The Graphic Storytelling Master: a Will Eisner Interview
by Andrea Plazzi and the Comics Code boys

 

     This interview has been conducted on the phone on February 2nd, 2004, in the Radio Città del Capo studios, Bologna (Italy).
Special thanks to Paolo Noto for sound-engineering and the Eisner-philia; to Radio Città del Capo's editor-in-chief Giovanni Dognini for comic-philia and support.

 

     The line's ok Will... you're just "lower" than I am.

     Maybe you're standing up. I am sitting.

     Yes, something like that... [laughs] I'm hanging up the phone, Will... hold on, please.

     I'm holding on.

     Are you still there, Will?

     Yes, I am.

     That's ok. That was the most difficult part. Now it's only you and me and it will be easier...

    Can you hear me?

     Yes, I do.

     I hear myself.

     That's wonderful [laughs]... Now we can start. From the good success here in Italy of La Repubblica's edition of Contract With God, for example.

     That's really very good news. I'm surprised, because after all Contract With God's a 25-year-old publication and for it to appeal to younger readers today is very encouraging.

     That's the point. You're usually considered a "cult", "niche", even too much of a "sophisticated" creator, revered by colleagues and fellow comic writers and by a small, faithful readership. Now you almost did better than Superman [a book in the same series published by La Repubblica was devoted to Superman ]...

     That's incredible... ah, ah, ah [wild laughs]... I'm very proud of that, all of my life I've been way behind Superman's sales...!
But, seriously, as a matter of fact I want to say that this is very reassuring because when I started I was not writing to the young comic market, I was writing to the adult reader I knew and that was not only risky but it was almost, donkey-hokey, you know? Adult stories with an adult theme... and nowadays the adults read comics, and that for me is reassuring. I was right.

     What's the public perception they have of you in the States as a comic writer?

     Things are very exciting in the States, right now. In the last two years graphic novels have become recognized. The public libraries are now including comics and graphic novels on their racks and for the first time these books are being reviewed seriously. So we have really reached a watershed point, which is something we've been dreaming about all these years. For me, I'm very excited, at the long last this medium has become mature and is being read by mature readers and it cointains mature material. I'm very pleased, I'm very excited and I'd wish I was 25 years younger.

     With the hindsight, I think that Contract with God played a key role in this. You repeatedly said that at that time you were trying to catch a new, more adult and serious audience for the medium. My personal opinion is that, to some extent, you created such an audience. Do you agree with that?

     I don't think you can create an audience. I think that what you can do, what anybody can do, is hope to reach an audience which has been lying dormant. In 1974-1975 adult readers were reading only text. It occured to me, at that time, as very obvious, as a matter of fact, that the almost 50-year old person had grown up with comics as a child. Consequently, he was not getting any material in the medium that he grew up with, so somebody had to produce serious material for the adult reader in this new medium.
I also believed, almost religiously I suppose, that this medium is capable of far more than just jokes or two super-heroes beating each other up. So, it was with that in mind that I began Contract With God. I chose a subject which I thought would   never had been addressed in the comics, which is the relationship with God. Which is something very central to all of us, we become more aware of that as we get older. It's an adult theme.
This is how I came to produce A Contract With God.

     Twenty-six years after Contract With God you're still producing books full-steam, almost one book a year. How do you perceive yourself as a creator and a storyteller in what back then was a new, ground-breaking format and now is so much more well-established?

     Well, the medium itself is well-established, that is its capacity to deal with a subject matter beyond the ordinary super-heroes stories. What I am involved with... well, I see myself really superseding the same basic idea. The current book, Fagin the Jew, is an attempt to find a new direction, what we call "a polemic", which is using this medium to make an intellectual point. That was the purpose, I think. I think I'm still involved in trying to be at the head of the parade, you know, I'm an exploratory man. I still feel like that. There's so much yet to do that I really can't pay attention to the fact that I'm older than I was. [laugh]

     With Fagin the Jew for the first time you explicitly tried to deal with strong and controversial themes like anti-semitism.

     That's right, that's right.

     I found very interesting the way you address how "bad" stereotypes - as you call them - as opposite to "good" stereotypes and clichés, can affect our judgment. Moreover - and this gives the book an even stronger attitude - you did this exposing a classic of world literature like Charles Dickens.
Could you explain the genesis of this work and what exactly you are protesting against, considering Dickens' work?

