The Spirit of Will Eisner: Talking with Bob Andelman

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on Nov. 15, 2005 Sign up now!

By Tom Spurgeon -- Publishers Weekly, 11/15/2005

Bob Andelman worked closely with the late cartoonist Will Eisner (1917-2005) in shaping Will Eisner: A Spirited Life, an intimate albeit sprawling biography of the legendary comics author and comics innovator. Andelman reaches for the breadth of Will Eisner's career—his years as a successful businessman in addition to being both an influential art teacher and a driving creative force behind the modern graphic novel.

Did you have that moment while working on A Spirited Life when Will Eisner's life kind of fell into place for you?

It was [one night] sitting at his kitchen table. It was about nine o'clock. Ann [Eisner's wife] had already gone off to bed. We were just sitting there talking. There were some pictures on the refrigerator that I was asking him about. There were some cartoons that he had drawn for Ann for Valentine's and wedding anniversaries that were really sweet. And then there were photos. I saw Neil Gaiman and [Art] Spiegelman and Scott McCloud. Then there was one I didn't recognize. It was a photo of his son, John.

I said, "Oh." I had been told by [agents] Denis Kitchen and by Judy Hanson to not ask about family, not ask about the children. If I knew it was his son, I wouldn't have asked at that point. But since I didn't know, it was an honest question.

That was the point where he said to me, "I know you need to know about this stuff, and you've been very patient." I said, "I know you don't want to talk about this." He said, "No, I think it's time we have this conversation."

That evening was when I knew it was going to work, and I knew there was something more here than just comic book fans would be interested in. That was the night that he sat down and he told me about losing his daughter. He told me about Alice getting sick, and all the doctor visits, and the hospital time, and just being so frustrated and unable to do anything for his daughter. She had leukemia. He was so upset and so frustrated. He dealt with it by working. He kept working and working. He had never talked about this to anybody for print before. He had family and friends who didn't even know he had children. It was such a heartbreaking thing. And then I put two and two together that evening and I started asking him if that was the connection with A Contract with God [in the title story of Eisner's seminal 1976 collection of comics short stories, a young girl dies, plunging her father into grief]. And it was. It just kind of opened up everything. I went to bed that night and I was like, "Wow."

Can you talk about your choices dealing with Eisner's immense body of work?

I went into this as most people would approach Will, I think, thinking, "Okay, he did The Spirit [Eisner's innovative comic strip from the 1940s]. And he did the graphic novels." That's really what most people know. Then you start finding out about PS magazine [an equally innovative 1951 Army maintenance publication that used comics that Eisner developed]. Then you find out about the 20-30 years of corporate and industrial works, running a cartoon syndicate in the 1960s. That he was the CEO of a publicly held, publicly traded company [American Visuals]. And it's like, "Oh my God, what am I going to do with all this stuff?"

There's a couple different groups that I kind of saw as likely readers for the book. Obviously comic fans, but I just saw them as a portion of it. Because when you realize he worked on PS for 20 years, and that when he was in World War II he was one of the few guys who got to sign his own work, you start to think there's this whole other generation of people who know him. Then there's also the School of Visual Arts. He taught there for 10, 15 years. Then there's this Jewish audience who didn't know him maybe until A Contract with God. And I thought, "You know, I need to write a biography that appeals to a lot of people. If I just write for the comic book fans, it's kind of limiting."

As it turned out, I think the chapters on his involvement with PS magazine and his involvement with the School of Visual Arts are the two longest chapters. They open up more information about his career and his life than anything else I can write about. I'm not an analysis guy. I'm not going to break down and analyze everything. That's not me. I like to tell stories. I like to hear stories, absorb them and retell them.

Can you talk about the transition Eisner made as a young man from artist to artist/businessman? There was a time he needed a partner like Jerry Iger [partner in Eisner & Iger, their seminal 1930s comic book studio].

He had a father who was a dreamer, who was a painter, and he had a mother who was very bottom-line oriented. They wouldn't have called it that then, but that's what we would think of it now. Everything was about money for her, and managing money, and she had to manage their money very carefully. He understood money was important, and that managing it and running it was important. I think that growing up Jewish he had this sense that there was a lot of respectability to being a good businessman, and running a good business, and earning a good living.

Iger was the ultimate salesman. Some might question the way he went about things, but he understood business. Will only needed two or three years with Jerry. Then when The Spirit ended in 1952 what he really wanted to be was a businessman. He set aside his drawing and he pursued running a company, American Visuals [a successful commercial art and cartoon company founded by Eisner] And for the next 20 or so years, that's really what he did. Comic books didn't appeal to him at all. He made good money. He earned enough in that period that he was comfortable. He could have just retired and taken it easy, but that wasn't in his nature.

What made Will Eisner become an artist again?

I think he realized there was a limit to what he wanted to do as a businessman. I think when Alice died he reconsidered things. Ann had been encouraging him to return to the drawing table. By 1972 he had made Denis Kitchen's acquaintance. Denis wanted to reprint The Spirit and got him to do [new] covers for the magazines. I think it was all tied up in that. I think that over the next two to three years, he started teaching, and I think he was just kind of drawn back to it.

Was he interested in his own legacy?

Absolutely. He had his brother, Pete, as his gatekeeper; you had to go through Pete or Denis to get to him. It was so funny that people were so protective of him. Pete and Will were best friends. I wouldn't quite say business partners, but they looked out for each other, mostly Pete looking out for Will. I think Will understood by the late 1970s that he had played a very big role in what comic books had become. Even if he didn't believe it, he was constantly having people who worked in the industry tell him.