Speaking from personal experience, I can vouch that both of these are true. But what really strikes me about working with Will Eisner is that he sincerely appreciates the efforts of everyone involved in bringing his work to the shelves of bookstores and comic shops. And it wasn't until Dark Horse began working with Eisner on his next book, Shop Talk, that I made the connection between Will's unrelenting grace in professional relationships and his dedication to the medium and industry of comics.
As he explains in the transcribed interview below, Eisner began conducting informal interviews with this industry peers in the late 1970s because he was interested in documenting the importance of comics as a literary form. The fact that Eisner is, in his 83rd year, still a profound and prolific creator of comics speaks to his dedication to comics, but it's his respect for individuals involved with every aspect of creating comics -- from other artists to editors, marketing folks to print-buyers, distributors to retailers -- that shows the depth of his understanding of the medium.
Thanks to the tireless efforts of people like Will Eisner and some of his interview subjects for Shop Talk, such as Joe Kubert, Jack Davis, and Harvey Kurtzman, other people can now begin to understand the comics industry from the drawing table up. Pick up Will Eisner's Shop Talk in April and you'll see what I mean.
Shawna Ervin-Gore: Tell me a little about the history of the interviews that are being collected in Shop Talk. How did you decide, in the early '80s, that you wanted to start interviewing your industry peers?
Will Eisner: Originally the idea came to me as a result of a conversation I had with Milton Caniff. We were talking about the fact that many of the interviews he did with journalists were usually stupid. They didn't ask good questions and didn't know much about the industry. When he said that, I said, "Look, I'd like to produce a series of interviews -- or conversations, rather -- very much like the ones we had back in the shop." He said, "I'll be glad to do the first one with you," and that's how this really got started.
But I felt for a long time that it was necessary to try to retain some of the conversations that we had in the shops -- studio conversations.
SE-G: Do you remember when this first occurred to you...what year?
WE: I think it was late 1978 or '79.
SE-G: Was The Spirit Magazine already up and running at that time?
WE: Yes, the magazine was going already, and I thought that would be the best place for these interviews. I had a vehicle in place for the interviews.
SE-G: What else did you run in the magazine?
WE: Lots of different stuff: mostly reprints of Spirit stories, serialized segments of graphic novels I was working on at the time, stuff like that. I also included parts of Comics and Sequential Art as a set of serials that ran in the magazine.
SE-G: A lot of the content was straight comics, so adding some journalism to the mix probably worked pretty well. You mentioned that Milton Caniff was the subject of your first Shop Talk interview...how did you schedule these interviews? Was it a formal process?
WE: No. Not really. I called Milt and I said, "Milt, will you come down and have a conversation with me?" He came down to the Princeton Club, I believe it was, and we sat down and had a long conversation.
SE-G: I noticed that all of these interviews are in person. Did you travel a lot to get these conversations documented, or did a lot of these guys live in or close to New York?
WE: I really did a number of these at the Princeton Club...Phil Seuling I did at the Princeton Club, Joe Kubert I did at the Princeton Club...Gil Kane I don't remember off hand. I think I went up to his house in Westport and did it there. The Kurtzman and Jack Davis interviews were done in Jack Davis' studio, because he lived a couple of miles away from me, so I could get to him easily. I tried to do it in the studio, if I could, rather than at a formal place.
SE-G: Did that suit what you were trying to capture better than other settings?
WE: Yeah. The feeling of being in the studio was one of the more important aspects of what I was trying to do.
SE-G: Before you started this project, had you ever interviewed anyone before?
WE: No, this was the first time. And I really wasn't thinking of myself as an interviewer. In fact, the only problem I had was with Jack Kirby, who kind of insisted on making it a formal interview. The other guys were willing to talk off the cuff.
SE-G: That surprises me. I know you worked with Kirby quite extensively before that, so it seems he would have been more casual about it.
WE: It surprised me, too. I think it was because he had worked for me that he kept it formal; he kept calling me "boss" (laughs). I said, "Jack, don't do that." And he said, "Well, you're still my boss." I think Jack was a little bit more formal in many ways. He wasn't as outgoing as some of these other guys. Even when he worked for me at my shop, he didn't communicate too easily with the other guys. He was a very concentrated guy, especially when it came to his work. He thought of it as "work" and approached it like work, where I think others of us had a bit more fun.
