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215                                    <h1 id="page-title" class="asset-name">Spirited Work</h1>
216                                </div>
217                                <div class="asset-content">
218
219                                    <div class="asset-body">
220                                        <p><strong>Of the comics publishers of the 
221                      late '30s, Quality Comics was one of the most important. 
222                      The line was published by Everett M. Arnold (though he was 
223                      always referred to by his very apt nickname, "Busy").</strong></p>
224                    <p>Whether it was this constant exposure 
225                      to comics or business acumen that led Arnold to form his 
226                      own comic company is infinitely debatable; for whatever 
227                      reason, Arnold decided his future lay in the nascent field 
228                      of comic books, and he tapped <strong>George Brenner</strong> 
229                      to edit his line, which would eventually include <em>Smash 
230                      Comics</em>, <em>Police Comics</em>, <em>National Comics</em>, 
231                      <em>Plastic Man</em> and <em>Uncle Sam</em>, among others.</p>
232                    <p>"In the early fall of 1939, Arnold called 
233                      me and asked me to have lunch with him," Eisner said. "Although 
234                      we weren't doing any packaging for Quality, he knew of us 
235                      and we knew of him. It was over lunch that he proposed to 
236                      me the idea of the newspaper section."</p>
237                    <p>Eisner said Arnold was a classic case 
238                      of the guy who didn't know art, but knew what he liked. 
239                      As we shall learn, Arnold was nothing if demanding &#8212; 
240                      he knew what he wanted (even if he himself could not supply 
241                      it), and he was not shy about haranguing Eisner to achieve 
242                      the level of quality and commercialism he deemed necessary.</p>
243                    <p>Attempting to respond to the Register 
244                      & Tribune Syndicate's desire to circulate a feature that 
245                      would meld comic books and newspapers, Arnold had <strong>George 
246                      Brenner</strong>, his editor at Quality, try and develop 
247                      one. "The syndicate rejected it," Eisner said. "That's when 
248                      Arnold came to me. By then, I had developed a pretty good 
249                      reputation, and <strong>Henry Martin</strong>, an executive 
250                      vice president and top salesman at the syndicate, liked 
251                      my work. He specifically mentioned that he liked <strong><em><a href="../library/hawks-of-the-seas.html">Hawks 
252                      of the Seas</a></em></strong>. What he really liked was 
253                      my reputation of being able to deliver on time.&quot;</p>
254                    <p>Arnold proposed that Eisner package a 
255                      weekly, 16-page comic book section for Quality Comics. There 
256                      was one catch: It would be a full-time project. Eisner would 
257                      have to quit Eisner & Iger. Arnold was not interested in 
258                      dealing with a production shop; he needed to deal with a 
259                      single creator. By this time, Eisner and Iger employed about 
260                      a dozen writers and artists, including <strong>Jack Kirby</strong>, 
261                      <strong>Bob Powell</strong>, <strong>Chuck Mazoujian</strong>, 
262                      <strong>George Tuska</strong>, <strong>Bill Bossert</strong>, 
263                      <strong>Toni Blum</strong>, and <strong>Dick Briefer</strong>; 
264                      overall, the shop was producing more than 200 pages of comic 
265                      book material each month. "Leaving Eisner and Iger wasn't 
266                      easy," Eisner said. "I was making good money, but I've never 
267                      been able to resist the opportunity to climb new creative 
268                      mountains.</p>
269                    <p>Once his decision was made, Eisner went 
270                      about the task of separating from Eisner & Iger. "Iger and 
271                      I had a corporation, and we had an agreement that if either 
272                      partner wanted to leave at any time, he had to sell his 
273                      half to the remaining partner, which protected the remaining 
274                      partner from having to deal with someone he didn't want 
275                      to deal with.</p>
276                    <p>Occasionally, Eisner would discuss his 
277                      career with his father, who harbored a lifelong affinity 
278                      for the arts, and his father would support whatever Eisner 
279                      wanted to do. Eisner's mother was included in these discussions 
280                      less frequently, because she had always held grave reservations 
281                      about the viability of Eisner's art career.</p>
282                    <p>When Iger realized that he couldn't change 
283                      Eisner's mind, he offered him about $20,000 for his half 
284                      of the company. Eisner didn't really care about the money 
285                      at that point. He was anxious to start <strong><em>The Spirit</em></strong>, 
286                      he was anxious to get the company for himself, so he felt 
287                      it was a good deal.</p>
288                    <p>No divorce is without trauma. Their separation 
289                      agreement stipulated that Eisner could not raid talent, 
290                      and that any personnel changes that resulted would be due 
291                      to voluntary moves on the part of staff members. From the 
292                      shop, Mazoujian, Powell, Fine and <strong>Klaus Nordling</strong> 
293                      volunteered to follow Eisner into his new frontier. Eisner 
294                      would singlehandedly produce the seven-page <em><strong>Spirit</strong></em> 
295                      stories, and the other staffers handling the chores on the 
296                      <em><strong>Lady Luck</strong></em> and <em><strong>Mr. 
