Eisner is a consummate artist and a true gentleman, whose insightful confessions and concoctions introduced the potential of rendering true human emotion and experiences onto a flat, white, paper board. Before the days of "rock-star" comic book creators, Eisner spent time both in the military world and in the artistic trenches of the slowly-sprouting comics industry. His appreciation of fans who have connected to his work is as genuine as his relentless purging of treasured and troubling memories. Spending a few minutes on the phone with Eisner was a great way to reach beyond the name and connect with the individual spirit (no pun intended -- honest!) behind some of the most memorable comics ever produced. In the tradition of keeping the friends and fans of Dark Horse connected to the best the industry has to offer, we're pleased to share the following interview.
Shawna Ervin-Gore: What led you to publish this book with Dark Horse?
Will Eisner: I chose Dark Horse to publish this book because Dark Horse has been one of the established publishers singularly responsive to the more experimental and adventuresome graphic storytellers, and since this book, for me, is experimental, it seemed appropriate.
SE-G: In what way?
WE: This is a book that attempts to do something I experimented with years ago in The Spirit. The idea is that the reader is an actor in the story and the characters address the reader directly. I want to make the reader involved very directly, in that the characters in each story speak to the reader out loud. Not a common thing in this medium.
SE-G: It's strange that I noticed that in the very first story, but it didn't stand out as a feature of the other stories in the book. I was so pulled into what was happening to the characters after the first one that I lost sight of that format.
WE: With the exception of the last story, the characters do not talk to each other, they talk to you. It's an innovation which I thought has been coming for some time. Anybody who has followed my work will probably know that I make a very major effort to make contact with the reader -- almost directly. That's one of the reasons I use rain and weather and so forth in many of my stories -- it seems like it involves the reader more heavily, brings them more into the story being told. So anyway, this book attempts to do that, and if you understood that right away, it was a success.
SE-G: The stories collected in Last Day in Vietnam -- have you been working on them graphically over the years or are they stories you have been thinking of producing?
WE: These are stories I have carried in my mind. These are, in reality, an accumulation of memories. We all go through life having met interesting people over the years, and there generally remains a remembered incident with a certain person. It stays with you almost all your life. These have been wrangling around in my head for many, many years, and I never really knew what to do with them. This was the first time I thought, "Well, I'll do them as a memory"... or a kind of memoir if you will. The main purpose of this book is to deal with individuals who have peopled or are stored in the inventory of my mind.
SE-G: Was there any specific impetus that made you want to share these stories now...Anything that has inspired you or happened recently, or is it just time these came out?
WE: Well, its really time. I've been wanting to do it for a very long time. I started thinking about a number of years ago when the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington was built. It seemed then that this might be a project for me to do eventually, but this came now simply because it was a time to do it. You know, I usually have a file of things that say "do me next" on my desk, and this has been lying here waiting to be done for some time.
SE-G: These days, it seems like everybody gets a chance to tell their story at some point...confessionals are everywhere, and people go on talk shows to talk about all the dirty things they've ever done...
WE: Yes.
SE-G: And much of your work has been very, very intimate, combining autobiographical accounts with fictionalized events, like you did with both At the Heart of the Storm and A Contract with God. I think when most people have their story told, somebody writes a book about them or an outside party makes a movie about them. But you share your stories from a very first-person level, both writing and drawing the very story people will read. Is this tough on you, emotionally?
WE: Of course it is. It's painful to expose yourself. To Heart of the Storm, which was frankly fully autobiographical, didn't start out to be that way. I discovered something as I created that one. I found myself -- as we used to say in the army -- standing naked in the drill field. There I was with my clothes off. All my life, all of us working in this field, and particularly those who are working in the medium with superheroes and so forth -- we always hide behind the costume. I was hiding behind the Spirit's mask all those years. I was always saying "Well, this isn't me -- it's him!" But all of a sudden, here I was revealing myself. It was a very difficult thing to do dispassionately.
