THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION THE SPIRIT SECTION Spirit appeared on the cover of the underground comic, Snarf, I believe, and then had the two fifty-cent issues of his own, if memory serves me. By then I had latched onto other Eisner stuff. Bobby’s father worked at the Fort Monmouth army base, so we were privy to Will’s PS Magazine, also, on a regular basis. Something that we saw really early on may have predated all of this—but it wasn’t Eisner. Bobby and I used to go to a flea market, Collingswood Auction, near our homes, near Asbury Park, New Jersey, and every Friday night they had a backdate magazine stand there, and this guy would come in from New York with boxes and boxes full of old, old comic books, and because they were old, he sold them for a nickel apiece.
the convention in—I want to say ’68, but I don’t have the con booklets in front of me—where Eisner made an appearance. I don’t know that it was the first big con that he did, which I think came later, but at one of those conventions when I was in high school I did meet Will just as he was being exposed to this thing called comic book fandom. I had a chance to hear him speak, and to talk to him, and that, to me, was the be-all and end-all, because as I began to go to these conventions, that’s when I began to see The Spirit. That’s when I saw the inserts and expanded my horizons in terms of this character, and began to realize that what Orson Welles and Citizen Kane are to cinema, that is what Will Eisner and The Spirit are to comics.
DF: Who would want old comic books? MU: Right. And it was in that batch, for five cents, probably sometime around maybe 7th grade, that I got an IW or a Super reprint titled Daring Adventures with the Spirit in it. It was definitely not Eisner, but that might have been my first, or one of my real early, looks at the Spirit as a character.
DF: Did you have a friendship with him then? MU: I just sort of met him. We didn’t really develop a relationship until about 1994, when I got a call from Will. He indicated to me that Steven Spielberg’s people and some other people in Hollywood had contacted him about the possibility of doing The Spirit as a movie. And, being the businessDF: The Feiffer book came out in man that he was—and he was ’65, and it was definitely my first a great businessman—he did a awareness of the character. lot of investigating, and spoke to MU: Well, no matter which ones a lot of people, and he said may have been in what order, it everywhere he spoke to people, was certainly the Feiffer book my name kept coming up. And with the color insert that was he said, “I know you went the one that had the impact. through hell and it took you ten years to bring a dark and serious DF: When did you meet Will? version of Batman to the screen the way Bob Kane and Bill MU: I met Will when I was a Will Eisner firmly embraced the independent spirit teenager. As you know, I was at Finger and the gang had intend(pun intended) of the underground comix, licensing ed him to be, as this creature of the very, very first comic book Denis Kitchen to reprint some Spirit stories in 1972’s convention ever held, which the night stalking criminals from Snarf. Eisner also provided this new, then-topical cover to the issue. [© 2009 Will Eisner Studios, Inc.] the shadows. And everyone tells was in New York City, July, me you love comics, you know 1964. Bobby Klein and I went comics, this is your passion. Is this something you there. My parents took us. It was at a fleabag hotel on might be interested in?” I said, “Yeah!” So my business the Bowery called the Broadway Central—which later partner Ben Melniker and I met with Will at the collapsed on itself! My mother was appalled. We had Harvard Club on 44th Street shortly thereafter, and we to step over unconscious drunks in the hallway in order to check in. There were roaches on the wall. had a wonderful meeting of the minds. I think Will realized at that point the unbridled love I had for comics, and the passion I had for The Spirit, and my DF: That was probably better than conscious drunks. understanding of Will’s work on The Spirit. And slowly, MU: [laughs] Sure. That was the first convention, there over a period of time, he and Ben worked out the were 200 of us there. A few years later, I think it was MICHAEL USLAN | 7