297                      Mystic</strong></em> stories, each of which ran four pages 
298                      in the weekly section. In January, 1941, the Spirit stories 
299                      grew to eight pages a week, bringing Eisner's contribution 
300                      to half of each section.</p>
301                    <p>Eisner also needed the additional talent 
302                      to help produce the other two jointly-owned Quality comic 
303                      books that Eisner would have to edit.</p>
304                    <p>Once Eisner made the break with Iger, 
305                      he formed a three-way partnership with Arnold and Martin. 
306                      Prescient, Eisner insisted on owning the copyright to his 
307                      new creation, a situation almost without parallel in comics 
308                      at that time and almost without parallel on any popular 
309                      basis for several decades to come.</p>
310                    <p>Eisner said: "Since I knew I would be 
311                      in comics for life, I felt I had every right to own what 
312                      I created. It was my future, my product and my property, 
313                      and by God, I was going to fight to own it.</p>
314                    <p>"I agreed to let Arnold copyright it 
315                      in his name rather than mine, but with the stipulation my 
316                      ownership was acknowledged in the contract, and that at 
317                      any time the partnership terminated, all rights to <em><strong>The 
318                      Spirit</strong></em> would revert to me."</p>
319                    <p class="bodytextcentred">* * *</p>
320                    <table width="200" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="pic-table-left">
321                      <tr> 
322                        <td><img src="images/spirit_news_advert_200.jpg" alt="The Spirit, press advert" width="200" height="284" vspace
322="5" border="1" /></td>
323                      </tr>
324                      <tr> 
325                        <td class="pic-credit">Press advertisement announcing the new Spirit Section.</td>
326                      </tr>
327                    </table>
328                    <p>After four years of relentlessly producing 
329                      comic book material, by 1940 <strong>Will Eisner</strong> 
330                      was combat-ready to begin <em>The Spirit</em>. The pace 
331                      was going to be grueling; besides singlehandedly producing 
332                      a page of art a day, weekends included, Eisner also had 
333                      to conceive Spirit stories and supervise <strong>Lady Luck</strong> 
334                      and <strong>Mr. Mystic</strong>, the four-page tales that 
335                      filled out each Sunday section. Add to this his partnership 
336                      agreement with <strong>Busy Arnold</strong> and <strong>Henry 
337                      Martin</strong> to oversee production of three Quality comic 
338                      books, and the 22-year-old artist could see life was not 
339                      going to be simple. </p>
340                    <p>But Eisner was convinced that the potential 
341                      of comics was not yet tapped. And he had managed to create 
342                      a situation in which he was intimately involved in both 
343                      newsstand comics and newspaper strips.</p>
344                    <p>In making the move from the Eisner and 
345                      Iger studio to the Sunday section, Eisner became the beneficiary 
346                      of increased esteem from his new colleagues, the newspaper 
347                      cartoonists, to whom breaking into strips from comic books 
348                      was considered a move uptown.</p>
349                    <p>Then as now, there were two comics &quot;fraternities&quot; 
350                      &#8212; books and strips, with only a slight overlap. Through 
351                      <strong><em>The Spirit</em></strong>, Eisner had standing 
352                      in both groups.</p>
353                    <p class="bodytextcentred">* * *</p>
354                    <p>Eisner had frequently sequestered himself 
355                      to work, preferring solitude to create. So it was on the 
356                      evening when Eisner sat down to invent the characters for 
357                      the Sunday section. &quot;What I originally wanted to do 
358                      was a straight detective character that would give me room 
359                      to do stories,&quot; he said. &quot;I was interested in 
360                      the short story form, and I thought here at last was an 
361                      opportunity to work on short stories in comics. I could 
362                      do the stories I wanted, because I was going to have a more 
363                      adult audience.&quot; Although Eisner had little idea then 
364                      of the range of expression or the number of voices that 
365                      lay inside him, he knew his new feature must give him flexibility. 
