The View from the Cheap Seats (26 page)

R
ereading the four original graphic novels that make up this book, I was prepared for sentiment, and was surprised at how brutal so many of these stories are. They are tales as brutal, as uncaring, as a city. Two garment workers and a baby die in a fire; a hydrant that is an immigrant's only source of water is sealed off; an old woman is robbed in front of witnesses who do nothing but jeer; a man's life is destroyed by a newspaper typo. There's sentiment in here, true, for sentiment is part of being human, and it would be a foolish observer of humanity who would leave it out (certainly Dickens didn't), and Will Eisner was indeed a remarkable observer, but there is little sentimentality.

Eisner himself is visible in the stories of the
City People Notebook,
drawing, observing, moving through the city. You learn little about the man, his face hidden, so I shall pull a few scraps from my own mental notebook, by way of introduction.

When I first met Will he was well past the age at which most people have retired, yet there was nothing old about him—not about the way he moved (purposefully, easily), about the way he thought, the way he smiled or the way he treated others. One was only reminded that Will had been in comics since the very beginning, back since Genesis, when discussing some new wrinkle with him, some idea that would change the way that the world of comics would operate forevermore. “When we
tried that in 1942 . . . ,” he'd say, and tell us whether or not it had worked back then, and why it had fallen out of use.

The working life of Will Eisner could be a three-act play. In the first act, as chronicled by Will's semiautobiographical roman à clef “The Dreamer,” he was a man who believed in comics as a medium, a man who wrote and drew excellent comics, particularly
The Spirit,
perhaps the finest and most consistently ambitious creation of its kind, a man who created business models in which he kept the ownership of his work and his creations; in the second act Will Eisner left comics at a time when the future for comics looked bleak, and the Spirit newspaper supplement was in the decline, and comics for adults were seen as an impossibility, so Will went off to take his knowledge of comics to create
PS
magazine for the US Army, a maintenance magazine—chiefly of educational comics for adults—that he drew for the first twenty years of its existence. And the third act consisted of an entire career, begun—at an age when most people are planning their retirement—with the short stories that made up
A Contract with God
. Eisner's was a remarkable body of work, produced over a period of more than sixty years, clear-eyed and consistent.

Will Eisner was amiable, gentle, friendly, approachable, encouraging, yet with steel beneath. He had a practicality, an awareness of human frailty and fallibility, an enormous generosity of spirit. In the work of his third career, Eisner demonstrated himself an American storyteller, like Ray Bradbury, like O. Henry, unashamedly populist while creating stories for a populace who were not there to read them, not yet.

It would be easy and dishonest to view the stories in this book as valentines to the Big City, to New York. And yet, if they are, these are peculiar valentines—a concatenation of unconsummated desires, unmet loves, fates avoided and unavoidable, people—damaged and bruised, hopefully or hopelessly on their way to the grave, with or without each other.

The Big City
is a series of vignettes, of tiny plays, some silent, some not; some are stories and some merely moments. While Eisner was producing most of the drawings in this book, he was teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and there is a teacher's eye in the way many of these stories and especially the short-shorts are told. Eisner's mastery of silent storytelling is apparent. Dialogue, when he uses it, tends to be drawn with a broad brush, a cartoon of speech with never a word wasted, but his ear for the rhythms of the ways New Yorkers talk is remarkable. On occasion, rereading these, I was reminded that Jules Feiffer was Eisner's assistant, over half a century ago: “Go to work, Charlie,” repeats the wife in “Trash,” who has thrown out Charlie's cap and with it all his hopes and dreams and youth. Charlie says, “I don't feel so good. I'm tired, my feet hurt . . . Maybe I shouldn't carry so many samples. That bag gets heavier every day.” And he carries the heavy bag past the garbagemen who are disposing of his past.

All his life, Eisner was, as I have remarked, an observer of people. The tales and fragments in
City People Notebook
are, as the title suggests, observations—notebook pages, and stories built up from notebook pages, ranging from sketches all the way to complete short stories, stories about Space and Time, neither of which is quite the same in a city.

