: the most important thing, and the publisher also urge us
Speaker 5: to do this was to get to the contract with God.
Speaker 5: So it's like let's get to the Contract with God
Speaker 5: as quickly as we can, which also which means getting like,
Speaker 5: how how did he sort of drift he drifted away
Speaker 5: from the comic world. How did he come back and
Speaker 5: have this really remarkable last act of his life in
Speaker 5: which he did so much. So I think that was
Speaker 5: a big decision of something not to leave out that
Speaker 5: was initially going to be left out. I think it
Speaker 5: was the right decision.
Speaker 3: I think one of the nice things about your book
Speaker 3: is that it primarily looks at his life and work
Speaker 3: before he returned to comics in the seventies.
Speaker 5: One reason that we did that was in sort of
Speaker 5: developing or however you say, when it's a real person,
Speaker 5: his character and his vision up to a certain point,
Speaker 5: and then realizing that doing Contract with God was really
Speaker 5: like a culmination of something that he had deferred for
Speaker 5: all those years that he kind of there wasn't any
Speaker 5: opening in comics for him to do something serious and artistic,
Speaker 5: so and he probably thought he never would be able to,
Speaker 5: but you know it. So there's a line in the
Speaker 5: book where I care exactly what it is, where his
Speaker 5: wife says, how do you feel? And he's finished contractor
Speaker 5: with God, he says, I feel like I finally finished
Speaker 5: something I started, you know, forty years ago or so.
Speaker 5: I think that's why it really made sense to get there.
Speaker 4: And then it wouldn't. We didn't think it would be
Speaker 4: very interesting to go you know, through the next twenty
Speaker 4: books that he did. You know, he did family matter
Speaker 4: at something and a value. You know, then it would
Speaker 4: be like a book I did earlier Almoths, like almost
Speaker 4: like an encyclopedia. But so then we just did it
Speaker 4: that kind of a montage of the of the rest.
Speaker 5: In the pros biographies, you when you're doing a biography,
Speaker 5: and this can be the strength of a prose biogra
Speaker 5: You just cover everything, you go through, every period you write,
Speaker 5: you know, sometimes again to you know, day by day practically,
Speaker 5: and so the So the Schumacher biography, which we use
Speaker 5: a lot, you know, it covered every period of his life,
Speaker 5: all his business interests during the fifties and early sixties.
Speaker 5: And I think the approach of a graphic novel, unlike
Speaker 5: a prose biography, is more like a movie, where you
Speaker 5: choose the most interesting and engaging parts and try to
Speaker 5: either give over or shorthand the rest.
Speaker 2: Eisner's immigrant father was a failed artist but remained a
Speaker 2: persistent dreamer, something Will inherited from him. It's almost like
Speaker 2: Will Eisner fulfilled to dream his father never could.
Speaker 4: Do you agree, I mean, I agree that there was
Speaker 4: the artistic impulse, but Will had a very very smart
Speaker 4: business center. It might be it might have been more
Speaker 4: more acute than his artistics actually, and his father clearly
Speaker 4: did not. So I think my answer would be he
Speaker 4: took he took some of his father, and he made
Speaker 4: a way to make what his father to make, make
Speaker 4: his father's ambition into something that would actually work commercially
Speaker 4: and he would be able to support because he supported
Speaker 4: the entire family. It supported his parents, He supported his brother,
Speaker 4: and he supported his sister. He put his sister through
Speaker 4: college and he never graduated from high school, and his
Speaker 4: brother was employed by him. Is in his entire life
Speaker 4: was he was part of the company. So I think
Speaker 4: his business sense is really that's something we don't think
Speaker 4: about a lot, because we did think about what he
Speaker 4: did for comics, but it took a lot of business
Speaker 4: savvy to do what he did.
Speaker 5: That is how Eisner always presented it that his father
Speaker 5: was the follow your dream guy and his mother was
Speaker 5: the don't take risks, you know, make a good living
Speaker 5: influence and and we felt that that that's a little
Speaker 5: loaded like you you come away thinking, oh, that wonderful
Speaker 5: father told him to follow his dreams. So we tried
Speaker 5: to sort of balance that out because I think because
Speaker 5: it was balanced and in will Eisner's career and his
Speaker 5: personality that he he in a way he did fulfill
Speaker 5: his father's dreams. But he wasn't a dreamer himself. He
Speaker 5: was hard nosed and practical like his mother taught him
Speaker 5: to be. And without the both of them, he couldn't
Speaker 5: have done done what he did. He might have been,
Speaker 5: you know, he might have been just a successful businessman,
Speaker 5: or he might have been just another struggling comic book artist.
Speaker 5: But he brought those two sides of his of his
Speaker 5: parents together, if they both they both contributed to who
Speaker 5: he was. And that's what we wanted to show in
Speaker 5: the book.
Speaker 2: Do either of you have a favorite Will ais Ner
Speaker 2: graphic novel?
Speaker 1: What?
Speaker 4: I think one of them that it's really good for
Speaker 4: people who they're like novel readers, they're not necessarily commics
Speaker 4: readers would be Fagan the jew which is which is
Speaker 4: the retelling and rolliver twist from Fagan's point of view.
Speaker 4: Another one that's really biting, it's really really sharp, a
Speaker 4: really biting story is called The Family Matter. It's it's
Speaker 4: about a family trying to decide to do with it right,
Speaker 4: trying to decide to do with an infirmed grandparent, and
Speaker 4: it's you know, they're not necessarily very nice about it.
Speaker 4: It's a really bitter book. It's a really short book too.