I guess, probably, the only reason I could do it now is because of my age. When I was younger, I couldn't bring myself to do it. I didn't dare bare those details of my life. I think autobiographies are done mostly by older people because they have reached the point where they don't have much to lose.
SE-G: And they have more to tell, too.
WE: More to tell, of course, and less to be embarrassed about. And also, one other thing that is difficult about my work is that I am trying to share my witness of the human condition with people who often don't understand. It's tough to talk about heartbreak with people who have no heartbreak experience.
To a kid who is into superheroes, the heartbreak of somebody who lost a kid in the army doesn't have a lot of impact. He just doesn't feel the pain, nor can he be expected to.
SE-G: And it seems a lot of times, younger people pretty much run from something and won't consider exploring it once it's established that a story might be emotional.
WE: Right! It also has to do with the business of sentimentality. I've been accused over the years of being sentimental. I object to that because I think sentiment is terribly important.
And I think no real story involving human relationships can be really told without a certain amount of sentiment.
SE-G: I would argue against labeling your work like that. I've always considered sentimentality as being when people try to force emotion on you, and I think there is a difference between evoking an emotion and forcing it down someone's throat.
WE: You are right. That's absolutely true. There is a difference between honest sentiment and cheap sentimentality, where you've contrived something in order to wring emotion out of it. But if you deal with it honestly -- and I like to think I am an honest writer -- I think it can be very valid.
SE-G: It's also part of the whole human condition, and if you are not willing to face up to the emotion that comes with subjects you've written about -- and war in particular -- there is little sense in telling the story.
WE: If you are dealing with the human condition, you must deal with emotion, and you must deal with sentiment.
SE-G: Here's another question: Your art can be described in many ways -- it's extremely real feeling but also somewhat cartoony, but I think the one word most people would use to describe your work is emotional.
WE: Thank you. Because that's really what I'm looking for.
SE-G: Do you ever become emotional as you write or draw?
WE: When I'm working, when I write, I'm very involved in it, as you can see. I spend more time now than I ever did in pouring emotion into the drawing. I will re-draw the posture or gesture of a figure three or four times until I get the exact emotion I want. What we are dealing with in this medium is the selection of a single gesture or a posture out of what would -- in real-life -- be a seamless flow of action. The one that you want to extract and depict must be understandable by the reader as expressing or capturing an exact emotion. The reader must be able to say, "I feel that too. I understand what he's saying."
SE-G: With To the Heart of the Storm, I would imagine that certain stories in that collection gave you pause as you were considering them because it's so autobiographical. Did you have a hard time deciding how much was OK to tell?
WE: Oh, yes. As a matter of fact, part of the story was almost a therapy session for me, for several reasons. For one thing, you discover that memory is very treacherous. There are certain kinds of memory that are more valid than the remembrance of a date or a time. Also, you discover that you remember in segments. You almost remember in little panels or episodes. You remember, for example, being caught stealing the cookies out of the cookie jar, but you don't remember what happened before that or what happened after that.
The second thing that made that particular project difficult was dealing with my parents. Depicting my parents was a very hard thing to do -- it evokes a lot of guilt feelings, and you're also not certain that the way you remember things is exactly right.
SE-G: You were pretty young during this story -- between the ages of 15 and 19?
WE: That's right. And memories are different at different ages. I remember being very angry at my father at one time, and then loving him very much later on...angry at my mother, and understanding her later on. A lot of things I didn't know. An interesting sideline to the story is that when I showed the finished book to my brother -- he is four years younger than I am -- he said to me, "I don't remember Mom and Dad like that." And when I showed it to my sister, who is thirteen years younger than I am, she said she remembered them way I did.
SE-G: That's interesting, and I think a lot of siblings go through that same conflict of memories.
WE: Memory is very treacherous. You learn that different events remain with you in a form that does not have hard edges; memory is soft on the edges . . .But you remember things like smells, you remember things like sounds and gestures, all in a very selective way.
SE-G: How does this come to play in Last Day in Vietnam?
WE: With this book, one memory I was working with carried an underlying feeling of guilt that has not gone away, particularly with the last story.
SE-G: That's "A Purple Heart for George"?
