WILL EISNER (Archival interview: "Stan Lee presents: The comic book greats")

This is an edited transcription of the videocassette Stan Lee presents: The comic book greats Vol. 11, released in 1992 by Stabur Home Video.

I am not an English-speaking person, so it's quite possible that some mistakes had occurred. Any ammendments/corrections will be welcome. 

This show being a live-recorded conversation between Stan Lee and Will Eisner, it's inevitable that some overlap in the dialogue should occur; in some of those instances, I haven't been able to decipher the words.

On the other hand, I did delete on purpose some parts of the dialogue which I thought were irrelevant in the context of the whole conversation (for example: most of the humour that Stan Lee interjected here and there).

As always, all the notes [in brackets] have been made by me.

 

Stan Lee: Where did you grow up? How did you get into this?

Will Eisner: I grew up in New York, in the Bronx, went to DeWitt Clinton High School...

 

So did I!

Well, a lot of us did, and it was there that I began to do comics. My first comic strip was for the Clinton newspaper, The Clinton News, as a high school student. However that was an outgrowth of a career that I had really set for myself and had nothing to do with comics. I wanted to be a painter and a writer, but I can't either paint well enough for galleries, nor write well enough for magazines and books, so I took two ineptitudes and made one aptitude out of it, and began doing comic books right after high school.

I stumbled into Wow: What a Magazine! -- which was a children's magazine -- sold them a page of comics and when the magazine collapsed [in November 1936, issue #4] I realized that there was an opportunity for a comic book [with] original pages comic books. And it was the birth of the comic books at the time -- Superman had just started and so forth.

This is a little before your time, buddy, about four or five years.

 

A day or two... [both laugh]. You had a studio, the EISNER-IGER studio.

When Wow Magazine collapsed, I realized that there was an opportunity because pulps were dying at that time, a lot of the pulp publishers were coming into the comic book business looking for comic book material. At that time, most of the comic books consisted of daily strips pasted together, [like] Famous Funnies, and it was very obvious, didn't take great genius, to see that they would soon run out of those daily strips and they were gonna need new materials.

So I made a proposal to Jerry Iger, who was also out of work, because he was the editor of a magazine that collapsed [the aforementioned Wow], and we were both on the street, so to speak. I said: "I'd like to start a studio and we'll produce original material". He was thirteen years older than me and therefore a seasoned [man?], he could sell, it was very hard for me to sell because I was still young and a cartoonist. So he went out and sold and I was at staff. I did five strips under five different names. One of them was W. Morgan Thomas, the other was Spencer Steel [in fact, that was the name of one of his characters, not one of his pseudonyms]. I always believed that anybody with the name Spencer Steel had to be successful [both laugh].

Anyway, we started a studio packaging our comic books for publishers like Fiction House, who had been doing pulp magazines, and several others.

 

Actually, companies like yours that provided artwork to comic book publishers, that was the main source, because even when MARVEL was starting we used a company -- it was called FUNNIES INC.

We started that out with the idea that we could hire artists inexpensively. See, there was no comic book history at that time, there was no background as there is today, there was no precedent, there were no schools, the artists that I hired were guys who came from other fields. Kirby and Bob Powell and people like that aspired to be illustrators. Matter of fact, they all came into my shop as a kind of stepping stone toward moving uptown.

So I put a studio together. I think we had about 15 men at the time. It ran pretty much like a slave ship going down the Nile [both laugh]: the artists were arrayed along the side of a wall and down the center the drawing boards. The pencillers were here, the inkers were down the center and the lettering [inaudible]. I sat at head table, I was a stroker, I was the drummer [laughs]. I drew... I initiated the character and so forth and then passed it down and went all the way down the line and came all the way back.

 

How's THE SPIRIT come out of that?

Around 1939 a very interesting phenomenon happened. Comic books had by that time achieved a tremendous popularity and the Sunday newspapers in this country were worried about their position in their Sunday readership. So they said: "The thing that's stealing our readership are comic books and therefore we've got to get a comic book (in the newspaper)". So The Register and Tribune Syndicate came to me with Busy Arnold -- who was also a comic book publisher at the time -- and asked me if I would produce a supplement for a comic book insert for them. That represented a tremendous opportunity for me. I didn't realize at the time that I thought they came to me because I was a great genius, but they came to me because I, by that time, built a reputation of being able to responsibly deliver. As you know, newspapers require... there was no margin for error there.

So I left Eisner & Iger and I created a package. [In 1940] I created a character called The Spirit largely because they wanted what they called in those days "a costumed character" -- today we call them "superheroes" but they called them "costumed characters". So I compromised and gave them a detective character with a mask and gloves. I was sitting in my studio at the time and I remember Arnold calling me and saying: "We got a character, does he have a costume?" I said "yes yes" [and hastily started to redraw the pages].