Speaker 4: It's really it's very well done. I really love A
Speaker 4: Life Force. That's a book about if you have you
Speaker 4: haven't read. It's a book whereut two people in their
Speaker 4: sixties who reconnect and they were lovers when they were teenagers,
Speaker 4: and they have to decide what they're going to do
Speaker 4: with the rest of their lives. And they're both married.
Speaker 4: By the way, to to other people, what about you, Dan,
Speaker 4: do you have any The Spirit? Even though that's not
Speaker 4: technically one of his graphic novels, The Spirit was first reprinted.
Speaker 4: Warren reprinted them.
Speaker 5: In black and white when I was in high school,
Speaker 5: and you know, I bought those off the stand and
Speaker 5: read them all, and uh, I think they had they
Speaker 5: had a big impact influence on me. Also, you know,
Speaker 5: kind of growing out of superheroes and the other the
Speaker 5: sort of genre, a mix of genres that Eisner did
Speaker 5: in the spirit because he had had a great freedom
Speaker 5: from story to story, could do whatever he wanted. And uh,
Speaker 5: but just the look of it and the humor of it,
Speaker 5: you know, I still think that's that's the work of Eisner.
Speaker 5: That that means the most to me. I have a
Speaker 5: contract with God is great, especially the first and fourth story,
Speaker 5: but I'll stick with the spirit.
Speaker 3: Did you learn any lessons from delving into Eisner's life
Speaker 3: and career.
Speaker 4: I think the most important lesson of the biggest impression
Speaker 4: that that during this book made on me was that
Speaker 4: to just realize how driven he really was and how
Speaker 4: how community was because even though this is you know,
Speaker 4: even though I did a book about him before, he
Speaker 4: just I didn't. I didn't until we sat down and
Speaker 4: looked saw this on paper and saw the sacrifices that
Speaker 4: he made, especially the young person. I mean, you know
Speaker 4: how driven he was. It just didn't it didn't really
Speaker 4: didn't make the impact that it did this time that
Speaker 4: I learned.
Speaker 5: I learned.
Speaker 4: I came away thinking being really deeply impressed with his
Speaker 4: drive and his vision of the of the industry, that
Speaker 4: was it.
Speaker 5: One one lesson was how to draw Fedora's because he
Speaker 5: had dre a lot of those. But yeah, but I
Speaker 5: think the same like the drive, you know, I think
Speaker 5: the nice thing about this book and the reason why
Speaker 5: we felt it could have brought appeal, was the drive
Speaker 5: that he had as a young as a kid sort
Speaker 5: of into the world of literature and art that he loved,
Speaker 5: and coming out of that to create the drive as
Speaker 5: a young man to be independent and start his own business.
Speaker 5: And I think for for us, you know, because we're
Speaker 5: both fairly on in years, the fact that he he
Speaker 5: came back at the age of sixty and started a
Speaker 5: new career with tremendous energy. That and and he kept
Speaker 5: he kept doing those graphic novels until he was, you know,
Speaker 5: eighty five or whatever. I mean, I think I think
Speaker 5: that you know that lesson that it's you know, you
Speaker 5: don't have you don't have to let go of that
Speaker 5: drive at a certain age. It was his is important.
Speaker 2: Maybe his constant reinvention of himself also kept him fresh
Speaker 2: and young, and I took that away from the story
Speaker 2: as well, that maybe because he didn't get stuck doing
Speaker 2: the same thing over and over and over that prolonged
Speaker 2: not only his life, but his creative life.
Speaker 5: I would agree with that. Yeah, and Steve, Steve knew
Speaker 5: him in his in his later years.
Speaker 4: Sometimes I would actually speak to him and he had
Speaker 4: just spoken to a young cartoon it's like Scott McCleod
Speaker 4: or something like that, and he would he would be
Speaker 4: very excited. He'd be telling me in a very excited way,
Speaker 4: what they're doing. He'd say, this guy is doing this,
Speaker 4: you know, just and he was. He was, he was,
Speaker 4: he was like you would think that he I would
Speaker 4: think anyway, that he was a person much younger than
Speaker 4: his years. I think that was one of the reasons
Speaker 4: that when he did pass away, he passed well, it
Speaker 4: wasn't sudden. He'd had a heart attack, and then he didn't.
Speaker 4: He didn't, he didn't, he didn't come out of the hospital.
Speaker 4: But the end is a lot of people were really
Speaker 4: shocked because he just had this youthful energy to him
Speaker 4: that they didn't They didn't think this would this would
Speaker 4: be his demise. They thought he had many more years left.
Speaker 4: One of the really interesting things about doing this book
Speaker 4: is that we've been hearing from people who knew him
Speaker 4: because they're you know, this is this is an opportunity
Speaker 4: for them to to to you know, to to share
Speaker 4: their stories and what I actually got a letter from
Speaker 4: the Sun of Eisner's tennis partner, because when I then
Speaker 4: moved to Floyda, he paid tennis every day and he
Speaker 4: had these anecdotes about you know, he called them Uncle
Speaker 4: Will that they you know, they had these picnics and whatever.
Speaker 4: But it did that every every story that I've heard
Speaker 4: kind of recount a very youthful person, even though at
Speaker 4: this point he was seventy five years old.
Speaker 2: So well, Stephen and Dan, thanks so much for joining us.
Speaker 4: Well, thank thank you.
Speaker 2: It was great to talk to you and to our audience.
Speaker 2: Now back to your regularly scheduled lives.
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Speaker 4: M mm hmm