Will Eisner’s Quarterly (1983) #1-8 by Will Eisner

Kitchen Sink had published The Spirit for a few years, but in 1981 the Eisner side of the business really took off — and became the main part of the business. Of the 20 new titles Kitchen released between 1981 and 1986, 12 of them were Eisner titles. (Depending on how you count.) Now, some older titles continued to appear (like Gay Comix), but there’s only a handful of them. And Kitchen continued reprinting older Crumb undergrounds, but it’s nevertheless a striking shift.

Looking at the shortboxes of Kitchen stuff I have here, my guesstimate is that the Eisner stuff ended up being about… a quarter? of the total volume of things Kitchen published.

Anyway, the Spirit magazine had been a pleasant mix of random Spirit stories and… well, whatever Eisner wanted to do. So you got illustrations, serialisations of new work, and whatever. It worked quite well, I thought. But The Spirit was relaunched as a comic book sized bi-monthly (later monthly) 32 page book, with no room for the other Eisner stuff, so Kitchen created this book to carry on the er spirit of the Spirit magazine.

So we get a serialisation of the current Eisner thing (in this case A Life Force, which ran for six of the Quarterly issues). (I’m not re-reading this bit now, because I’ll be covering A Life Force when I get to that as a collected book.)

And then we get reprints of the (almost) complete 16 page Spirit newspaper inserts, starting with the first one, and continuing chronologically. So not only The Spirit…

… but also the other features, like Mr. Mystic.

And then the third thing in each issue is the “Shop Talk” thing, where Eisner interviews some other artist.

It’s a pretty good package? But… while the Spirit magazine had all these random things, we get exactly these three things, and only these three things, for the first few issues. So it’s more, dependable, mature, and feels a bit staid.

And I guess it didn’t sell all that well, because with the fourth issue, the magazine goes squarebound, and ups the price to a then-scandalous $6. Knowing how stingy comics people are, this seems like quite a gamble.

But the increased page count allow them to run features like this, where Cat Yronwode has a peek at the business correspondence between Eisner and Busy Arnolds, and it’s quite entertaining (and interesting).

However, by the second instalment, I was really starting to fade. Too many details and too many editors complaining about the strip being too anti-Nazi.

The concluding bits about Bob Powell are interesting, though.

A Life Force concludes, so we get a number of shorter (I mean, less than 30 pages) things. Nice artwork, eh?

And the story seems like it’s going to be all pathos and stuff, but it’s got an amusing twist ending. Well, Eisner usually does that, with varying degrees of success, I guess.

Another format change! Shocker: People weren’t up to paying $6 for a quarterly magazine after all, so it moves to a slimmed-down stapled format again. I find it interesting that Kitchen namechecks Love and Rockets as the model for the format…

So we get a number of shorter, self-contained stories in the two remaining issues.

Most of them are surprisingly entertaining.

But they can’t all be winners.

No, even dropping the price to $2 wasn’t enough. From now on, Eisner’s work is going to be dropped as graphic novels only, without serialisation.

Rounding out the series, we get an amusing thing about a geriatric hit man…

… and a sequel to Kafka’s The Trial that’s… not as successful.

Bill Sherman writes in The Comics Journal #92, page 66:

I write this, however, with a profound
sense of depression about Quarterly’s
chances of finding and keeping a large
enough audience willing to follow the art-
ist. Childishness definitely outsells
everything else; witness mainstream com-
ics’ -biggest titles, Quarterly may hope to
hook part of that audience with its token
color section (one Spirit and one Mr. Mystic
but it hopes to hold them with the
work of an unashamedly maturer artist. Is
there a comics • shop audience capable of
supporting sequels to the rapidly remain.
dered A Contract With God? The prospect
looks grim.
I hope I’m being needlessly pessimistic
here because, on the basis of Quarterly’s
premiere, Eisner appears to have finally
found a means of tempering both the melo-
dramatic strain that marred Contract’s
tempts at ’30s naturalism and the free-
floating pretentiousness of his short city
pieces in Spirit Magazthe. With “A Life
Force,” Eisner gives us a seriesof fine-tuned
interlocking character studies set in Con-
tract’s Depression milieu, pieces that com-
bine Eisner’s Characteristic comic book art
style with a range of physical and verbal
expressiveness that humanizes his subjects
beyond the traditional caricature.