     All right, let me answer the first question, which is how I came to do this work. I was looking through classic folktales, unconsciously, 'cause they contain the best of enduring storytelling. And I began to understand this, that in these folktales the villains or the characters were referred to ethnically. Like, he was an Italian? They referred to somebody as "the Italian" or something, throughout the whole book, and stopped using his name. Or they were saying "the nigger". And I somewhat became aware of the fact that we are exposed to stereotypes created by another. This has an effect on our entire ethic.
The more I thought about it the more I realized that this is the subject matter that I was discussing when I was staging this own business' [sequential storytelling] stereotypes.
You see, this medium - sequential art - depends on stereoypes as part of its language. So, we create images that look like people that we want people to understand.
For example, I used to ask my students «Draw me a picture of a doctor» and invariably they would come up with a picture of a man with white mustaches, glasses and a reflector on his head. Nobody sees a doctor like that anymore but the point is that this has implanted itself in our intellectual understanding.
And at the same time I was looking at the Dickens' book, Oliver Twist, and I discovered that to my amazement he began to refer to Fagin as "the Jew" throughout the book, without refering to anybody else in a category. Then I began doing some necessary research and I discovered that at that time, 1740, the Jews emigrated into England were a specific type of Jews. The caricatures, like Cruikshank's at that time, were all wrong and they created a character that actually didn't really exist. It's the same that's happening in our country now with Mafia and Italian gangsters; gangsters are usually Italian, in American storytelling. Which is really not fair, but the point is we have created stereotypes which embed themselves almost like a virus in our intellectual body.
As for the second answer to the question, I believe that stereotypes are awfully necessary in this medium but there are "good" stereotypes and "bad" stereotypes. And my defintinion is that if you use a stereotype to hurt somebody, that's "bad". But if you use a stereotype to fairly depict a classic type then you're using a "good" stereotype.

     I think that you answered, in part, also to the following question.
Basically, a reader of almost any one of your many graphic novels set in an ethnically-connoted environment could very easily contest something like this: «Mister Eisner, you talk about stereotypes and prejudices against the Jews but you are a Jew whose novels are full of Irish people called O'Brian or O'Malley, and of Italian Mafiosi crying "mamma mia!", eating pasta and talking with hands.» Not to mention your own "original sin", Ebony, the Spirit's black sidekick.
These are all examples taken from your works. You would call them all "good" stereotypes?

     For the most part, all of the stereotyopes that I had to use were not done to offend anybody, or to hurt somebody. Even my treatment of Ebony was done carefully.
Remember that, when we write, all of us who are writing, in the business of communication, we have to deal with the psyche of the times. So, when I'm writing about a black, and I'm trying to create humour in 1929, in America, that humour will be based on a person's inability to speak English properly. Or that he looks physically different, coming from a rural point of the country. Today, in year 2004, you can't do that anymore, it's no longer considered funny or socially correct, if you will, to have somebody be laughed at because he can't speak English well.
So the times have an effect on how you write. The function of the writer is to communicate with the reader and deal with what he creates and capture the reader's attention and create an understanding between the two, between the reader and the writer. So, in writing we use memory, a common memory, which is well.
In the foreword to Fagin I dealt with the question of Ebony. So, like, my answer is in the foreword of that book.

     On account of all of these reasons Fagin is the most controversial of all of your books. Did you get any particular reaction or review to the book?

     So far, I had only good reviews, library reviews. I've had no... well, I was kind of hoping of waving for debate on the subject, maybe from somebody in the Dickens Society, or something like that.
I was very careful in the book to exhonerate Dickens from being anti-semitic. He was not anti-semitic, he was callous. And he realized later he had a responsibility and, as a matter of act, in a later edition of Oliver Twist he emended some of the matters which he was dealing with Fagin.
I feel that I have been addressing an area as it has not been done before in this medium and I'm hoping that I am once again uncovering new passageways.

      Anti-semitism is forcefully, in itself, a politically hot or at the very least controversial topic.

     Yeah, it is.

      You're a Jewish person who's born and grown up in the USA, where there is what's probably the most powerful and influential Jewish community outside Israel. What's your involvement, if any, with what's been going on for decades now in Palestine and in the Middle East?

     I'll answer this question by telling you what I told to the Jewish Society in 2002, when they gave me a Lifetime Achievement Award. And they complimented me on "fostering the Jewish appreciation in society". I told them that I'm not a propagandist for Jews. I don't regard myself as a propagandist.
I write about the things that I know. If I were Italian I would be writing about Italian characters, my characters would be all Italians. If I were Irish or my family was Irish, my characters'd be probably dealing with Irish people. So, I don't regard myself as a propagandist for Jews, necessarily. It just happens by concidence that I'm Jew and that I write about the things that I know.
Most writers will tell you that if you want to write successfully you have to write about the things that you know.