What I was interested in is reaching another audience, I was never really happy drawing for comic books, it was never my audience. I never had the kind of visceral connection with them that you have. I didn't understand what they really wanted. I knew pulps but I really aspired to write short stories. The newspapers gave me the opportunity, as I was writing for a family, and I was producing a short story every week. The Spirit later became simply a walk-on character, he was really simply an excuse. I made him very human and so forth and so on. I enjoyed doing him satirically...

[...] These were 7-page stories, complete in themselves, no continuity in effect.

[...] I devised [the splash pages] out of necessity because what they had to do is hold on to the audience, capture the audience, they had to serve as a cover, as a magazine cover. At the same time, they afforded me the opportunity to lead the reader into the story. You know as a storyteller that the best way to tell a story is to tell the reader what you're going to tell them, set the mood for it and then tell the story. It was a marvellous opportunity for me as a writer because I could experiment...

 

Some of your title splashes I thought were masterpieces of design. You used lettering as if it was part of the artwork.

One of the problems I had was I changed the lettering [of] the logo every issue, every story, and the syndicate was screaming blue murder because they couldn't advertise it on their trucks because there's always different lettering. And also I had a copyright problem, it was hard to... only in the last few years I was able to trademark it, I trademarked it ten/fifteen years ago. [...] As a matter of fact, it's the thing I enjoy the most, to be involved in expanding this medium.

[...] The longevity of this feature... I'm as astonished by it as anybody else. Probably the reason is that the stories I dealt with are fundamental stories. They're stories -- like the short stories of the 30s, like the O.Henry stories, like the Ring Lardner stories -- which are readable to this day. Sherlock Holmes still goes on being usable and readable and valid, even in these times. I think that's probably what accounts for because the ambiance was all 40s and 50s.

[...] I closed The Spirit down in 1952 because I became intrigued and involved in the use of comics as a viable medium as an instructional tool, as a teaching tool, and I began producing material for schools and so forth. This was an outgrowth of my experimentation in the military. I began doing it for training manuals. [...] So in 52 I closed The Spirit down and until 1972, 73, I've been running a publishing company with which we produced training manuals and instructional material for schools, social studies, enrichment material for 6^th and 7^th graders and so forth.

In the middle 70s I sold the company and decided that I wanted to go back and develop a further expansion of the medium. I felt that I hadn't yet reached the limits of the medium and I began working on a graphic novel. For two years I wrote this book [A contract with god] in dummy form.

The story of why I called it a "graphic novel" is a very interesting one. I did a complete dummy, it was the first time in my career almost that I had made a complete dummy with no publisher in mind, I had no publisher because no comic book publisher would publish a book like this and the mainstream publishers were publishers that... I called up the head of a very large publishing company, the largest in New York -- I don't think I should mention the name because they turned it down and I don't want to embarrass them -- and the president of it was a former Spirit fan and knew me. I told him: "I have a new book here, a very interesting book". He said: "Oh! What is it?" I couldn't bring myself to say it's a comic book because it didn't, so I said: "It's a graphic novel". "Oh", he says, "that's interesting, I've never heard of that! Bring it up, I'd like to see it!" Well, I brought it up, he looked at it over his glasses and he said: "Well, it's still a comic [laughs]. It won't be for us. I don't think we can publish it. Go find yourself a smaller publisher."

[...] In our society we are victims of a self-imposed categorizations. In order for us to be able to survive in this welter of information and media that we have, we have to classify, we have to create categories: some are nice and safe, and some of them are good. For years this medium has been a despised medium.

[...] Most of the people in our society have cultural police who tell them what is good. A paper hires a critic and the critic says "This is a good play" or "This is a bad play", and they either go or they don't go, based on what the critic said. They have no way of making a choice, they haven't got time to make choices. What's happening now, something very enormous is happening right under our skin: this medium -- which I have devoted my life to and intend to devote the rest of my life to -- is now probably the most proliferating literary form in this country. It is the new literacy.  

 

And you know something else? It's one of the greatest weapons against illiteracy because comics are the only things today that a youngster will read voluntarily, nay eagerly, and obviously the more a kid reads the more he develops a facility at reading.

Why do you say kid? Why not say everybody? Anybody who wants to read. I'm working on that right now with Public Television, developing a way of bringing this medium to the television screen for the purposes of enhancing literacy in this country. It's a very big thing and I can't go too deeply into it.

 

You said that you did all this instructional work in the army, was that for the Signal Corps?