Dale Luciano writes in The Comics Journal #89, page 43:

[…]

The material often appears banal—a key
scene in this regard is the carpenter’s
philosophical dialogue with a cockroach in
an alleyway—but then, the banality of
these people’s lives is both Eisner’s subject
and the quality he values most about them.
It’s worth noting that the carpenter, in the
fashion of an inarticulate man musing over
the cruel vagaries of fate, reaches no cone
clusion and says nothing profound. And
the gesture of the man’s saving the roach’s
life, while a bit florid, has a psychological
truth to it. He has after all, established an
odd, momentary union with the insect and
quite naturally—in terms of his attention
and frame of mind—doesn’t want to see the
creature pointlessly destroyed. An instant
later, the union is broken, and he walks
away, utterly unconcerned with its subse-
quent fate. (Eisner, however, stays with the
roach for a few panels, making a point
simply and well, before similarly abandon-
ing his own interest in the roach.)
You either respond to ‘ ‘A Life Force” or
you don’t: it is what it is. I found it full of
intricately wrought moments that gave me
pleasure.
The “Shop Talk”- in Will Eisner’s
Quarterly # I is with the artist Neal Adams.
It’s a good one. Eisner’s interviewing
method is an appealingly informal give-
and-take with his subject. And while
Adams has granted extensive interviews
elsewhere, Eisner isn’t terribly familiar
with his career. (Hearing mention of
Adams and Denny O’Neil’s Green
Lantern/Green Arrow series, Eisner, with
disarming innocence, says, “l, uh, never
read any of those, so… Adams is thus
placed in the position of being asked to
account for his own involvement with and
impact on comics, a task he manages with
clarity and a measure of humility. Eisner’s
Shop Talks never get too philosophical
and try to avoid controversy; the aim is to
have artists talk about the nuts-and-bolts
of their craft. The occasional problem with
this approach is accurately suggested by
Adams who, when asked to talk about his
working methods, responds with “‘Don’t
you find that sort of stuff… boring
(laughs)?” The Eisner-Adams meeting pr0-
duces an informative exchange, however,
and some genuinely illuminating samples
from Adams’s portfolio accompany the
text.

This is the sixty-seventh post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

The Outer Space Spirit: 1952 (1983) by Will Eisner, Jules Feiffer and Wallace Wood

Catherine Yronwode explains in the introduction how this weird artefact came to be. Lemme recap in a totally inaccurate way: Eisner didn’t want to do The Spirit any more, so he tried to get Wally Wood to do it instead.

Wally Wood on a seven page weekly feature.

Hilarity ensued.

But it’s not as if Eisner wasn’t involved — he took the time to change the only of these stories that had any point into something pointless: Feiffer had written, and Wood had illustrated, a story about Hitler going to the Moon and ranting about jews and stuff, and Eisner retouched/relettered it to be about some unknown South American dictator, rendering the story into a big non sequitur.

We get Feiffer’s storyboards to several of the stories, which is nice, so we can compare with Wood’s artwork. And…

Yowza! The first couple of er “stories”, I mean episodes, look like prime Wood. So inhuman, so shiny and attractive.

But it soon becomes apparent that there’s no there there. Feiffer hated the idea of The Spirit in Space, so he… didn’t really write much for Wood to illustrate.

One of the charming things about The Spirit is how Eisner packed a whole little melodrama into every seven page story. If you’re charitable, you could say that Feiffer was going for a decompressed storytelling method, but the result here is that basically nothing of interest happens in each episode.

If I were to recap the storyline over these ten episodes, I’d say… The Spirit goes to the Moon with some convicts, and nothing happens there, and then they come back. The end.

