Imaginary Worlds - The Spirit of Will Eisner

Episode Date: March 9, 2017

Imaginary Worlds goes live in this special presentation from the work x work on air festival. In celebration of Will Eisner's centennial, authors Paul Levitz and Bob Andelman, along with comics publisher Denis Kitchen and MAD Magazine's Al Jaffee discuss at how Eisner redefined comics as an art form, and became the "father of the graphic novel." Then comics historian and author Danny Fingeroth, editor Joan Hilty, and artist Dean Haspiel explore Eisner's legacy today in a live panel discussion.http://willeisnerweek.com/Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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So before we start, I just want to tell you today's episode is going to be pretty different. It was recorded in front of a live audience at the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn as part of the Work by Work on-air festival. It was a really cool experience. I mean, throughout this four-day extravaganza, presenters like me would sit on a couch in a salon in the back of the lobby. I had a microphone, speakers, and a laptop while the audience stood and sat around me. And next to me in these big comfy chairs were my three panelists.

We'll hear from them in a while, but first, I want to play you the presentation I did on Will Eisner, the legendary comics artist who would have been 100 years old this week. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molenski, live at the Wythe Hotel as part of the Work by Work on-air festival. Welcome to everybody here and everyone listening online. So March 6, 2017 is the centennial of Will Eisner. A hundred years ago, the legendary comics writer and artist was born in this neighborhood, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Now Eisner liked to say that he was there when comics were born, but he was being way

too modest. Eisner was there when comics learned to walk. He was there when comics had its bar mitzvah. He was there at comics' wedding. In fact, if you look at every major turning point in the life of comics, Will Eisner played a key role, even though he was an outsider for most of his career. So now Eisner was born in this neighborhood, but his family moved to the Bronx. He went to high school with Bob Kane, the guy who created Batman, or at least took credit for creating Batman, which is a whole other story.

Now Eisner graduated high school in the Great Depression, so he had to grow up fast. At the age of 19, he created his own studio with a guy named Jerry Iger. They were actually in a position to reject Superman when Siegel and Schuster were pitching Superman around town. Now in his defense, Eisner never really cared for those, quote, costumed characters, as they were known back then. But when Superman was a huge hit, every studio in town was under pressure

to have their own costumed character. So Eisner created one, but he did it on his own terms. Will Eisner's The Spirit was a vigilante detective. He wore a mask like Zorro and a fedora, a trench coat and gloves to hide his true identity as Denny Colt, the ex-cop who faked his own death. Now at first The Spirit fell into the typical conventions of the detective genre. Some of the stuff, the early stuff, is dated. In fact the spirit had a sidekick who was black who was a stereotype that we would find fairly offensive today named Ebony White.

And I asked Paul Levitz about that, who wrote a book about Eisner. The probability that he had personal friendship with a person of color in 1941 when he created Ebony is really close to zero. But that changed with World War II. Eisner was sent to Washington to draw manuals for the Pentagon. He comes back having met a much wider variety of people, having experienced other cities, certainly other kinds of social environments. He's probably much better read by the time he comes back. That's a much richer set of paints to make his tapestry with. He also becomes a more confident storyteller. In fact,

after the war, he almost starts to lose interest in his main character, the spirit, and becomes really interested in the poor guys that the spirit is trying to save. And sometimes the spirit doesn't save them. Eisner was not trying to emulate Batman at this point. He wanted to be O. Henry, and he could experiment with the format because the spirit came embedded in newspapers that people were already going to buy. Eisner owned the rights to his own character,

which was practically unheard of, so he didn't have to answer to anyone. Will was to comics what Orson Welles was to early movies. That is Bob Andelman, who also wrote a book about Eisner. He captured shadow and light. The angles that he took on things were different. The spirit, the logo on the front of every spirit comic was always different. It had a different look every single week.

I composed the page as a single unit itself, almost like music. And this is Will Eisner himself from a 1987 documentary. I want to convey tears, I want to convey anger, I want to convey the subtleties that people who write with words only are able to convey more easily.

Eisner's bullpen was a rotating who's who of artists, from Jack Kirby to Jules Feiffer. One of his early employees was Al Jaffe, who went on to create the fold-ins in the back of Mad Magazine. Remember those? Jaffe is still drawing for Mad. He is 96 years old this month, and he just doesn't work on deadline anymore.