WE: Yes, and, you know, maybe it was an attempt to expiate my sins, so to speak. That story, and the whole book, was an attempt to try and cement subtleties that have stayed with me... like the fellow who was about to shoot this old mama-san in the field ("A Dull Day in Korea" -- Ed.) I remember being enraged by this guy. I tried to tell the story and get that emotion across, by just having the Lieutenant talk to the reader.
SE-G: So that was one of the situations you were present for? You witnessed that?
WE: Yeah, I witnessed that.
SE-G: Wow.
WE: And, of course, in the first story in the book I was also involved. I'm the person the soldier is talking to the whole time.
SE-G: One of the things I get from reading these stories is that you are a fairly patriotic person, but you're also willing to be very honest about what war does to people and what military life can do to people, and especially young men. Are there any traits you've noticed soldiers adopt across the board? Are there experiences that people of every background come to share?
WE: Well, I mentioned in the book that I'm dealing with a number of people who are dealing with a combat of their own, no matter what situation they are in. It is something that transcends the mission that they are involved in at that given moment. The man in the first story was in a struggle for survival; he believed he was going to be killed. Then there is the boy who was blown up by the prostitute, then picks up another girl; he is driven by a sense of imperviousness. One of the reasons that young soldiers are recruited is because they have a feeling of immortality.
SE-G: And there are other stories about individuals who are very conflicted, like the tough guy...
WE: ...who turned out to be very kind with kids. Yes. What struck me was that this was a story which I really wanted to go into beyond more than I did, but I couldn't really. It's a little too late in time. The story focuses on this big brute, but it's really about American soldiers who had children with Korean girls. They went home to the states and left the girl and the kids behind. The Koreans didn't want these little children -- didn't know what to do with them. They abandoned, literally abandoned these little kids. It was heartbreaking. But there were a couple of soldiers, this guy was one of the guys I saw, who went up to the makeshift orphanages and spent time with these little kids on weekends. Right in the middle of this brutal war, where you are trying to be brutal, where you are trying to kill -- in the midst of it are these little things that help make you feel like you are still human. These are the things that remain with you over the years, and you want to tell them to somebody.
SE-G: I'd like to talk about your chosen format a little. You mentioned earlier how all the stories are told as direct addresses, where the reader pretty much becomes a character in the story. I'd like you to explain how you approach the layout of a page. You don't work with panels much, and you sort of let the atmosphere blend from image to image. What effect do you intend for this to have on the reader?
WE: Well, first of all, each page is a mega-panel, as far as I am concerned. Each page is a complete entity in itself. The turning of each page becomes a punctuation, and panels become far less necessary. Now, in the later years, as I have begun to do graphic novels, I have cut down the rigid series of single panels, largely because I was reaching for a wider, more adult reading rhythm. At the same time, I've been trying to involve the audience or engage the audience more heavily. For example, if you broaden the background, if you eliminate a panel, what you have done is opened up the amount of time elapsing in that scene. If you want to have a short moment, you have a very small, very tight panel. But if you eliminate the panel, immediately you open up the time perimeters completely. Not only that, but you also involve the reader in imagining the background or the environment.
SE-G: I noticed that you'll include little touches like a window in the background, or trees, but little else.
WE: That's right. But that is all that I will put -- an idea, an impression. I like to think of my work as being in the fashion of the impressionist artists, partly because I have discovered that people remember scenery largely by feel, rather than by detail.
SE-G: And that fits what we were discussing earlier about memories, and how you don't remember exactly what happened leading up to an event, or what happened after, but you do get a sense of what it was like to be there.
WE: Yes.
SE-G: I think that worked really well in "A Purple Heart for George." The first pages where he is stumbling around the whole page give you a sense that you are in a room with somebody who is drunkenly weaving his way toward you.
WE: Well, thank you. That is what I was hoping to do. I'm hoping to involve the reader in that completely. You see, when I was doing The Spirit, I was talking in the film language, but in these books, I am talking in the stage language -- the theatrical stage or live theater language. When you watch live theater performances, you are involved because you are literally sharing space with the people on stage, which is unlike a film, where you are the camera. In the case of a film, or in comics where there are panels or so forth, your vision, or the rhythm of your reading is under the control of the people presenting the each frame.