Wood was famously slow as an artist, so the last half of the episodes only have a few Wood pages, and then they either ran re-runs of older Spirit strips to pad things out, or Eisner stopped by to draw some “meanwhile, back at Earth” pages, in while… nothing of interest happens either.

Reading this … is “unmitigated crap” too harsh? … now, I’m not surprised, at all, that most of the few remaining newspapers where this shit (oops!) ran dropped the feature. There were three more scripts in the pipeline when Eisner cancelled The Spirit belatedly, and this book prints those, too.

As a book, this is an excellent production: It’s informative, with great reproduction, and includes all these interesting bits about this period. Editor Yronwode has done a wonderful job.

It’s too bad the source material is basically… nothing.

Except for some awesome Wood artwork.

Sure:

With Wood he creates an extraordinarily successful approximation of isolation and danger in a remoter location than any on Earth, while Wood provides realism, incredible looking equipment and incredible looking lunar landscapes.

Mm-hm:

Tense, suspenseful, dark and fearsomely compelling, these are the stories that killed off the Spirit for nearly two decades, but today they stand as a mini-masterpiece of modern comics storytelling that was quite simply, too far advanced for its audience.

Sure. Sure.

This is the sixty-sixth post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

Signal from Space (1983) by Will Eisner

I bought this book when I was about fifteen, I guess? It sort of occupied a special place amongst my comics — I would look at it sometimes, but I don’t think I read it more than once. I kind of admired it? But… I didn’t really like it.

And reading it now, I can totally understand why.

This is a “satire” about what would happen if intelligent life were to be discovered on another planet. So lots of venal scheming and etc.

It was originally serialised in the Spirit magazine (but in black and white). It’s been coloured for this version, and it looks really good. (It’s printed in Italy.)

And it’s not that it’s even unrealistic how stupid everything is — we know from the recent years that our branes don’t work that well — but it’s just so choppily told. There’s about two dozen characters, and Eisner is a veteran in getting to plot points very, er, efficiently. (Doing hundreds of seven page stories must be good training.)

Of all the things that don’t make sense, the bit about this guy dying and therefore splicing his cells with a plant… makes the least sense. I mean…

Did I mention this is a satire? Oh, how satirical and droll.

Reading these 130 pages feel like reading the synopsis of three seasons of a New Era of Quality TV series.

And I mean that in the worst way possible.

On the other hand, the artwork’s quite nice.

Dale Luciano writes in The Comics Journal #89, page 41:

Eisner has created an epic
nightmare fable that documents human-
kind’s response to a signal from space that
affirms the presence of intelligent life on
another planet. The dim vision of the
human race in Signal From Space grows out
of Eisner’s determinedly grim assessment of
how our world and its leaders might cope
with such an epoch-making development.
For all its macabre and caricatural aspects,
however, Signal From Space raises no better
question than whether its cynicism, which
is overpowering at times, isn’t in fact a form
Of clear-eyed realism. Signal From Space is
not ideological storytelling so much as it is
a drama about ideologies and how people
sacrifice their humanity at the altar of the
hopes, promise, and dreams that are the
raw stuff of ideologies. If Signal From Space
lacks a certain human resonance, it’s at
least partly because the sapping of redeem-
ing, sympathetic qualities from the central
characters as they compromise away their
humanity is a key focus of Eisner’s theme.

[…]

I reviewed the Life On Another Planet at
some length in the Journal and so won’t
reiterate my earlier thoughts here. I will
note that those who perceived my review
as schizoid were quite accurate, This is a
major piece of work from one of the
medium’s acclaimed masters: he has given
us a startlingly vivid and complete
speculative vision of a possible future,
based on how he understands and imagines
our world. At the same time, there are,
think, grievous flaws in the very idea of the
work—in the conception of the story, , in
how the characters have been worked out,
in the very thought behind much Of the
work—that inhibit unqualified praise of
the piece as a work of art. So I’m Of two
minds about Signal From Space. It’s heroic,
daring, and moving, but it’s also, at inter-
vals, shallow, banal, and tiresome. NO neat
capsule judgments here, folks, just
unresolved feelings about work from a
master that deserves to be read and argued
about.