I take as much time as is needed. Social security helps me get through. Jaffe still remembers the first day he went to Eisner's studio, which was in a fancy residential building in Midtown. Now, Jaffe came from the same kind of neighborhood as Eisner, so he saw Eisner as the kid who had made it. You know, I felt like a big shot when I walked into that place, you know. It was great to come out of the slum areas of the Bronx. Jaffe got the job by pitching an idea

about a pathetic superhero called Inferior Man, but Jaffe struggled to flesh out the story, and he wasn't impressing his boss. His mind was working at a mile a minute. Will would sit down with me and he'd say, oh, I've got a great idea for Inferior Man. Inferior Man is called in because someone has stolen the Brooklyn Bridge. And you have to work out how this is an optical illusion. And he was throwing out a lot of scientific gobbledygook at me. And it was all very clever. And I did it, but I don't think that I did it successfully because if Will did this, it probably would have been terrific. Now Eisner had one ambition. He wanted comics to be taken seriously. Here he is again from that 1980s documentary.

I've always been annoyed from the very first day of my involvement in comics at the use of the word comics. Comics is a misnomer. Comics should not be comical. It should not be necessarily funny, as in the case of funny papers. This is a valid medium of expression, equal in respectability, if you will, to words without pictures or to film. But comics were not getting that kind of respect, and Paul Levitt says by 1951, Eisner was feeling burnt out. He gives up the spirit right at the point

where comics in general are being pounded, the moral crisis of comics are causing all the juvenile delinquency of America. He was also married for a couple of years at that point with a father-in-law who still was asking him if he was going to get a real job one of these days. So Eisner closed the studio, became a businessman drawing educational comics for the military, and eventually started teaching. If his life for a movie would fade to black now,

the scrappy kid from the tenements had been transformed into the quintessential suburban family man of the 1950s. The screen would go dark for a few moments and then we'd see the words 20 years later. Now imagine it's 1971. We're at one of the first comic cons ever in New York. A long-haired hippie named Dennis Kitchen is looking through a box of old comics when a French historian approaches him and says, And he said, Mr. Will Eisner, he is looking for you. And I assured him he was mistaken and he assured me he was not. So who is Dennis Kitchen at this point? He was running Kitchen Sink Press. They published underground artists like Art Crum and Art Spiegelman.

The only place they could distribute their work back then was in head shops, which if you don't know is slang for bong paraphernalia stores. So Kitchen followed the Frenchman all the way up to a private suite, and there was the legend himself, Will Eisner. I saw the opportunity, I thought maybe the only opportunity to ever talk to Will, and so I tried to get a word in edgewise and ask him about the old days but he made very short shrift of that and he really was interested in what our mode of distribution was, the fact that artists received royalties not flat rates, the fact that our artists retained

their copyright and kept the original art. These are all very radical notions to a guy who had come up through a very different kind of business model. At this point, Kitchen realizes that Eisner has never read an underground comic. He's only heard about them. So they went down to the convention floor. And I was going to selectively pick something out, but Will grabbed one at random, which was an unfortunate choice from my perspective. I think it was zap number two, maybe. I know he opened it up and there was an S. Clay Wilson page. And he looked at it and he blanched and he put it down. And he said something

like, oh, dear, oh, my. And I realized then we had a generational moment. I asked Dennis Kitchen if you could describe that comic in Will Eisner's hands. Yeah, as I recall, it was two pirates. And one pirate literally takes a sword and sliced the penis off another pirate, put a fork in it, and started to eat it. And he said, the tip tastes best. And I thought, well, it's probably the last time I ever see or speak to Will Eisner again. But I had his business card, and I followed up. And I said, look, what you picked out was,

you know, an example of how outrageous an underground can be. But I said, it's not necessarily typical. So I said, here's a half a dozen or so that you might enjoy more. And it turned out he did. Now, this is fascinating to me because a lot of guys of Eisner's generation felt alienated by the counterculture, but he was endlessly curious. So Kitchen invited him to join Kitchen Sink Press. This means the spirit, which used to come embedded in major newspapers around the country, would be distributed in bong shops. Eisner's all for it. The hippies at the head shops were a little more skeptical.