No.

 

Because I was in the Signal Corps doing the same thing.

When I got into the army... I was drafted and went kicking and screaming all the way, and became part of the ordinance department.

 

[...] If I throw the phrase "sequential storytelling" at you, what is that to you?

Sequential Art -- which is what I call the art of comics -- is the arrangement of pictures in a sequence to tell a story. What we do, what is being done in this comic medium, is to take a seamless flow of action, say for example "a man walking across the street and falling into a manhole"... We start off with the understanding that there are maybe 500 actions between that man walking across the street and going down. [He starts drawing that scene.] What I do is select out of the 500 little, totally connected, unseparated actions, we select those actions which we can use to show the action itself. What Sequential Art depends on is an intellectual understanding between you and the reader. So we have the man walking down the street here [he is drawing as he speaks], with a bowtie, and between him and here there's another action [he starts to sketch a second drawing] in which he is perhaps looking back at somebody back there. [...] And then the third action here [a third drawing], he falls into the sewer and I leave his hat hanging flying up in the air.

 

Oh, I see what you mean. He turned around so he didn't see the open manhole. He's fallen.

[...] So what I've done here really is selected out of a whole series of actions, which would normally occur in a motion picture film -- a moving picture frame would be something like several hundred frames for this action -- and selected from this into that. And this is what is known as Sequential Art, because is a sequence of events between this picture and that.

The textbook I wrote on it [Comics and Sequential Art] -- which I use to this day to teach from -- builds on that point. I felt that, for the first time, somebody had to sit down and create a discipline out of this art. When I started, as I said earlier, there were no schools, nobody taught this subject, and I think it was necessary to do this. And I think it had to go beyond, I wanted to go beyond. How to draw feet, how to draw ears and noses.

[...] Part of the importance of the work I do, to me, the importance of the scene itself, is the human action. I spend a lot of time developing emotion. I believe that emotion comes not necessarily from a face, picturing the face rather than the body. We show our emotions with our body.

 

Body language.

Body language, if you will. So to me it's very important to be able to develop that and I spend of time, I do a lot of erasing, I'll start figuring it and playing with it until I get it exactly that. Because I'm in constant contact with the reader. Remember that I am writing a story to a reader, I'm telling a reader a story and I have to connect with the reader's life experience and his understanding of what it is that will convey or transmit an emotion.

So if I have a figure here [he starts sketching a drawing], I'm going to take a back view of the figure, to show you that, without showing a face, I can transmit emotion. I have the same figure [he sketches a second drawing] displaying several kinds of emotion by moving his shoulders up and straightening his arms... We are still very primitive creatures and we understand the basic animalism in each person, we understand what it is that transmits the emotion. We know that, for example, when we are tight or when we are frightened there's a tendency to tighten up our muscles. When we cock our heads to a side, we are leaving ourselves vulnerable, so to speak, so that we do not betray the internal instincts that keep us going.

...I'm having trouble talking and drawing at the same time, which is never the problem for me, I usually talk a lot while I'm drawing.

What I've done here [referring to the three sketches he's just finished] is displayed three emotions...

 

Well, this fellow [referring to the first sketch] is obviously very rejected.

This fellow [the second sketch] is very upright and this fellow [the third sketch] is kind of quizzical, he's not sure, he's looking up. But I would dare say right now you could possibly, just looking at this, or any reader could, envision the face on these people. That's a very important element. So I spent a lot of time, through most of my stories, most of my books are built on that kind of device.

We respond to internalism, or the internal emotions, quite obviously the way animals do. For example, we open our eyes [starts a sketch] this wide in the face of danger. We're like animals of old, we widen our eyes so that we can see all over. We narrow our eyes when we're about to do something sneaky. We lower our eyes when we don't want our emotions to be seen.

[...] The mouth remains the same. I'll give you an example: How often have you seen a photograph of a very good friend or a girl or wife and you say that photograph doesn't look like her, or him. The camera is an idiot, it took everything that was there, but the point is, it took it at a moment when that face was at rest. Faces are in continual motion and we know each other based on the fact that we have experienced the emotional movements of the face. It's why good caricaturists are so successful, they're able to capture a compendium, a collection, a composite of all the actions and put it together.

[...] I could take the same face [he refers to the three faces he has just sketched, who have different eye expressions] and put the same mouth [in all three sketches] and the emotion will still be conveyed, even though I've done nothing with the mouth. Young cartoonists invariably play around with the mouth, they think the mouth is the thing that shows expression. I can show humour in this guy, can show this same character laughing by crinkling the eyes and still keep the mouth the same. I believe there's a vast science of understanding in the whole business of Sequential Art.

