A tribute - remembering a friend’s passing
On January 3rd, 2005, my friend
Alain David and I were talking on the phone about Will’s latest project. We
were in a lively discussion about the distribution of his latest book Fagin,
and about what the chances were for the Plot to do better with the French
readership. We were also talking about Will going through surgery and
recovering from it at the hospital. Through the transatlantic phone line, I
suddenly heard the faded ring of Alain’s cell phone.
“Hold on a minute”, he said, “I’ve got a
call on my cell”. I waited, hearing a few words from his conversation and
trying to make something from what did not sound like good news. “Listen” he
said with a soft voice after hanging up on the other call, “it was a friend on
the phone. He told me that Will Eisner just passed away”. “Will Eisner just
passed away”… It took a few seconds for the words to sink in. None of us knew
what to say. So I quickly hung up and called Will’s wife Ann. Will had died in
the early morning. He would be buried in New York
State , about an hour north of Manhattan
The news had traveled fast across the
continents but was refusing to settle in my own mind. I had talked to Will over
the phone not so long ago, so how could it be? We had discussed The Plot as
well as a multitude of new projects that were either ongoing or at their
ignition stage. We often had hour-long conversations. Will filled a special
space in my life.
I had known Will’s work since my childhood
in France Paris
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The first
original drawing I got from Will Eisner is the one I prefer: A quick and small
Spirit sketch that, I find, captures the essence of both the character and its creator.
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I had to break my piggy bank to buy that,
as 120 Francs was prohibitive for a 12 year old. This hefty price tag delayed
my acquisition of The Spirit, which I had spotted the first time I had
visited the shop. But Mandrake’s top hat had appeared definitively more
intriguing to me at the time than The Spirit’s fedora. I only bought The Spirit later, once I
had read Cannif, Segar, Goldberg, Foster, Raymond and others. Only then did
Eisner’s genius strike a chord. I guess I realized that he was doing something utterly
different from the other artists I had discovered. But I couldn’t quite put a
name on it yet.
Much later, I must have been 17 or so, I
discovered Life Force in a train station. I was waiting for a friend,
decided to kill a few minutes by looking in the station’s bookshop and started
to look under the tables in those boxes with cheap out-of-date magazines and
sales items. Will Eisner hated to know that his stuff goes in sales from time
to time. But it was my lucky day, as A Life Force was there, for just 13
francs. A bargain! I devoured it. The story of Izzy the Cockroach and his fight
for survival made me understand what the Spirit was all about. It all came back
to me, all the splendor of the stories and the humanity of the art. The
Spirit, as I was discovering, was just the antechamber of Eisner’s work.
His graphic novels were pushing the medium to its extremes. And I was amazed at
the stories he was writing. So I went on a quest to find everything I could
from him. I quickly found The Spirit stories and the graphic novels, and
also came across some traces of the work he did in between. I was the typical
fan. Raving about him with my friends who did not know his work yet, and
spending weekends in shady shops until I found a copy of a piece of his work
yet unknown to me. I had a fairly big collection of European Bandes Dessinees
and American comics then.
I shipped it all to Israel
The field of comic art was quasi
non-existent in Israel. With a friend, we decided to create the first comics
magazine there, modeled after the French (A Suivre). We collected a few
samples of art from Michel Kichka’s students in the Betzalel Art Academy of
Jerusalem. We even decided on a name: “The Bottom Line”, which in Hebrew
translated into a funny play on words invoking underwear. The project failed
because of, as always, financial reasons. But I was energized. Kichka organized
that year a competition on comic books, together with the Alliance Française. I
participated and won a VIP trip to Angoulème, the international Mecca Florida Israel
We kept writing to each other for a while,
until my whereabouts brought me to Florida
I left Israel
in 1998 to live in New York City , but I kept
finding myself in Florida
every so often. Will and I started to spend more and more time conversing about
his work, the art form in general, and nothing in particular. In Manhattan , in the midst
of the dot-com frenzy, I also discovered online auctions. It quickly replaced
what had been long Sunday afternoons spent looking for Eisner’s work in various
bookshops. Now I was engaging in fierce bidding wars, which eventually enabled
me to acquire a very large Eisner collection over time. My collection is now so
abundant that I often showed Will items that he had forgotten about.