A lot of the people behind the counter who were ordering these things would scratch their head and say, what the hell is this? This isn't hipping with it. And I would just have to say, look, why don't you read it? It's great stuff. But Kitten didn't know that something else was fueling Eisner's return to comics. A few years beforehand, Will and his wife Anne had suffered a terrible loss. Their teenage daughter Alice had died of leukemia. They had two children, and the daughter suddenly died and then the son who

was slightly older became schizophrenic and they effectively lost him as well. He was estranged from them for many years and so when you have two children and suddenly you have no children that's tough for any parent to first of all survive and then to be able to easily talk about. any parent to first of all survive and then to be able to easily talk about. Bob Endelman says at first the Eisners didn't want to talk about it. Over time, Will and Ann just started putting away all the pictures of their children. So people who met them after this time, some of them never even knew that they had children. But the best way for Eisner to process his grief was through art.

He began drawing a series of short stories called A Contract with God. They all took place in the same 1930s tenement building, which was very similar to the one that Eisner grew up in. But this was not sepia-toned nostalgia. It was dark. The first story was about a rabbi who tried to be a good man

because he thought he had a contract with God. But when his daughter died, the rabbi fell apart and became a very cynical businessman. Paul Levitz was one of those friends who didn't know the true story behind a contract with God and wouldn't for many years. A contract is an absolutely different book when you know about Alice's story than it is if you don't. But Eisner was on a mission to have his new work distributed like a novel. Again, here's Dennis Kitchen. And he apologized for not offering it to me. He said, at the time I was in Wisconsin, central Wisconsin, my address was number two Swamp Road. And he said to me, Dennis, this is a book that needs a Park Avenue address,

not a Swamp Road address. When Eisner pitched the book to publishers in Manhattan, he described it using a relatively obscure term. He sold it as a, quote, graphic novel. When the book came out in 1978, Eisner was so excited he went to this fancy bookstore just to see it on the shelves. Again, here's Bob Andelman.

They can't find it. And they said, well, maybe it's in this section. Maybe it's in that section. Maybe it... Well, it's turned out it was nowhere because they couldn't figure out... It's comics, but it's not comics. And there's a little nudity in it, so they can't put it with the Beatle Bailey. And it's religious, but it's not religious.

And ultimately, they just put it in the back. But it wasn't ignored. Certainly not by comic book writers like Paul Levitz, who would eventually become president of DC Comics. And there's a young generation of creators who look at it because it's Will Eisner. He's one of the greats of the field. Eisner's doing this? This is an old person. The book didn't sell any significant numbers, but the people that it

touched, the Frank Millers and Neil Gaimans and Alan Moores, who would go on to be the next generation of driving forces in comics in many ways, it had a very powerful effect on it. In fact, Alan Moore, who wrote Watchmen and V for Vendetta, among many other great books, said, Eisner is the single person most responsible for giving comics its brains. Now, I said at the beginning that Eisner was there at every major turning point in the life of comics.

He was also literally there on stage at the Eisner Awards, the industry's highest honor, meeting the rising stars and encouraging them to experiment as much as possible. By the time he died in 2005, Will Eisner had produced more than a dozen graphic novels since A Contract with God had come out. What is fatherhood? with God had come out. What is fatherhood? It's partly the biological act, but an awful lot of it is helping the kid grow up. And I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone with a larger contribution to the growing up of the graphic novel, defining the aspirations of it, than Will. He missed, by an instant, the full respectability.

He dies just at the moment that we get the New York Times bestseller list of graphic books, that we get graphic novels reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, the MacArthur Awards that now have been won by a handful of cartoonists. But he gets us to the promised land, and he can see it's there. He knows what it is. He'd get a kick out of a lot of what's going on. In a moment, my expert panel discusses the impact that Will Eisner has had on the comic book industry and even the way that artists draw now. Last month, I told you about the hashtag Tripod, which is a campaign to raise awareness of podcasts in general.

Now, I want to tell you about a podcast that you should try, Gastropod. It's a show about food in the same way that this show is about sci-fi and fantasy. In other words, it's about a lot more. The two hosts, Cynthia Graber and Nikki Twilley, call on the expertise of scientists, historians, and chefs, but also agricultural detectives and former sex shop managers. They explore things like whether adding salt to your food is really going to kill you and the science behind how bubbles get into seltzer.

New episodes are served up every other week. You can subscribe to Gastropod on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's get back to my live show, the Work by Work Festival. So after the presentation, I welcome my panelists. Danny Fingeroth is a former writer and editor for Marvel Comics. He writes a lot about comics from a psychological and sociological perspective. He also runs Will Eisner Week every March. This year is a big one. Joan Hilty is a writer, artist, and former editor at DC Comics. She's now a comics editor at Nickelodeon and runs a production company called Page Turner.