SE-G: I guess in looking back at your Kirby interview, it is a bit more structured than the others. The conversation doesn't seem to stray as much as some of them do.
WE: That's right. He kept it that way. I couldn't get him off that path. This didn't turn up in the interview, but at one point I said, "Jack, remember, we're just two professionals talking to each other." He said, "I know, I know ...", but he didn't want to relax on the structure. It was a little hard on me. If you look at any other interviews Jack has done, you'll notice that he thought very carefully about what he said. He would pontificate... I don't know if that's exactly the word I'm looking for. He was deliberate. He used a lot of clichés when he spoke, but he was a very genuine person.
SE-G: It seems like he might have had a hard time expressing himself and feeling like others truly understood what he was saying.
WE: Probably. I think so.
SE-G: We've talked about why you wanted to do these, but I'd like to know more about your approach to the interviews and what you were setting out to learn from these guys. With most of these conversations, you seem to dig in deeply pretty early.
WE: Well, when I first started, I realized that what I had on hand were people who were very important to the profession, who would continue to be important, and who would, someday, be historically important. And it turned out exactly that way.
SE-G: You ask them a lot of questions, not only about the technical aspects of their work, like the materials and techniques they used, but also about theory and how they approached their work. Did you ever find yourself back at your own drawing table reflecting on what you'd heard from your peers and incorporating their ideas into your own work?
WE: Not really. I guess the answer to that question is yes and no. Even in studio situations, like the Eisner and Iger studio, where there were 10 or 12 or 13 guys in the shop, it was like a classroom in school. You would instinctively compare yourself to the other guys. You wouldn't go over and look at somebody's work and go back to your drawing board saying "I'm going to do this exactly the way he did." The internalization that went on was often about what the other people were doing. It could be somewhat competitive. And some guys paid no attention to what other people were doing. Jack Kirby was one of those guys.
So when I finished these interviews, I really felt that I was able to capture something that would normally disappear -- the feeling of working in a studio. I always felt that the conversations we used to have in the shop were things that would evaporate over time, so to speak. Also, speaking of students in a classroom -- when I was a student, when I was first starting out, the idea of getting into a studio and listening to the big men talk was something that was very precious. So here was a chance to leave something for posterity, if you will. And also, to make a contribution professionally.
SE-G: In the course of these interviews, did you ever want to argue points with these guys? Did the conversations ever get confrontational or argumentative?
WE: These never got to the point where I felt like debating or arguing a point, which is actually one of the things I regretted. In hindsight, I would've liked to have pressed the issue a little more and debate a point more than I did. I did debate occasionally. In a few of the interviews you'll see where I said, "I don't agree with that; I look at it this way." I think with Gil Kane I did that. I interviewed him at his house, and I think it was with him that I argued a little over a point.
SE-G: Here's another thing I'm curious about: this book is full of comics' greatest talents sharing their technical tricks and stand-bys, like C.C. Beck's technique where he'd check his work with a mirror to see how it really looked from another perspective. Did you ever find yourself in a situation where you working late in the studio and wanted to try out some of these other ideas you were hearing about.
WE: No, not really. I have my own way of working, and I know what works for me. It's interesting to hear how other people work, but that doesn't mean the same techniques would work for everyone. Here's an example: most of the people working in comics, before comic books, were people who worked mostly in daily strips. Most cartoonists never used models, as illustrators did. Illustrators were all pretty dependent on models. What cartoonists used were "swipes"-- pictures of objects or scenes. This is a technique not everyone would use, but it worked for a lot of people. I have always depended on memory for people, action, and composition. I have a good visual recall.
SE-G: That makes sense. I guess by the time you were all working professionally, you'd probably tinkered enough with technique to know what suited your work.
WE: I think so.
SE-G: Since The Spirit Magazine had been up and running for a few years before these interviews ran, what was the response from your readers once they started running?
WE: We got very few letters, with the exception of (people responding to) the Milton Caniff conversation. By the time I brought him into this, Milton Caniff was already legendary. Most of the other guys -- Gil Kane, Harvey Kurtzman, Joe Kubert -- they were still active and working, but Caniff was maybe a little more rare. That interview was even published in Europe; I guess they thought it was something special in Spain.