SE-G: That is very true. It's entirely dependent on how much of the scene the artist wants you to see.
WE: In this medium, the rhythm of reading is looser and you are more involved. Nothing I do in any work is accidental. Everything is pretty well deliberate. I think things out very carefully. I make a complete dummy -- Vietnam was done in complete, readable pencil dummies first, before it was finished. And maybe on other, upcoming books, you will be seeing something like that. When I write I don't write on a typewriter -- I write with pictures and dialogue at the same time, I write with the images. I rough it out with the images, composing all the while. Now the reason I used the technique I did on this book is because I wanted to keep it as close to a kind of diary as I could. As a matter of fact, originally I thought it might work to emulate a loose leaf binding on the inside, with lined paper, but I decided it was just too much, it was too gross. But the reason for this pencil technique was to create a very rugged, rough sketch book look, almost.
SE-G: As if you were keeping notes in the field?
WE: Exactly.
SE-G: Which story from Last Day In Vietnam is your favorite?
WE: Well, actually, they are all my favorites. The first story is the one I guess I participated in the most, so, obviously that is a favorite story; but actually, the one that I worked hardest on, strangely enough, is the fellow we discussed earlier who wanted to shoot the old woman
SE-G: He's a great looking character, too.
WE: I worked on that very, very hard because it was so subtle. The point of it was so subtle that I wanted to be sure I really got it across, without my having to rub it in the reader's nose, you know?
SE-G: Yeah. It has such potential to be a tragic story, and this guy is really sort of a sad character. But the way it ends is so subtle -- there's no punch line.
WE: Well, that is the essence of everything I write. There are really no clear villains for me; everybody's not all bad, and nobody's all good. Years ago, when I was working in a shop, they used to disagree, and their complaint with my work was that all my bad guys are not bad enough.
SE-G: Physically, you will draw people that aren't very attractive or in such a way that you get the feeling that they are not the nicest people in the world. But you don't seem to milk any opportunity to make them worse than they really are, and you don't caricature them to the point that the reader can't relate to them.
WE: Well, the reality of life is that nobody is completely, absolutely all bad unless he is insane. Most people don't think of themselves as bad. As a matter of fact, even jails are filled with people who essentially think they are good. People want to think of themselves as good and the bad things they do they say is not their fault because they were forced into it.
SE-G: Well, I think a lot of times people make mistakes and do bad things because they are using what they know and what they have learned from people around them. They are doing what they think might fix a situation, not necessarily thinking it's a bad thing. I think sometimes it's that way when parents hit their kids -- they are not really trying to hurt their kids, but they are just trying to exact some form of discipline and they don't know what else to do.
WE: Yeah, that's it exactly.
SE-G: It's very sad, and to some degree you have to empathize with people who make bad choices if they're trying to do the right thing.
WE: Also, people are constantly in the business of surviving. All of my books are about survival. As far as I am concerned, the enemy is not people. You might say the enemy is life, and everybody is struggling to prevail.
SE-G: Do you see your capturing so many of your experiences like this as being one of the ways you survived for so long?
WE: Well, I don't know if I can fairly attribute my own survival to that. I don't seem to be unusually preoccupied with survival. Fortunately, I've had good health most of my life, and I also keep busy working and that's probably contributed.
SE-G: It seems like you've also had the chance and taken the opportunity to work through things artistically that maybe would weigh you down and age you emotionally if you hadn't shared them.
WE: Well, now that is an astute observation, because most of us working in this field are fortunate that we can work out a lot of pain and deal with the difficulties of life that we have encountered. We don't have to swallow it or push it down. We can unburden ourselves to readers. It's a very fortunate position to be in, especially at this time in history.
Will Eisner's newest original graphic novel, Last Day in Vietnam, will be available July 19, from Dark Horse Comics and your local comics retailer.