And finally, Dean Haspiel is a comic book artist who's worked with indies and big publishing houses. And he also self-publishes a comic about a reluctant Brooklyn superhero called The Red Hook. So let's start where we left off. What would Eisner think of graphic novels today? Would he be thrilled, or would he say, God, we have so much further still to go?

I mean, I think that, you know, I hate speaking for someone else, especially when they're not around. Go ahead. But I'll do it anyway. Are you kidding me? He would love this. Now, if part of what his mantra was to take it seriously,

yes, comics are being taken seriously. And so he won that battle. I did get to meet him once at the Small Press Expo in the late 90s, early 2000s. And Diana Schutz, who's an editor at Dark Horse Comics, was working with him and knew him. And she was targeting certain artists. And she brought him over to me. And I was, like, in shock. Here's a hero, right?

Here's a comic's god, as it were. And he's flipping through a comic I had done back then, and he looks a few pages, he looks at me, and he pumps his fist, and he says, kid, you're the future of comics. And I sat there, like gobsmacked and in awe, with this burden, you know? And then I said, thank you very much. And then like literally five minutes later, down another row, I heard, you know, in the background, kid, you're the future of comics.

But that's what was great about Will Eisner was his encouragement of the form and just getting people to continue doing this thing that we do. Where do you see Eisner's visual style influence today in terms of either the staging, the lighting, his incredibly expressive style of drawing? It's so much a part of comics vocabulary. People don't even know.

It's like Eisner and Kirby, whose centennial is also this year. They invented the language of comics. And with Eisner, he did it at least twice, you know, with the spirit, kind of using a cinematic Orson Welles, German expressionistic kind of very dramatic thing. And then with the later graphic novels with kind of almost sitting the camera

in the fourth row of the orchestra and shooting directly. So I think, you know, he's's one of the maybe five or six figures that even if you've never read Eisner, you're influenced by Eisner. Somebody once asked me, what did you get from working with Harvey Pekar in American Splendor and the Graffinal?

And I had to think about that a lot, and I realized, oh, it's his ability to observe. And I feel like Eisner not only had the ability I had to think about that a lot and I realized, oh, it's his ability to observe. And I feel like Eisner not only had the ability to observe and convey observation, but more importantly, human behavior. You know, a lot of comic books are just, you know, action or point A to point B, but he would stop and cinematically convey with certain kind of pacing human behavior, the body kind of crunching up or feeling. He could show feelings. But also the other thing I got from him was how his font,

I call it, his kind of lettering style, especially titles like The Spirit, would become landscapes. They would carve out mazes in the city. And then ultimately the city was also a character in a lot of his stories and I got that from him yeah and I fundamentally agree with both of you in that when I think about his influence I don't think about people working in his style so much as it's sort of

like that Norman Rockwell painting family tree remember the famous one where it's a painting of a family tree and Rockwell very famously used the same model for either the male or the female ancestor throughout the entire, and that's sort of how Eisner's legacy has worked, is that you don't necessarily see that people are influenced by his style so much as, you know, his vocabulary became theirs. So I think of, you know, when I think of the visual style, I guess I think of the flowing layouts and the ink work of somebody like Jillian Tamaki or Craig Thompson. But I also think of the

tendency to create like ethnic, like culturally ethnic urban worlds, like the worlds of Hoppers and Palomar by the Hernandez brothers in Love and Rockets, or Ben Kachor's comics about the urban landscape. Like you said, Eisner believed in making the city a character, and he believed in, you know, he was a product of his time. His cast themselves weren't so diverse but he you know he created cities that were born of those you know immigrant Irish and Jewish communities and people I think have been inspired by that however indirectly. And his comics

showed time and celebrated decay and history you know when you look at his work. Well his central theme that he always talked about was survival on whatever level. And that informed everything. You know, he came up very poor and then in the Depression. And I think everything that was around him

was about how do you survive economic hard times? How do you survive a world war? How do you survive economic hard times? How do you survive a world war? How do you survive being in a medium that's attacked and marginalized and demeaned? But I mean... And also dysfunctional families, too. I mean, there's in contact with God. I mean, that was the biggest surprise for me.