[...] We know that if a mouth is put in a smiling position, some other things happen because the muscles pull the mouth apart so therefore the cheeks would go up.

[...] I teach on the basis of storytelling, not so much of drawing. I teach drawing as it relates to the telling of the story. I sincerely believe that this is a literary form, it's a medium. Sometimes people ask me what I do. I tell them I'm a writer, I write with pictures. That's what we're doing. It's a very primitive art form but it is one that has found its place. It's come of age in this society, because we're in a visual age. Today is the new literacy in the Western hemisphere.

 

There are people who say: "I don't want someone reading comics because he's looking, or she, is looking at the picture and therefore they're not using their imagination".

They're wrong. [...] What we're talking about is the fact that the visuals, the imagery that we put on the page forces in effect, or invites us, and seduces and it forces and attracts the reader to the reading of the word, because this medium is very unique, it is a very special precious combination of words and pictures. And there is no formula for it, which means that the writer of this sometimes will have to leave out words. I've done pages and pages where there were no words. I've stopped the script and I've continued with words, as you've seen in my work.

[...] One of the things I like to tell students is that this is one medium in which nothing happens by accident. If you're painting in oils, of if you're doing any other medium, things happen accidentally. In this medium everything is under your control and nothing happens by accident.

[...] I'm talking about the relationship between the reading and the imagery. Remember you said that images... the reason comics are very helpful to read and give a lie to the people who for years said "you're destroying reading".

When I first began selling comics to schools in the 60s -- I told you I had a company doing that -- I used to have a terrible time with the teachers -- I felt like I was a drug dealer in the schoolyard -- and their argument was: "How can you do this? You're destroying the children's imagination, you're giving them pictures for words in which we would like them to learn to imagine." And I kept arguing that no, I'm enhancing, I'm abetting the imagination. And they couldn't see that. As a result we had a lot of trouble selling [to schools?].

 

That theory is much less prevalent now.

Yes. Well, there are two reasons. One is a very pragmatic reason and the teachers have been frustrated by the reluctance of children to read and so they're reaching out on anything they can get their hands on. The other reason is, there's a whole generation of people who've grown up with this medium. Nobody under the age of 40 grew up reading anything but comics.

[Eisner has just finished a sketch of a person.] Now I'm gonna put a balloon here and I defy somebody to look at this thing without wanting to know what's inside that balloon [Stan Lee laughs]. So you have here the necessary combination of words and balloons. The balloon could not exist without this thing [the sketch] and this [the sketch again] could not exist without the balloon. It's that very carefully wedded combination of the two that really makes this a reading medium. This is the thing I'm working on in this television thing I was telling you about, the Public Television. So we have a medium here that not only is a true reading medium but has a capacity of encouraging reading and have meaning.

 

I'm involved in a committee called ENTERTAINERS FOR EDUCATION where we're trying to use various forms of entertainment, such as comics, to help education, and today the mood and the climate has changed so much. I cannot tell you the support we're getting from boards of education throughout the country and educators all over.

I walked into Public Television with this down in Florida. I was surprised at their response. They put together a committee of librarians and educators and they took us certainly seriously. It was astonishing.

[...] The need, in each era of human history, the need begets the invention. Just as I don't believe men make events. I think events make [unintelligible].

 

Necessity is the mother of invention.

There's one other element that I think is worth discussing and that is the content. One of the things that's happening now in comics is that there is a rise in the depth and the value of the content. What's happening now is that men are coming into this field...

 

And women.

...and women... of higher... I wouldn't say higher intellect, but of more serious demean, and who are beginning to make contributions that exceed mutants trashing each other. Comics have divided themselves into a couple of parts now. There's comics that is designed for entertainment, purely, and they serve a purpose. And there's comics that provide male teenage fantasies, or female teenage fantasies, and provide us with mythological characters, which our society always needs. Young people growing up need a mythological superhero to identify with. By now the third force, which I feel I'm part of, is conveying of works of literary merit, what I would call literary merit -- I shouldn't use that because that's a little too pretentious, but works of a serious nature, dealing with subjects that are not necessarily pure entertainment, even though the medium itself is an entertaining medium, I'm dealing with...

For example, in A contract with God I decided to deal with a man's relationship with God, his perceived relationship with God. The last book I did [To the heart of the storm] was an autobiographical book in which I deal with prejudice over a period of time, [Willie's]? coming of age.