SE-G: Milton was the first interview, as you mentioned earlier. Once you got the hang of doing these interviews, did you find your questions changing a lot? Did your approach to the conversations change as you got a few interviews under your belt, or did you find that the same approach worked well with each artist?
WE: I always thought of things I wish I'd asked once the interview had passed, and I did get to follow up with Milton Caniff, since I interviewed him in two parts. I think the thing I learned most in the whole process came with the Caniff interview, in fact. It was a very strange experience for me, because I was like a fanboy when I first spoke to him (laughs).
SE-G: (Laughs) It's funny to think of Will Eisner as being a fanboy to another artist.
WE: (Laughs) I suppose. As a matter of fact, I apologized to him. I said to him, "When I was in high school, you were my ideal!" He was very influential on me, and before we started the interview, I had to ask him if I could take a few minutes to compose myself. He laughed at me.
I know that for many fans and young cartoonists, one of the first things you want to do in an interview with someone you've admired for a long time is to find out how human the guy is. My students often told me this. You'll often be surprised by how human these people are. For example, I had a side conversation with Milton Caniff -- and I don't think this made it into the final interview -- where he showed me some of the current strips he was doing. He had mentioned that the newspaper strips were being run in increasingly smaller sizes, and he could no longer deal with the small sizes, because he loved to do all that nice artwork and it got reduced down to a microscopic sizes. He was already expressing concerns about the state of the business, which at that time for him was newspaper adventure strips, and I thought that was amazing. I thought of him as being the master of the newspaper adventure strips, and if he said they were in trouble, I believed him.
So I got to hear, on many of these occasions, what the great men thought about things, and this always led to more interesting parts of the conversations, but I didn't re-invent the thing every time I did it.
SE-G: Is Dark Horse publishing every Shop Talk interview you did, or are there others?
WE: Dark Horse is publishing all of them. The only one we gave a second thought to was Phil Seuling, and only because he's not an artist (Seuling was a major figure in the formation of the direct-sales comics market, as well as a convention organizer and distributor -- Ed.). We didn't include this part in the published interview, but Phil had asked me if I had ever been bankrupt, because that's what he was facing at the time with his company. We can talk about that now, because it's an interesting point, but it was more personal at the time.
SE-G: I think that's one of the elements that makes these interviews work: in a lot of ways, the lives of these men -- their personal ups-and-downs -- mirror the industry they spent their lives working in. These stories make the comics industry that much more endearing, hearing how these guys approached their drawing tables every day and learning about the projects that worked for them and which ones didn't.
WE: That's something I felt from the start.
SE-G: Of these interviews, do you have a favorite?
WE: Well, my favorite would have to be Milton Caniff.
SE-G: I could have figured that, I guess.
WE: It was such a thrill, and he was so intelligent. I learned so much from him, just reading and following his work. When I sat down to talk with him, I was absorbing everything he said for my own purposes, rather than for the interview.
SE-G: Milton seemed to respond very warmly and openly, too. This interview is pretty fascinating because you don't often read interviewers where the subject is enthusiastic about it.
WE: He was also very kind to me. It was Milton that brought me into the National Cartoonist Society, even though I was not a daily strip cartoonist. In those days, the National Cartoonist Society seemed to be peopled only by daily strip cartoonists, and I guess I was kind of a mutant, because I was doing a comic book that was published in newspapers.
SE-G: So he took a stand for you with the Society?
WE: I don't think he was in danger of losing any credibility, but it was an act of great generosity and kindness. He was that kind of guy.
SE-G: After you started this project, did you find yourself feeling differently about comics? Were you heartened by the insight of these creators?
WE: It reinforced the feeling I always had about the fact that this is a valid literary form and also a valid field to be in. And when you talk to guys like Joe Kubert and Jack Kirby -- as simple a guy as he was -- you got the feeling that you were part of a group of giants. That's exactly what they were.
Don't miss Will Eisner's Shop Talk -- a 250-page book featuring eleven interviews by Will Eisner with some of comics greatest creators (and Phil Seuling!), on sale starting April 25.