The Truth About Will Eisner and Wonderman

I admit that I have little time for checking out what is the latest on the Internet. Therefore my blog is not the place to go to find the latest news. But my attention was recently pointed to a blog post that I thought deserved comment here. The post in question is DC VS VICTOR FOX: The Testimony of Will Eisner in Ken Quattro’s blog, The Comics Detective. Quattro has provided, for the first time every, the actual testimony that Will Eisner gave in court in the case between DC and Fox Comics.

For years Will Eisner has said that he refused submit to Victor Fox’s pressure to say in court that he (Eisner) created Wonderman. Instead, according to Eisner, he testified that Wonderman was based on instructions from Fox. It was a great story of young man standing up for his integrity at the cost of his future business with Victor Fox. Unfortunately the actual trial transcripts shows it is not true.

I am sure we will be hearing a lot about how Will Eisner lied. While the transcripts show he certainly plagiarized himself (that is lied) I do not believe Eisner’s telling of the story years later was a lie. Despite all that has been learned about memory in recent years people still think of memory as like some sort of tape machine. The tape might degrade with time but is otherwise accurate. Therefore if someone tells something about the past that is not true, he must be lying. In reality it turns out that it is surprisingly easy to develop false memories. Even the memories that seem to be accurate are often more correctly said to be based on our previous telling of the story rather than the events themselves. I doubt that Eisner would have repeated his story so often if he had actually lying. Will probably believed it and would have been quite surprised had he been presented with the trial transcripts.

This is the first time I have seen Ken Quattro’s blog. Quattro started it in February but like I said I am not good with keeping up with the Internet. A quick look at earlier posts on the blog indicate it is well worth following. I know I will.

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