I hadn't read it in a long time, and I reread it. And just how dark those family dynamics are. And just like, how do you emotionally survive poverty? Well, you know, poverty? Well, you know, one of my favorite Will anecdotes is in an article, I think the author David Haydu is interviewing Will and they went to Barnes and Noble and Haydu says to Will, look,

there's a Will Eisner, not only is there a graphic novel section, but in the graphic novel section, there's a Will Eisner section. Isn't that incredible? And Will goes, yeah, it's okay. But I should be over there in literature with Roth and Malamud. Yeah.

You know, so that was his aspiration. I think he achieved it. Yeah, and it's funny what you're saying, too, about body language. Because ever since I've been working on this piece and reading so much of him, I feel like I'm starting to notice Eisner characters on the street. That guy's got a story just from his body language, the way he holds his clothes hanging off of him. I think another thing that Eisner got criticized for,

which I am attracted to and connects with me, is his sentimentality. He was very sentimental, even when things were sad. It's sentimental, but it gets dark. I didn't know this until just now about his kids. That's news to me. So many other things make sense

suddenly now because of that. And his people did act. They were dramatic. You saw every line of their face and when you talk about body language, this is almost, to me, a way in which he critiqued traditional panel layouts. You sometimes felt like his characters were hunching, trying to fit themselves within panel layouts.

They would literally bend over trying to stay within the panel, and their energy was just coming off the page. They couldn't actually do it. He also seems to me broke the whole idea of the panel. I mean, there's the one Spirit comic from the 40s where it's sort of like the apartment building and you sort of follow all the characters as they're going from the top floor to the bottom floor

and I thought, I saw Chris Ware do that like 10 years ago and I thought that was revolutionary. Well, for Will, the Spirit was a big opportunity to break out of the monthly comic book ghetto theater there's a lot of theater in his well his father his father was a scene designer in the yiddish theater and then in catholic churches too somehow i'm not sure how that i think i think he had to do it to

survive that's so interesting um i always love that i also love this quote of alan moore's that will eisner gave comics its brains so what do you think that means in terms of his storytelling or or is did was it the kind of themes that he felt like comics could grapple with when I think of his not the brain I think he is the heart of comics you know like that's what I feel when I think of Will Eisner is more of the heart than the brain you know but I can understand Alan Moore's iteration of that you know and you know it is still a struggle like we're still not there yet I still have to explain to people all the time why we call them graphic novels when half the time they're non-fiction you know I still have to

you know deal with people who are like I don't understand how I read the words and the pictures together it's just not for everybody and it's it's still a struggle in that way but he sort of creates our floor uh let's open this up for questions. Does anyone here have questions for our panelists? Okay. Since we're sitting here in Williamsburg, you said that he was from Williamsburg.

I was wondering if there's any relationship between the geographic location and the style and the stories. Is he, though? I was looking at you when he said Williamsburg. It's ambiguous. He grew up in the Bronx, but he was probably born in Brooklyn.

That's pretty... I don't know if we know that it was Williamsburg specifically. I think I'd read that he thought he was born in Williamsburg, but he was not entirely sure. Well, again, those are the days when you would get free rent, so you'd live in a place until the free rent was up, and then you'd move to the next place.

Wait, wait, wait. Time out. What? Those were the days of free rent? Well, free, like two months free rent. A landlord would give free rent. When the subways were first built and people would come out to crazy places like Brooklyn and the Bronx, you would get a free month or two rent as a bribe to move into a place. I mean, I get it now, but that's kind of awesome. Well, I don't think it was a preferred way to live. I think, you know, oh, the free rent is up.

You live out of a bag at that point. I mean, that's the era of like a tree grows in Brooklyn. Right. You know, where, yeah, it's not a... And I mean, I really recommend, like, it can be tricky to corral and look at all the 70s stuff he did, but the detail of the streets and the buildings, especially because he did a lot of little short form things about city. New York, New York. Right. He did the building.