“The Building” is a ghost story, although the four ghosts in it are, we learn, as much ghosts while they are alive as they ever are when dead. Mensh, who could not save children; Gilda Greene, who did not marry a poet; Tonatti, the street violinist who died as the building died; and Hammond the developer, a driven man. The optimistic ending of “The Building,” though, contrasts painfully with the last three short stories,
Invisible People
. The protagonists of “Sanctum,” of “Mortal Combat,” of “The Power” could be characters from
The Spirit,
forty years earlier, but the fundamental hospitality and (occasionally ironic) justice of the world of
The Spirit
has been replaced by a
place as bleak and unwelcoming as Kafka's. There is no justice here: there is no place for you in the world, magic will not help you, and nor will love. The last three stories are cold things, as unsentimental as three stories could be.

Will died a year ago today, and I still miss him. He was modest and wise and, above all,
interested
.

“What keeps you working?” I asked Will Eisner in 2001 at the Chicago Humanities Festival, where he, and I, and Art Spiegelman and Scott McCloud were guests—something unthinkable in the 1930s, when Will began to draw comics. I was interviewing him. I wanted to know why he kept going, why he kept making comics when his contemporaries (and his contemporaries were people like Bob Kane—
before
he did Batman, remember) had long ago retired and stopped making art and telling stories, and are gone.

He told me about a film he had seen once, in which a jazz musician kept playing because he was still in search of the Note. That it was out there somewhere, and he kept going to reach it. And that was why Will kept going: in the hopes that he'd one day do something that satisfied him. He was still looking for the Note . . .

My introduction to
Will Eisner's New York: Life in the Big City
, 2006.

B
eing the Eisner keynote speaker is a huge honor. Not just because they're the Eisner Awards, our industry and our art form's Oscars and Pulitzers and Tonys, but because it's a rare opportunity to speak, without being interrupted, to thousands of people who actually create comics, who sell comics, who care about comics—and because it's still early in the evening, and the awards have not yet been handed over, people have to pretend to listen to what I say.

I thought I'd talk about awards, and why they matter, and comics and why they matter and making art and why it matters.

I don't have anything huge and controversial to say. The last time I had anything controversial to say was ten years ago, when I told retailers not to get caught up in a speculator bubble that would, I predicted, soon pop like the Dutch Tulip Bubble. Creators, publishers and retailers were bathing, Uncle Scrooge–like, in money, and I got up and told them that there were bad times just around the corner, and what mattered was selling stories that people cared about and wanted to read.

And most of my predictions, bizarrely, came true.

Ten years on, I think it's a good time to take stock of where we are. A state of the comics nation, if you will . . .

And we aren't doing badly at all.

I started working professionally in comics about seventeen years ago. I was writing about comics as a journalist, whenever anyone would let me, for two or three years before that.

In my dreams, back then, I would think about a comics utopia. A future golden age.

So let's look back and remember what that comics utopia would be.

First and foremost, I wanted comics to be taken seriously.

That didn't mean that I wanted all comics to be serious. I wanted all kinds of comics. And I wanted them to be able to stand beside theater, cinema, books, TV, grand opera, as a valid and unique way of telling stories. A fairly young medium, perhaps, in which a lot of great work was still to come, but a medium that shouldn't be sneered at for simply existing: a medium whose name can be used as a put-down has a long way to go.

When I was a journalist, as once upon a time I was, I would ask editors to be allowed to write about comics. Normally I'd be reprimanded, and told that I couldn't write about
Watchmen,
or
Maus,
or
Dark Knight,
or
Love and Rockets,
because something had already been written about comics within the last year—it had recently been English comics character Desperate Dan's fortieth birthday, and simply mentioning this had soaked up all the available newspaper column inches. I tried to explain that the action of acknowledging the existence of a book or a film didn't preclude interviewing authors or directors in the future, and sometimes they'd let me write something about comics just to shut me up, and if they ran it it would run under the heading “Wham! Bam! Pow! Comics Are Growing Up!,” a headline that every editor around the globe was convinced was original and smart.

So in my utopia, if a journalist wanted to write about comics or comics creators, his or her editor would say, “Of course.”

I wanted to explain why people should know who Alan Moore
and Art Spiegelman were, and who the Hernandez brothers and Frank Miller were and why people should care.

I wanted people to know who Will Eisner was.

