The comic view of becoming and being an American

Off the Shelf

Terry England | The New Mexican

11/25/2007 -

If you know Will Eisner only from his famous comic book, The Spirit, you might not see where the reality lies in the fictional Central City. The title character was this tall, broad-shouldered man who fought crime from his headquarters in the local cemetery. He wasn't a superhero, he was a mortal man with impressive physical skills who survived being shot several times. A former cop thought dead, he struck a deal with the commissioner of police that he'd don a mark and operate as the Spirit to take on the bad guys in the crime-laden city (aren't they all).

The stories were full of humor and the characters real and engaging. The art is sumptuous; indeed, it was Eisner's work in The Spirit that showed me that comic art could be something well beyond the usual superhero everything-is-over-the-top atmosphere. Crime wasn't so black-and-white in The Spirit despite its film noir-like quality. Sometimes conditions lead someone to desperate measures; sometimes it's better to stand back and give them another chance.

Everything in The Spirit likely points to something in Eisner's background; most art usually does. And if Eisner had done nothing else in his life, he still would be assured of his place among the greats of comicdom. But he didn't stop with The Spirit; it mostly was a beginning. Eisner as a young man opened a studio that became a large comic-book packaging house. While admitting he didn't invent comic books, he did say he was there at their birth. (He was 87 when he died in 2005.)

He influenced many younger comic artists, but he in turn was influence by the underground comic movement of the '60s to try a form now known as graphic memoir, stories based upon one's own life. Several of the former have been collected in series published by W.W. Norton; Life in Pictures: Autobiographical Stories ($29.95) is the third and last in the series. If the price seems high for a cartoon book, be aware this is a hardcover with 493 pages of heavy stock with the quality to hold the ink of a master storyteller.

Scott McCloud, who wrote what might be the seminal book on how to read comics, says in the introduction Eisner, as a Jew, was subject to prejudice in his life, some of which he touches on in the stories. That's the kind of thing that drove him to write an extraordinary book, The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Norton, 2005) in which he showed how a fake book details the supposed secret plot of Jews to take over the world. That sort of concern marked Eisner's work and his life.

To the Heart of the Storm is the longest and perhaps the most personal of the five stories. An Eisner stand-in is riding a troop train in World War II on his way to combat training. As he watches the scenery pass, he reminisces; these flashbacks explain where his parents came from, how they met, young Eisner's growing up and where his wife's parents came from. It's a story of newly arrived immigrants from Europe, the problems they faced trying to make their way in a new country — and the problems they faced as Jews. That problem dogged all of them — from their European lives to Eisner's life in the so-called melting pot.

In one of the stories, Eisner takes artistic license with his own life. His wife's father had wanted Eisner to go into business with him, but he stuck with his artistic dreams. In The Name of the Game, a young poet accepts his father-in-law's offer and eventually become a cold-hearted tycoon, head of a solid business but a dysfunctional family. Is that what Eisner believed would happen to him? Probably not. He just went wherever the story would take him.

The shortest piece is The Day I Became a Professional, wherein the young artist puts on a suit, packs his portfolio case, takes the subway to a cartoon editor's office downtown. But he's rejected. As he leaves in a gloom, an older, experienced artist tells him not to give up. And that's it. But to any artistic hopeful, the pictures speak volumes.

Eisner's fiction was stylish and great reading, bit his graphic memoirs gives us glimpses into an age that has passed and the people, many still living in the old and new worlds, who inhabited those dual worlds. He tells of joy, sorrow, frustration and success — and what it is to be, and become, an American.