 

We have finally found the subject to disagree about [smiles]. I know what you're saying and you're not wrong, but the area of disagreement is this: I feel that any entertainment medium, anything that's done for pure entertainment, also has educational value. For example, when MARK TWAIN wrote what he wrote, when CHARLES DICKENS wrote what he wrote, those were commercial stories. Well, CHARLES DICKENS admittedly did write about problems in England at the time, but he was writing to sell a story, those were entertainment. Anything has educational value if it's well written, if it's well drawn, if it's well sung, if it's well danced, whatever it is. I think the people who try to entertain in any medium, but who do it well, and do it with quality, they're contributing to society's fund of knowledge. I don't think you have to sit down and say: "I'm gonna write a story with a message". I think it is impossible to write a story without a message. I think that every story that's written, if it's well written, contains something that has something for the reader to hold on to, [or to profit by]?

Hold your hat. I'm going to agree with your disagreement. I think we are saying essentially the same thing, or at least I feel I'm saying essentially (the same thing). What I'm talking about is the effort to deal with subject matter that hitherto had been regarded as being too serious, if you will, for this medium. Remember that we who are in any given medium, whether it's film or whether it's theatre or comics, find it very hard to be immune to the feeling of the reader or the viewer toward the medium itself. It's almost like the slave who knows he's a slave and therefore does not aspire to do great things because he says "I'm after all a slave, everybody says I'm a slave and so I'm gonna continue being a slave".

What I'm talking about is not the fact that storytelling has no intellectual value. It does. Matter of fact, storytelling is a way of teaching that we learn as a society from our storytellers. Our storytellers tell us how to deal with life. [...] The storyteller in our society -- whatever medium he works with -- serves a teaching purpose. He teaches us what helps us learn to deal with life itself. Even Aesop's fables provided us with...

 

They're a great example, everyone had a lesson, but they were written with the intention of each one providing a message.

I wonder [?] they were entertaining. I think they...

 

The purpose of it was each one was to teach a lesson. It's very hard for a story not to teach.

The Bible is a series of stories which in effect explain the thing that teach a lesson helps us.

 

What you're saying is right and you're picking all the wrong examples because THE BIBLE has a very definite purpose. But let's go far afield, let's take a mystery story. You could say that a story with a villain fighting a hero and the hero wins at the end, in some subtle way is teaching the reader that good triumphs over evil. And it's written in such a way that your sympathies are on the side of the good guy and you feel that the villain is a bad guy whom you don't want to emulate, if it's written the right way. Now there's a story with no attempt to moralize but the morale is built in, as it would be -- I feel -- in any well-written story.

I hate to name a movie but let's take one of these trash and slash movies [...] the guy who runs around -- without mentioning the name -- terminating people. Is there a moral to that story? What does that teach us?

 

I think it may teach us a lot of things. First of all, our sympathies are entirely on the side of the good people and of the woman in that particular story. One thing that it shows is that a woman, as well as a man, can be strong, can have determination, can fight for what she believes in, and can eventually triumph. I've had many women say to me they love stories like that, with strong female heroes. [...] I would feel also that it shows that it you just keep fighting and you don't give up, no matter how impossible the odds, there's always a chance that you might persevere. […] Obviously I am grasping for something there, that movie was not written intending to be a life's lesson, but as I said, I think if something is well done there's something in it...

Nobody can argue with that, nobody can argue with the fact that if something is well done... There was a time when science fiction stories were regarded as kind of a literary junk food. Along came guys like Ellison and Bradbury who wrote stories that are classic and provide inching.

[...] The intent was to entertain, to provide entertainment. Sometimes it was to provide the reader what they thought the reader wanted. That's a classic, you've heard that in the publishing world where the publisher says: I want to give the reader what he wants. And that's my sole reason for existence and that's why I don't want to be arrested for pornography.

 

When you write anything or you draw anything you want to be sure that it reaches the audience, you want to be sure that the audience will enjoy it.

That comes under the heading of approval. We all in this medium want approval.

[...] For years you [referring to Stan Lee] were altering the concept of the characters that you were creating in your shops to lift -- if I may put that in italics -- lift the medium or lift the concept of the so-called superhero beyond just the cardboard figure that he was in the very beginning.

 

Artists, writers, musicians, actors... they have such influence in the world today that it's good if they are aware of that influence and if they try -- in whatever way -- to use... I mean, we're all entertainers, that's got to be our first consideration, but if you can find a way to entertain and also have a message, what a wonderful feeling.

Well, it is. And, as matter of fact, one of the nice things about being alive and in the field today, both in films and in this field, there's a lot of people who have what I call "sense of responsibility". They are aware of the fact that they're producing a thing that's going to be read by 50,000 people. They have a responsibility.

[After he finishes a sketch of The Spirit] Remember the time in Lucca, many many years ago, we were signing autographs, and one kid came over and you signed my name and I signed your name.