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I received this 8x11 aquarelle
color original from Will once Fagin was completed. He sent it by regular –and
non-insured- mail all the way to
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All along, I always joked with Will that I
was only a “fan boy” at heart, salivating at the thought of spending some time
next to his drawing table, watching him draw. In all sincerity it is true, as
once a fan boy, always a fan boy. But it quickly became apparent that Will and
I had been able to engage on a different level. While exploring deeper and
deeper his inner motivations and my approach to the medium, we developed a
strong relationship that has developed to what one may call a strong
friendship.
In 2000, Will decided to start his work on Fagin
the Jew, and he asked for my help on background research for the book. I
helped him out and in the course of that project, we had many occasions to
discuss both the storyline and the historical relevance of the visuals of
Fagin. I believe Fagin is a stunning piece of work, and I am very proud to have
been a modest part of it.
Will continued to be generous with his support when I left
New York in 2001 and followed my wife to Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
There, I started my own comics publishing business, Gasp Editions
(www.gasp-editions.com). The comics market was virtually non-existent in
post-war Bosnia .
But I got local artists to write and draw five short graphic novels that were
translated in French and compiled in “Sarajevo :
Histoires Transversales” (Sarajevo :
Side Stories). The Album was a success at Angoulème 2002, thanks to Will who
had agreed to lend his stature to that renaissance project by writing the
foreword of the book. He was fond of the album and of the artists who had
participated. He displayed a framed poster of the color cover in his office,
next to some Spirit memorabilia, which made me really proud. Later on, and to
ensure a steadier stream of revenues for the Bosnian artists, Will guided me as
I created a series of educational comics publications on medical issues (the
“MediComix”) to be sold to institutional clients in France. He had pioneered the use of comics for
educational campaigns during two decades between his work on The Spirit
and his graphic novel period, while working for the Army and then heading
American Visuals.
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“Sketched from life”,
1934, demonstrates the didactic methods which
inspired my work on “MediComix”. It is Eisner’s very first commercial
work (for “Gre-Solvent”). He told me he made $15 from these Segar-like scenes,
which he later used to start the Eisner-Iger shop.
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While running Gasp Editions and my MediComix activities
and working on my day job in Sarajevo ,
I got a call from Will who wanted to involve me with his latest project: a
graphic novel denouncing the infamous “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, the
mythical document designed to discredit the Jews. Needless to say, I was glad
to join in. I met him in Florida
and we went over the project. I immediately felt that something was different
about it. For starters, Will was working frontward rather that backward. He
usually started with the end of a book and made his way back to the beginning.
Here, he was fizzing with different beginnings, and was not sure where to end.
Second, Will was extremely concerned about the intent of the book. He was a
master at making stories believable, but this time around, he really felt a
responsibility to expose the fraud, and that responsibility weighed on him to a
point that it started to inhibit his ability to drive the reader’s attention.
This translated into several versions of the Plot to be devised. Before the
book was completed in its current form, about five different beginnings were tried
out, one of which I even wrote for him. The middle section of the book, with a
side-by-side comparison of the Protocols with Maurice Joly’s book “Dialogues in
Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu” initially buried the story under its
weight of no less than one hundred pages (it is seventeen pages in the final
version). The latter part of the book was slowly transformed from a dry
enumeration of facts to a more story-like investigation into which Will
included himself as a character. The fact that he did so proves the extent to
which he was concerned with the book’s subject.