[…]

The coloring is extraordinarily well-
managed—Eisner and Andre LeBlanc did
the coloring themselves—but the fact of
color adds an elements of artifice and
refinement that, for me, intrudes upon the
pristine reality of the artist’s original black
and white images. What so impressed me in
the black and white installments—the
sense Of observing a remarkable stylist
reduce his means to the near-elemental in
an effort to distill the raw, primal truth of
his imaginings—is oddly muted by the
meticulous and subtle artistry of the
washes. Mine is undoubtedly a minority
view, and an impractical one; I’m not
unmindful •that color will help sell this
book, but Life On Another Planet has a
violence that disturbed me more profound-
ly in its earlier incarnation.
Eisner has. redrawn and retouched the
first two chapters from their original
appearance in The Spirit Magazine (where
they appeared in an ill-advised sideways
format with pages about the size of a small
paperback book). Quite a few pages have
been completely redrawn. Eisner’s deft
reworking of the material is a matter Of
opening up some of the cramped panels to
suit the larger scale of the book format
—adding a panel here, refashioning a back.
ground or expanding the size of an image
there. In the book’s first chapter, Eisner
has substantially redrawn the character of
Bludd. Throughout much Of the original
opening chapter, Bludd is very sketchily
rendered, as though Eisner were rushed or
careless or, more likely, hadn’t quite settled
on a “look” for the character. In the revised
version, Eisner has “drawn” a whole Com-
plex Of attitudes and values into Bludd,
clarifying what kind Of man he is on his ini-
tial appearance. There are other small
changes of nuance (such as the new, malign
expression on Grebe’s face On page 36) that
provide intriguing glimpses into Eisner’s
methods. Those with a serious interest in
Eisner will want to note the changes he has
made, particularly those in the first
chapter.

Amazing Heroes #104, page 66:

But Eisner has an inexhaustible
bag of tricks that makes every page
of every story visually and narrative-
ly unique. Despite all the experi-
mental hotshot young artists of the
last twenty years, Eisner can still
startle us with a panel layout or a
storytelling trick. But more than
that, .. Eisner uses his bag of tricks
to tell stories of genuine, ,heartfelt
humanity and literary value. It is his
perfect synthesis of startling techni-
que and deep human reality that
makes “Life on Another Planet” the
artistic summit of comic book
science fiction.

The Comics Journal #100, page 84:

LUCIANO: How is something like Signal
From Space received differently in Europe
than in the United States?
EISNER: Well, Signal From Space is a
socio-political comment wrapped in a spy-
adventure yarn. It deals with an adult
premise in diverse situations. It is
“realistic” science fiction. I believe it has
experienced a good reception in the Euro-
pean marketplace because the European
market represents a more diversified au-
dience than we have in this country. These
seems to be a larger group of adult readers
with the life experience that is capable of
understanding storytelling that relates to
real experience. Here, superheroes still
dominate the output. I’m not dealing with
two mutants killing each other, I’m dealing
with real life, people involved with life
itself. This requires a common experience
between me and the reader. When I write I
intend to share an experience. I’m telling a
Story that deals with an aspect of life. A
case in point is a book I did recently, Life
Force. This is a reportage that deals with
the history of my experience, or experience
that I’ve seen, or felt, or been aware of, dur-
ing the ’30s. It deals with life during 1934.
It’s reportage, in the pure sense. As most
storytelling is.
The point is that, the publishers in
Europe seem to be willing to respond to a
marketplace that accepts the comic-book
nwdium as a valid, legitimate literary form.
A very important thing when you consider
it. It has an effect on the kind of work I’m
doing, and provides me with the market-
place that I’m working for. Here in the
United States, the marketplace is more
severely divided, even though it has a vast
young audience, a preponderance of young
readers whose interests are in fantasy art,
and whose interests are in science fiction,
mutants, for example, that is Teen Titans
and X•Men, things of that sort, and whose
life experience, as readers, is not really con•
ducive to a concern with man against the
system or against life itself. They’re con-
cerned largely with fantasy or escape. Their
interest seems to be largely in the, what I
call sensory experience, and, they are also
influenced, the young readers, largely by
motion pictures, Which have in the past
been influenced by comics. so you have a
kind of dog chewing on a dog’s tail, the
thing is going back and forth. European
readers are terribly interested in New York
life. One of the most successful comic strips
coming out of France right now is done by
this Italian boy named Liberatore, doing
Ranxerox, which is a violent, violent, sex•
laden strip. Beautifully drawn, magnifi-
cently executed. It deals with, realty, punk
life, and, really, very distasteful to adult
readers in this country who are concerned
with that kind of living as being a part of
the inner city in L.A. So we have a differ•
ent kind of interest. Another strip that’s
doing very well in Europe, that originated
in Spain, and originally the first issue was
done by Alex Toth, is a thing called
Torpedo which, fantastically, Concerns
itself with a hitman in the ’30s, a gangster
and bootlegger era, who’s really a terrible
person, a killer, and who is the hero of the
strip. Anti-hero if you will. But there’s a
great interest in inner-city living, and in
the American scene. There still exists in
Europe an interest in the Western scene in
this country, which we no longer have. So
you have really two basically different,
broad markets.