I wanted to live in an alternate universe, in which the cool comics stories from the past, the ones I'd read about in the fanzines but would never have a hope of actually reading, stories by Jack Cole and Bernie Krigstein and Winsor McCay and George Herriman, in which those stories were in print, and available. A world in which lots of good, long comics stories were collected. A world in which libraries stocked graphic novels. A world in which girls read comics, and in which girls and women made comics.

I wanted a world in which collections of comics existed and were routinely sold in places that other things were sold. Like bookshops.

I wanted a world in which superheroes existed, and did just fine, but in which there was also room for any other kind of comic one could imagine.

And, frankly, we're getting there. We may not have reached that glorious shining comic book utopia yet, but we're getting there. Things are different. A world in which Chris Ware's
Jimmy Corrigan
can take the
Guardian
best first novel award is the kind of future I wanted. It's an alternate universe . . .

I read reviews of a recent movie in which the complaint in most of the media seemed to be that the filmmakers had dumbed down a witty and intelligent comic. Now, this has happened scores of times over the years, and it is not unique. What was unique is that people had noticed—that the journalists writing the reviews knew. That's the kind of future I wanted, when I started out.

We are, for good or ill, where we always wanted to be: just another medium. The bastard child of Art and Commerce has become, if not respectable, then at least no less respectable than any other.

So. Now is the time we learn that we should have been careful of what wished for . . .

On the one hand, we are, right now, this minute, in a golden age. There are, quite simply, more good comics available to be read than there ever have been before. More classic books, more good books of recent vintage.

Last summer, at the American Library Association, a number of comics people were invited to talk to librarians. I was one of them. I went along, expecting to be talking to the two hundred fifty comics fans who had grown up to be librarians. I couldn't have been more wrong: the librarians were getting pressure from their readers. The librarians knew that graphic novels—whatever they are—were popular, and they wanted to know what they were. So they got me, and Jeff Smith, and Colleen Doran, and Art Spiegelman, and several other people in to tell them what we thought they should know. And the libraries have started ordering the books.

There's a potential downside, of course. Comics as an industry seems particularly prone to a peculiar sort of boom and bust. It's the place where commerce takes over from art, and we suddenly find ourselves staring at yard after yard of shelving containing lots more things kind of like what the people were buying last month, only not as good. Bad comics, bad graphic novels, drive out the good. And then, in six months, or two years, we find ourselves staring at empty shops and empty shelves.

Let's try not to let that happen again.

One way we can help avoid the next implosion is by trying to do good work. Do your best work, and then try to get better for the one after that.

The Eisner Awards, like all awards, are flawed. But they reflect something very important, which is a striving toward excellence.

Fifty, sixty years ago, Will Eisner was an oddity and a weirdo. In a world of people who were writing or drawing comics until
they could find more respectable work, who lied to their friends about what they did, people who couldn't wait to get out and make real money, make real art, Will was one of the few people convinced that this nascent mixture of words and pictures really was an art form. Other people believed it was about the quick buck. Will was certain, against much of the available evidence, that there could be well-written comics, well-drawn comics, and that the strange magic of comics that comes from combining sequential pictures and words into a story was really something powerful and unique and true.

It was true then, and it's no less true today. This is an art form in which you can make magic. Magic for kids, magic for adults. And that is what these awards are about, and notwithstanding those who like to think of comics as a cheap feeder unit for Hollywood, that's what this convention is about.

The awards that bear Will's name are about that. They're about more than patting ourselves on the back. They are more than marketing tools, more than pretty things to hang on a wall and be proud of, if you've got one, or to envy or disdain if you haven't.

They represent striving for excellence. Doing it as well as you can, and doing it better.

They're about improving the medium. If you want an Eisner Award, strive for excellence. If you want one, do it better. If you feel it went to the wrong man or woman, and it should have been yours, then do it better next year, whatever it is that you do. Strive toward excellence. If the judges don't put you on the Eisner list, then fuck 'em, and let posterity be your judge. If you feel that great work by other people is going unrecognized and unrewarded, then make a noise about it. Tell everyone you know. Word of mouth is still one of the best sales tools there is.

Nobody wants a world of identikit comics. Do the comics only you can do. Tell the stories only you can tell. Do not lose sight of
the fact that this is an industry that can create real art.

And in the meanwhile, do it better. And love what you do.

I gave this as the Keynote Speech before the handing out of the 2003 Eisner Awards, given for creative achievement in American comic books.