Of the comics publishers of the
late '30s, Quality Comics was one of the most important.
The line was published by Everett M. Arnold (though he was
always referred to by his very apt nickname, "Busy").
Whether it was this constant exposure
to comics or business acumen that led Arnold to form his
own comic company is infinitely debatable; for whatever
reason, Arnold decided his future lay in the nascent field
of comic books, and he tapped George Brenner
to edit his line, which would eventually include Smash
Comics, Police Comics, National Comics,
Plastic Man and Uncle Sam, among others.
"In the early fall of 1939, Arnold called
me and asked me to have lunch with him," Eisner said. "Although
we weren't doing any packaging for Quality, he knew of us
and we knew of him. It was over lunch that he proposed to
me the idea of the newspaper section."
Eisner said Arnold was a classic case
of the guy who didn't know art, but knew what he liked.
As we shall learn, Arnold was nothing if demanding —
he knew what he wanted (even if he himself could not supply
it), and he was not shy about haranguing Eisner to achieve
the level of quality and commercialism he deemed necessary.
Attempting to respond to the Register
& Tribune Syndicate's desire to circulate a feature that
would meld comic books and newspapers, Arnold had George
Brenner, his editor at Quality, try and develop
one. "The syndicate rejected it," Eisner said. "That's when
Arnold came to me. By then, I had developed a pretty good
reputation, and Henry Martin, an executive
vice president and top salesman at the syndicate, liked
my work. He specifically mentioned that he liked Hawks
of the Seas. What he really liked was
my reputation of being able to deliver on time."
Arnold proposed that Eisner package a
weekly, 16-page comic book section for Quality Comics. There
was one catch: It would be a full-time project. Eisner would
have to quit Eisner & Iger. Arnold was not interested in
dealing with a production shop; he needed to deal with a
single creator. By this time, Eisner and Iger employed about
a dozen writers and artists, including Jack Kirby,
Bob Powell, Chuck Mazoujian,
George Tuska, Bill Bossert,
Toni Blum, and Dick Briefer;
overall, the shop was producing more than 200 pages of comic
book material each month. "Leaving Eisner and Iger wasn't
easy," Eisner said. "I was making good money, but I've never
been able to resist the opportunity to climb new creative
mountains.
Once his decision was made, Eisner went
about the task of separating from Eisner & Iger. "Iger and
I had a corporation, and we had an agreement that if either
partner wanted to leave at any time, he had to sell his
half to the remaining partner, which protected the remaining
partner from having to deal with someone he didn't want
to deal with.
Occasionally, Eisner would discuss his
career with his father, who harbored a lifelong affinity
for the arts, and his father would support whatever Eisner
wanted to do. Eisner's mother was included in these discussions
less frequently, because she had always held grave reservations
about the viability of Eisner's art career.
When Iger realized that he couldn't change
Eisner's mind, he offered him about $20,000 for his half
of the company. Eisner didn't really care about the money
at that point. He was anxious to start The Spirit,
he was anxious to get the company for himself, so he felt
it was a good deal.
No divorce is without trauma. Their separation
agreement stipulated that Eisner could not raid talent,
and that any personnel changes that resulted would be due
to voluntary moves on the part of staff members. From the
shop, Mazoujian, Powell, Fine and Klaus Nordling
volunteered to follow Eisner into his new frontier. Eisner
would singlehandedly produce the seven-page Spirit
stories, and the other staffers handling the chores on the
Lady Luck and Mr.
Mystic stories, each of which ran four pages
in the weekly section. In January, 1941, the Spirit stories
grew to eight pages a week, bringing Eisner's contribution
to half of each section.
Eisner also needed the additional talent
to help produce the other two jointly-owned Quality comic
books that Eisner would have to edit.
Once Eisner made the break with Iger,
he formed a three-way partnership with Arnold and Martin.
Prescient, Eisner insisted on owning the copyright to his
new creation, a situation almost without parallel in comics
at that time and almost without parallel on any popular
basis for several decades to come.
Eisner said: "Since I knew I would be
in comics for life, I felt I had every right to own what
I created. It was my future, my product and my property,
and by God, I was going to fight to own it.
