Jules Feiffer on how he got started with The Spirit

GROTH: Can you explain how you became associated with Eisner?
FEIFFER: Well, loved The Spirit. I mean, going back to newspaper strips, I loved newspaper strips and ran across The Spirit in a paper called the Parkchester Review, where it was a Sunday supplement. I knew his work from comic books because I liked Hawks of the Seas. I knew his stuff. He was somebody who I could identify under whatever alias he used: Will Rensie or Will K. Maxwell or whatever the hell, there were things in Espionage or Black X. I was just crazy about him. I couldn't believe The Spirit when I found it. I just ate it up. That and, guess, Terry and the Pirates and Li'l Abner were the three strips, and Abbie an' Slats, which Capp wrote, but I didn't know that at the time. Those four were combined, were a series of role models for me. As to what, I'm not sure, but I studied them, studied the way they cropped the panels down, the dialogue, how many panels they would use on a Sunday page. There were other strips I liked, but those were the ones that were masterpieces to me. So, when it came to looking for a job, comic books was the field, because that seemed the most accessible. I had no idea how one got to be an assistant to a daily strip cartoonist. Also, that seemed to be way outside the realm. Comic books were more accessible because they were more raffish, they weren't drawn as well, generally, and it looked like it might be a field to enter before I did what I wanted to do, which was to have a syndicated adventure strip. That's what I thought I would end up doing. So I went to Eisner after a number of experiences--I got to know a few comic book artists before then--and showed him my work, and he thought it was terrible. But he'd just gotten out of the Navy about a year earlier, had organized a group of people to work on The Spirit to revive the strip. Lou Fine had edited it during the war years, and it had pretty much been run into the ground, and he was trying to bring it back. He had Jerry Grandinetti there, and a man named John Spranger there, a lettering man named Sam Rosen. He said I was worth absolutely nothing, but if I wanted to hang out there, and erase pages or do gofer work, that was fine, which I did a few weeks, and then he came upon bad times. I forget what was going on at the time, but he let virtually everyone go, Spranger, I think maybe everyone but Grandinetti. He kept me around for $10 a week, just to fill in, to do blacks and rule borders and things like that. So he had to strip down staff. I was useful just to do all the dirty work that it didn't pay for other people to do. So I did that for a period of time. Then i got promoted to $20 a week and did more of the same. But the main reason he kept me on was because was the only real fan he had. I mean, the others in the office in the early days, Grandinetti, Spranger, would talk about how old-fashioned he was, and would put down the work as terribly dated. I didn't know what the hell they were talking about. I thought this was the most wonderful stuff I had ever seen in my life. And whatever other annoying and wise-guy features I had which pissed Eisner off, he also knew I was a scholar of his work, that I was a groupie. That certainly didn't hurt his feelings. To the others, this was a job, and if they left that, they'd go to another job; this was an obsession to me. At some point, we got into one of our arguments--and we got into lot of them--about his stories. I said that his post-'46 stories weren't really up to his '39, '40, '41 stories. He had heard enough of this, and he said, if you think you can do better, write me a story. So I did. He liked it, and from that point on I was writing a lot of them, or most of them. It's hard for me to remember exactly how that broke down, but I would write them, he would go over them. We'd just go back and forth. We worked well together, and when we didn't, he would win.