He did city people notebook. And they were short stories. And they would take place like, you know, he would tell the short story of a street. He would tell the short story of an interaction on the subway. tell the short story of a street. He would tell the short story of an interaction on the subway, and they are a time capsule of pretty much New York, urban New York, and any borough, just these gorgeous buildings. He drew the old elevated line beautifully, the old subways with the actual straps, interiors of buildings with the original pressed tin ceilings. I mean, the level of detail is phenomenal. Almost like an archivist. I mean,

these beautiful vignettes. And I asked Al Jaffe, too, about that. The city of the spirit, I was asking him, did it feel like the Bronx? Did it feel like Manhattan to you? And he just said, meh, it just felt like some mythical city place. But I think that very much changed as he got

older and really wanted to talk about his childhood. Well, I think there are certain spirit stories. There's a spirit story, 10 minutes, and a story called Heat, which is about the spirit is injured and it's the middle of July and he's lying, dying in an alley

between Bronx tenements and kids are playing stickball and jump rope. Those are real precursors to Contract with God and the name of the game and to The Heart of the Storm, which to me The Heart of the Storm is like the best of the graphic novels. That's a really powerful memoir. The spirit, could it sometimes get generic? And he did have assistants working with him,

so maybe they didn't always convey the heart and soul he did, but he was pretty much a love, very often love letters to New York. Yeah. And also too, I love the Spirit comics when he started working with Dennis Kitchen and the Spirit comes back in the early 70s. And he still looks the same

in the way that Don Draper at the end of Mad Men looks exactly like he did the beginning of Mad Men. But I mean, the world is like, he is absolutely observing. I mean, you just suddenly felt like you just fell into a den of hippies, of dirty hippie cartoonists. And there's a great, that first cover is where they're all drawing and they're excited to curse.

They've got like beards and tons of hair. And then the old police commissioner, Dolan, says like, I'm going to arrest them all, spirit. And spirit goes, for what? That's like a great kind of cross-generational moment well i think i mean i think you know i mean obviously will had you know he had the tragic tales of his children but i think he and kirby and stan lee and a lot of those i think a lot of them were almost trying to work through their relationships with their baby boom generation children and i

mean i think we again you, not to beat a dead horse, but I think we have to give him a lot of credit for rising above what he came from, which was a work for a higher industry where, frankly, there wasn't necessarily always a heavy level of artistic detail when you were grinding out either Superman

or Wonder Man or all due respect, early Batman and Wonder Woman was not all that detail-oriented. Everything looked very generic because you were just trying to bang it out, and he really rose above that. A, and B, if there is one industry

that is guilty of, as we age, we get bitchier and bitchier about how things used to be like this. Comics is so guilty of that. The longer we're in it. And he was never like that. He was never like, it's not like it used to be. These kids today, he was just never like that.

Look at how he treated Dennis Kitchen. I mean, if you're asking what's his biggest influence, it's not outside of comics necessarily, although omnisciently it may be through the executives that take over the Hollywood desks and green light stories these days. He might be in that lineup of creators that we all dig or dug, but it's inside the industry. It encourages a guy like me to think outside of the work for hire box and encourages a

cat like me who was reading Harvey Pekar, but also Will Eisner and Chester Brown and whoever, you know, crumb and so on and so forth to make your own comics and, and to be innovative at 60, you know, like I'm going to be 50 in May. I hope I'm just starting,

you know, I'm just starting right now. You know, I've been doing this for many years. I plan to keep moving forward and keep pushing because the examples of Will, like Will Eisner. Yeah. And I feel like in some way, artistic integrity is partially his legacy for me.

I mean, just in terms of, and I think that's probably why these guys like Art Spielman and Art Crum were able to look at him and what he did in the 40s and just say like, I see what you were doing. That was amazing. You were doing your own thing. You own your own work.

And he looks at them and says, I see what you're doing too. And I think You were doing your own thing. You own your own work. And he looks at them and says, I see what you're doing too. And I think that he was a real artist's artist in that sense. I think he made a simple but brilliant realization, which was, okay, kids liked comics in the 40s and 50s. Those same people are now adults. They are literate in how to read comics and comics grammar and syntax

maybe they'd like something more mature told in that same medium now that seems obvious it wasn't so obvious then and what a brilliant thing to realize birth a comics reader and keep a comics reader basically I'm getting the

twirling fingers, which means it's time to wrap up. All right. That is it for this week. Thank you everybody for coming here. Thank you for listening. Thank you for having us. Come into the Work by Work on-air festival, a pop-up live streaming radio lounge exploring creativity and storytelling at the White Hotel in Brooklyn.

Special thanks to Danny Fingeroff, Jonas Hilty, Dean Haspiel, Paul Levitz, Dennis Kitchen, Bob Antleman, and Al Jaffe. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinski. My website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Thank you guys so much. Thank you, everybody.