This is the sixty-fifth post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

Fandom Confidential (1982) by Jim Engel and Chuck Fiala

This book reprints these fumetti that ran in The Comics Reader.

The schtick is basically poking light-hearted fun at current (mainstream) comics events.

Sometimes other people drop by for some more action-oriented guest appearances, which helps give the book some variety.

I think they’re pretty accurate in their targets? But it’s not like this is a savage critique of anything. It’s pretty amusing — if you know what they’re talking about, which… I do. I’m so old! If you don’t get the references, then I guess this isn’t for you.

They end the book with a tale called The Obligatory New Pages, which features John Byrne.

Looks accurate.

The Comics Journal #79, page 70:

Fandom Confidential plugs itself accurate-
ly enough as a satirical lampoon of comic
characters and their creators. While there’s
a mostly funny ravaging of Lee and a huge-
ly amusing debunking of Byrne (portraying
himself as a rampant egomaniac), what I
found most appealing and consistently fun.
ny is Engel and Fiala’s ongoing deflation of
the fan mentality’s absurdism. The image
of Engel soberly displaying an autographed
photo Of Stan Lee as evidence of his impec-
cable journalistic qualifications is satire of a
fairly high order, as is the description
throughout of the steady and mind-
sapping abosrption in the lavish, intricate
trivia of doings at Marvel/ DC. The new,
seven-page story has a funny conclusion
based on the premise that a fan who spends
more than five minutes in the same room
with the regal Byrne turns into a grovel-
ing…well, sycophantic gremlin. And for
once, the dialogue has the emphases in all
the right places: “You’re my favorite artist
in the whole world!” Brandishing a copy of
The Art of John Byrne, Engel pleads, “Pleez
could you sign this book? I’ll never sell it, 111
keep it forever, Oh pleeezz??” We may also
credit Engel with delineating the quint-
essential fanzine interview with a degree of
coldblooded accuracy:
ENGEL: And now for this month’s in.
depth interview With none Other than Frank
Frazetta!!
FIALA: Hey, Frank! How do pu do all
that wild stuff?
[Speaking from outside the
panel:] With a brush!
ENGEL: With a brush. Amazing.
What a guy.
And while I rarely laugh out loud while
reading comics, there’s one strip involving
Engel’s dada attempt to pass himself off as
Popeye that had me in mild hysterics for at
least a full minute. Only a couple of the
strips fall flat (in pariicular, I could have
lived without the strip that has Engel/ Fiala
in a fistfight with Buyer’s Guide publisher
Alan Light), and Engel makes such wry, in-
ventive use of this little used form that you
begin to wish the energy and invention
that went into creating these strips had
been channeled in a less cultish direction.
Still, if you’re savvy to the in-jokes and
references, Fandom Confidential is great
fun.

This is the sixty-fourth post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.