"I agreed to let Arnold copyright it
in his name rather than mine, but with the stipulation my
ownership was acknowledged in the contract, and that at
any time the partnership terminated, all rights to The
Spirit would revert to me."
* * *
 |
Press advertisement announcing the the new Spirit Section.
Click to view enlarged image. |
After four years of relentlessly producing
comic book material, by 1940 Will Eisner
was combat-ready to begin The Spirit. The pace
was going to be grueling; besides singlehandedly producing
a page of art a day, weekends included, Eisner also had
to conceive Spirit stories and supervise Lady Luck
and Mr. Mystic, the four-page tales that
filled out each Sunday section. Add to this his partnership
agreement with Busy Arnold and Henry
Martin to oversee production of three Quality comic
books, and the 22-year-old artist could see life was not
going to be simple.
But Eisner was convinced that the potential
of comics was not yet tapped. And he had managed to create
a situation in which he was intimately involved in both
newsstand comics and newspaper strips.
In making the move from the Eisner and
Iger studio to the Sunday section, Eisner became the beneficiary
of increased esteem from his new colleagues, the newspaper
cartoonists, to whom breaking into strips from comic books
was considered a move uptown.
Then as now, there were two comics "fraternities"
— books and strips, with only a slight overlap. Through
The Spirit, Eisner had standing
in both groups.
* * *
Eisner had frequently sequestered himself
to work, preferring solitude to create. So it was on the
evening when Eisner sat down to invent the characters for
the Sunday section. "What I originally wanted to do
was a straight detective character that would give me room
to do stories," he said. "I was interested in
the short story form, and I thought here at last was an
opportunity to work on short stories in comics. I could
do the stories I wanted, because I was going to have a more
adult audience." Although Eisner had little idea then
of the range of expression or the number of voices that
lay inside him, he knew his new feature must give him flexibility.
"As I conceived him, The Spirit was
an adventurer who would enable me to put him in almost any
situation," he said.
From there, Eisner added the other ingredients;
on a piece of scrap paper, he doodled the police commissioner
and his daughter. He knew she would be the hero's love interest.
As the concept crystallized, he imagined that the hero would
operate outside the law, creating tension between him and
the commissioner. "In the wee hours of that night,
I had roughed out the seven pages and I began writing dialogue."
Eisner said that as he sat there, he realized
the wonder of his position: in a real sense, no one had
ever been in his particular position before. And everyone
who tried such an experiment would be following in footprints
pressed by Will Eisner. "I was writing the rule book,
fashioning the rules out of experience. As the concept for
The Spirit evolved, I knew it must come from my
own idea of what it should be, not from anyone else's. I
was dead serious and I knew what I was about."
Things were going smoothly and perhaps
that should have been his first warning. The phone rang;
it was Busy Arnold, wanting to know what
Eisner was concocting. When Eisner described the concept,
Arnold was underwhelmed. "He said he and Martin felt
that newspapers were expecting a costumed character, because
of the tremendous popularity of Batman and Superman.
After all, he said, the Sunday section was a response to
the popularity of these characters.
 |
"I reluctantly agreed that he had
a point, so I compromised on the costume," he added.
"That's when I gave The Spirit the
mask. But that's as far as I was willing to go. Any kind
of costume would have limited the kinds of stories I could
do: it would be an inhibiting factor. Later I put the gloves
on him. Those were the two concessions I made. As far as
Arnold and Martin were concerned, they were trademarks that
were necessary to make a marketable character. They were
pragmatists, not creative men. Martin felt that if editors
liked it, it was good. Don't make waves. I think Arnold
and Martin were disappointed because they expected to get
a costumed character, and they got The Spirit.
* * *
Will Eisner's work on the Spirit was interrupted
in 1942 when he was drafted into the Army for service in
World War II. The Army took advantage of his skills as a
cartoonist, and during the war he was engaged in producing
posters, illustrations and strips for the education and
entertainment of the troops.
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This article in its unaltered form was
originally published in The Spirit: The Origin Years
#1-4 (Kitchen Sink Press, 1992). Text © Tom Heintjes. All
rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