     Fagin the Jew can be seen as a new stop in your journey as a novelist, a journey which started with Contract with God. And along this journey you play with time, memory and the memories of your personal and family heritage. A personal rediscovery of sorts of your roots.
Were you already so aware of being Jewish before starting writing stories rooted in your childhood's era?

     The answer's rather that Jews always are very aware of the fact that they are Jews. And that they are an hardy group, because their whole history as Jews in the last two thousand years has been that of a small group in somebody else's country, always. Jews are always aware of that, regardless of what they say.
In the comic world, the characters I was drawing about in The Spirit, they were all Irish characters with Irish names, largely because Jews attempt to assimilate, to become part of the community. So, you find in America many people from foreign countries, Italian, Irish, German, who change their names to make them sound a little bit more like the average American names. It is not unusual to me, it is not surprising, and the fact that I am Jew it's only a coincidence and it happens to be the kind of things I write about.

     I've always been struck by the way you play with memory in your novels. You are living a very long, rich and full life. How are you in terms with the passing of time and with memories?

     Well, I do get older. And somehow some of the memories seem to hit me like out of a bookshelf. And they are all incapsulated. As a matter of fact, as I learned when I wrote To the Heart of the Storm, which is auto-biographical, and I was reaching back in my memory to find the things related to my story... well, I found that that my memories were in series of panels, they were all incapsulated in panels, you know? You remember one single incident by knowing the before or the after. And that's largely because our life is a seamless flow of incidents.
As far as feeling my age, I really don't feel old, I have to be honest with you. And I have to be reminded by my wife and by my dog that I'm older. As a matter of fact, journalists keep reminding me [laughs]. They say «Isn't that wonderful seeing this old man still doing comics?» And I say «What's so wonderful about that?»

     You said many times that «The real enemy is life». Do you really mean it, and why?

      The enemy is life because instinctively all human creatures are in a struggle to survive. Survival means to avoid death. Their life is a series of incidents that affect the survival of everybody by doing his good or bad. If something good happens it is because it adds to the comfort of your life. Something bad happens when it threatens your mortality.
In one of the stories I did, I had these two characters, one was Italian, by the way, and one was a former Mafia hitman and the other fellow was supposed to be his victim. And the hitman, the gangster, dies in the process of trying to kill this fellow, and this fellow, the victim, goes to his funeral, you know?
Life is a risky business, living is a risky business and that's the way it is. And I believe that life itself is the enemy in the sense that it is as if we are fighting against it consciously, which is probably why people ask me why my books seem to be more popular in European countries than in America. Largely it's because I think that when people are living in crowded cities they are aware of the struggle to survive more clearly than other people.
I'm expanding my answer a little bit, but the American thinking is too short, we think in terms of immediate solutions to problems.

      In the last few year Hollywood has been seemingly taken by a "comic-mania" of sorts, namely huge blockbusters adapted from comic series.
What about the now almost legendary movie project concerning The Spirit by William Friedkin?

     Frankly, I've lost interest in it. Actually, I've never been really interested in having a movie of The Spirit. Largely because it's a totally different medium, one that I've really not been friendly to and when a bad movie is made, that's not gonna affect your opinion of my work and when a good movie is made, that's also not gonna affect your opinion of my work. So, I'm really not that seeking for a movie.
However, about eighteen years ago a group, a producer came to me and I licensed them to do a Spirit movie. It had to be Warner Brothers, and it was 1984, I believe, they did a one hour television movie, which was very unsuccesful, a failure.

    And that was your only attempt at movies?

      Yes, the only attempt. Correctly, the same people who did the Batman movie, the producers, they have got the license to do a Spirit movie but they have had it for twenty years and weren't able to sell it, so as far as I am concerned it's unimportant to me. I'm not interested in movies, I'm only interested in print.

      As a habit, you very rarely quote other people being good or bad at what they do in the field of comics. But if you had to choose three very good books to take with you on a vacation or never meant to leave your shelf, which ones would they be?

     One that I'd put on my shelf would be Barefoot Gen, which was produced in Japan about the nuclear explosion in Hiroshima. I think it's a great masterpiece.
Then, I really can't think of... Oh, I'd carry something of Milton Caniff. I have a collection of his stories that I think is marvelous. As a matter of fact, I consider him a mentor, I learned tremendously from him.
And a collection of Crazy Cat by George Herriman, which to me is a great classic, and really a great genius. From him too, I learned how to engage the reader, visually. Those are probably three books I'd have on my shelf.