366                      &quot;As I conceived him, <strong>The Spirit</strong> was 
367                      an adventurer who would enable me to put him in almost any 
368                      situation,&quot; he said.</p>
369                    <p>From there, Eisner added the other ingredients; 
370                      on a piece of scrap paper, he doodled the police commissioner 
371                      and his daughter. He knew she would be the hero's love interest. 
372                      As the concept crystallized, he imagined that the hero would 
373                      operate outside the law, creating tension between him and 
374                      the commissioner. &quot;In the wee hours of that night, 
375                      I had roughed out the seven pages and I began writing dialogue.&quot;</p>
376                    <p>Eisner said that as he sat there, he realized 
377                      the wonder of his position: in a real sense, no one had 
378                      ever been in his particular position before. And everyone 
379                      who tried such an experiment would be following in footprints 
380                      pressed by Will Eisner. &quot;I was writing the rule book, 
381                      fashioning the rules out of experience. As the concept for 
382                      <em>The Spirit</em> evolved, I knew it must come from my 
383                      own idea of what it should be, not from anyone else's. I 
384                      was dead serious and I knew what I was about.&quot;</p>
385                    <p>Things were going smoothly and perhaps 
386                      that should have been his first warning. The phone rang; 
387                      it was <strong>Busy Arnold</strong>, wanting to know what 
388                      Eisner was concocting. When Eisner described the concept, 
389                      Arnold was underwhelmed. &quot;He said he and Martin felt 
390                      that newspapers were expecting a costumed character, because 
391                      of the tremendous popularity of <em>Batman</em> and <em>Superman</em>. 
392                      After all, he said, the Sunday section was a response to 
393                      the popularity of these characters.</p>
394                    <table width="142" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="pic-table">
395                      <tr> 
396                        <td><img src="images/spirithead.gif" alt="The Spirit, circa 1940" width="142" height="150" border="0" /></td>
397                      </tr>
398                    </table><p>&quot;I reluctantly agreed that he had 
399                      a point, so I compromised on the costume,&quot; he added. 
400                      &quot;That's when I gave <strong>The Spirit</strong> the 
401                      mask. But that's as far as I was willing to go. Any kind 
402                      of costume would have limited the kinds of stories I could 
403                      do: it would be an inhibiting factor. Later I put the gloves 
404                      on him. Those were the two concessions I made. As far as 
405                      Arnold and Martin were concerned, they were trademarks that 
406                      were necessary to make a marketable character. They were 
407                      pragmatists, not creative men. Martin felt that if editors 
408                      liked it, it was good. Don't make waves. I think Arnold 
409                      and Martin were disappointed because they expected to get 
410                      a costumed character, and they got <em>The Spirit</em>.</p>
411                    <p class="bodytextcentred">* * *</p>
412                    <p>Will Eisner's work on the Spirit was interrupted 
413                      in 1942 when he was drafted into the Army for service in 
414                      World War II. The Army took advantage of his skills as a 
415                      cartoonist, and during the war he was engaged in producing 
416                      posters, illustrations and strips for the education and 
417                      entertainment of the troops.</p>
418                    <p class="nextnav"><a href="2-eisner-and-iger.html"><strong>&lt; 
419                      PREVIOUS</strong></a><strong> | <a href="index.html">INDEX</a> 
420                      | <a href="4-the-post-war-years.html">NEXT &gt;</a></strong></p>
421                    <p class="editions">This article in its unaltered form was 
422                      originally published in <em>The Spirit: The Origin Years</em> 
423                      #1-4 (Kitchen Sink Press, 1992). Text © Tom Heintjes. All 
424                      rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.</p>
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