My collaboration on The Plot hence translated into long
hours of research as well as passionate long distance discussions with Will. I
was regularly receiving his roughs by mail and commenting on the story’s
sequencing, rhythm or characters. I made sure to give him a hard time, and I
believe I ended up being both his strongest ally as well as heartless critic on
this work. Discussions were always heated, as Will was stubborn as a donkey and
I am relentless at pushing my own point of view. But we knew our way around
each other and after all, he was the master of his own work and therefore
always had the last word. I was always humbled by his talent, his energy and
how good of a man he was, qualities that ended up infusing in his art.
I wanted to share that experience of Eisner
with others. I believe many people are touched by his work, and would be
interested in understanding him better and discovering how he became what he
was. What better way to achieve that than going back to his early work? I
approached Will with the idea for a book on the topic and he welcomed it
wholeheartedly.
The first thing I asked him was to open his
personal archives for me. I spend several long days in the Cartoon Research
Library of Ohio State University, where Will donated a lot of his material
several years ago to the good care of Lucy Caswell. As an archeologist, I was
able to dig in several strata of drawings, letters, receipts, printed material and
odds things. All accounted for a piece of Will Eisner’s history. I had seen
some of the material reproduced in black and white in the “Art of Will Eisner”,
published by the great Denis Kitchen 20 years ago. But nothing had prepared me
for the beauty of the colors, the wealth of sketches, drawings, etchings,
pamphlets, posters, dummies, photos and even records I was unearthing.
I completed the research with a visit to
Will’s archives in Florida. His wife Ann, delightful as always, was of great
help to decipher some of the material and tell amusing anecdotes about such and
such photographs. Unfortunately, Pete Eisner, Will’s younger brother, had
passed away just before I started the research. Pete was Will’s memory, as he
had been heading Will’s studio production processes for several decades. Will
and Ann missed him dearly.
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Found in Will Eisner’s archives: This beautiful red,
yellow and black 1933 cover of the “Magpie” (the DeWitt-Clinton high school
literary magazine in which Will participated), he designed with a fellow student, which shows how the city landscape and
its vertical horizon was already present in his work from the outset.
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This work was still in production when Will passed away.
He went before we had recorded his comments on each of the illustrations that
were to be reproduced in the planned book. His answers would have been key to
understand how, as he had evolved and innovated time and time again, his
motivations never changed. He was always convinced that his art could convey a
message to the reader about humanity and survival, through a good story. The
fight against prejudice which motivated Fagin the Jew and The
Plot was a direct application of that driving force.
While The Plot was still on the
drawing board, we started to talk about his next graphic novel. What would
follow The Plot? Will was looking for stories that could bring him
closer to Jewish themes, while still being universal. We explored the
possibility of doing something about the Koran for a while. But his legitimacy
among the Muslim readership was questionable, and that idea faded away. Will
then considered using the transcripts of a trial won against holocaust deniers.
Even though Will obtained a copy of the transcript of the case, the theme and
the settings would have been too close to The Plot and the project was
abandoned. Will and I came to the same conclusion at the very same time. I
called him one day to tell him that I had found the ultimate theme for his next
work. “Go on”, he said, challenging me. “Primo Levi” I said. “Do you know his
book If this is a man? This could be your chef d'oeuvre.” Silence on the
phone. Hum, I thought… this doesn’t seem to register… “Primo Levi, you said?”
he asked. “Guess what I am reading now?” I had no clue. “A biography of Primo
Levi!” he replied. So Primo Levi it became. We talked about If this is a man.
The book had both the human and inhuman, personal and universal dimension that
Will was looking for. I let you imagine what would Will have done with such a
masterpiece. I believe it would have been his best work.
Up to Will’s last breath, the consummate
storyteller tried to interpret his time through perspectives which enlightened
his contemporaries. Beyond his participation in the invention of comics, which
ruled imaginations for many generations, he succeeded in reinventing himself
and developing a new graphic grammar. A beacon for young generations of
authors, he stayed anchored to his drawing table in his Florida
With Will gone, his legacy is left for us
to carry. His warm soul is still around, encouraging us to do so.
Benjamin Herzberg, originally written in Washington , D.C.
