Will Eisner (6 page)

“It was the bottom of the barrel,” remembered Bob Fujitani, who spent time at the Eisner & Iger shop. “All of the comics artists wanted to be an illustrator, another Norman Rockwell or [J. C.] Leyendecker—the top illustrators of that time. That’s what we all wanted to be, but very few guys made it.”

Stan Lee agreed. “Comic book writing was considered the lowest thing you could do in the creative field. Nobody had any respect for comics—even the person I worked for. My publisher felt they were only read by very little children or semiliterate adults. There was no point in trying to make the stories literate, or worry about character development or anything: ‘Just give them a lot of action and don’t use too many words.’ That was his philosophy.”

Nick Cardy, who aspired to be an illustrator before earning his reputation in comics, recalled a conversation he had with fellow artist Jim Mooney about how comics was a dirty word. “He said, ‘You know, if my mother had ever found out I was doing comics, I don’t know what would have happened. I would have gotten along if I said I was a pimp.’”

In his 1947 landmark study,
The Comics
, British cartoonist Coulton Waugh sneered at comic books as an important but appalling descendant of the newspaper strip. “It doesn’t seem possible that anything so raw, so purely ugly, should be important,” he wrote. “Comic books
are
ugly; it is hard to find anything to admire about their appearance.” Waugh, who spent a decade to working on the comic strip
Dickie Dare
after the departure of Milton Caniff, reflected the elitist attitudes of the newspaper artists of the time when he critiqued comic books. He was totally put off by the paper used in comic books, the colorization, by the “soulless emptiness” and “outrageous vulgarity” that he saw in the little newsstand magazines. “It is quite clear that you can laugh at the comic books but you can’t laugh them off,” he said. “They are a startling addition to both children’s and grownups’ reading matter with which we all might become better acquainted—if only to understand what our children are looking at.”

Eisner confessed to being embarrassed about being a comics artist when he first started out, not because he felt that his work was inferior, but because of the reputation attached to anyone working in the medium, the low self-esteem he witnessed around him, the “comic book ghetto” in which comic book artists felt trapped. It was especially galling to Eisner that the syndicated daily newspaper strip artists disregarded the comic book artists as inferior. “We were living in an environment that led us to believe that we were subhuman,” he said.

One of his favorite anecdotes from those early days, repeated frequently over the years, involved a cocktail party he attended on Madison Avenue. He had established his reputation as one of the best in the business, and he felt honored to be invited to such a highbrow affair.

“There were a lot of artists there,” he recalled. “I was standing against a wall, holding a drink, and a lady came by with long black hair, bangs, a long cigarette, and holding a drink, and she said to me, ‘What do you do?’

“And I said, ‘I’m a comic book artist.’

“And with a very large balloon with very tiny letters, she said, ‘Oh, how nice.’”

Over the passing years, Eisner learned to joke about the incident. It wasn’t funny at the time.

Eisner’s business instincts were on the money. Iger looked up his old contacts, and Eisner & Iger’s client list took off, netting Eisner as much work as he could handle. He’d go into work early and leave late in the evening, usually long after Jerry Iger had gone home. Eisner’s social life, not much to begin with, ceased to exist. He had work and he had sleep, with an occasional time-out for a hurried meal. One publisher, needing a lot of material produced on strict deadlines, asked Iger about his staff. Was it big enough to handle the workload? Eisner instructed Iger to tell the publisher that Eisner & Iger employed a staff of five artists; they certainly could handle the publisher’s needs. Iger landed the account, and Eisner would maintain the ruse by writing five different features in five different styles, signing each with a different name—his own and four pseudonyms.

“One was Willis R. Rensie—that’s ‘Eisner’ backward,” he explained. “Another was W. Morgan Thomas, another Spencer Steele. That’s a marvelous name, isn’t it. I always wanted to be named Spencer Steele.” The fifth name, William Erwin, was simply Eisner’s first and middle name.

Eisner & Iger established a reputation of producing high-quality work on deadline—a high recommendation in a business not known for its artists’ sense of responsibility. Freelancers could be quirky or temperamental, many were known to drink too much, and most missed deadlines. Eisner, perhaps because of his youthful experience of supporting his family, quickly established a professional standard that he would follow throughout his life. He was creative enough to move easily from genre to genre, from fantasy to detective stories to westerns to jungle stories. Just as important, he worked quickly. After spending decades in the business, he’d boast that he never missed a deadline—a claim that may or may not have been true; in any event, a blown Eisner deadline was so rare that neither he nor his clients nor fellow artists could remember one.

The key, Eisner would respond whenever asked about the secret to his success, was in the
story
. His voracious youthful reading, from pulps to the classics to newspaper comic strips, along with all the movies he’d seen, had taught him well. He knew the components of a good story, including characterization, point of view, plot, and action; he knew how to frame and construct a story in just a few pages. If he had a weakness early in his career, it was in writing dialogue: he had a strong feeling for vernacular and the rhythms of speech, but he could be too wordy, resulting in the disruption of a story’s pacing.

But comics, despite his protestations to the contrary, were not a literary medium—not in the early days, at least. In their advent, comic books were read by all ages, but an overwhelmingly high percentage of readers were adolescent, particularly boys, who expected a lot of action, in as exotic a setting as the writer could drum up, in very few pages. Eisner ground his teeth but followed industry dictates, but even that wasn’t enough for Jerry Iger, who’d impatiently chide Eisner for working too carefully on his art rather than churning out more pages. “The trouble with you is that you want to win an art director’s award,” he’d complain, “but we’re turning out frankfurters here.”

Iger had reason to push. Through hard work and hustle, the shop had connected with some impressive clients, including Editors Press Service, which gave Eisner & Iger its first international exposure. Iger knew Editors Press Service founder Joshua B. Powers from his
Wow, What a Magazine!
days, when Powers was trying to sell some of
Wow
’s material to magazines in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. Powers, supposedly a former undercover agent in South America, possibly with the CIA, had concocted a moneymaking scheme that he hoped would see him through his retirement. He bought comics from the United States for foreign clients, who paid him in advertising space in their publications. Powers would then sell the space at a hefty profit to U.S. companies looking for an inexpensive way to advertise overseas. Some of the comics that Powers purchased were reprints, like the
Dick Tracy
and
Mutt & Jeff
dailies, but he was also interested in the kind of original work that Eisner & Iger could provide.

One of the Editors Press clients, a magazine called
Wags
, a weekly tabloid distributed in England and Australia, became one of Eisner & Iger’s top publishers, leading to two of Eisner’s more sophisticated features: a reprise of his
Flame
cartoon, renamed
The Hawk
and, after several appearances under that title, renamed again as
Hawks of the Sea
; and
Yarko the Great
, a detective series featuring a magician crime solver. These entries—
Hawks of the Sea
in particular—gave Eisner room to develop characters and plot, which he relished. There was still plenty of action in the swashbuckling
Hawks of the Sea
to keep young readers glued to the pages, yet each installment found Eisner, writing as Willis R. Rensie, sneaking in more mature approaches to subject matter and dialogue and even experimenting with the “camera angles” in some of the frames.

“There was a great deal of freedom for development,” he said of those early days of working on
Hawks
, speaking in 1986 to his longtime editor, Dave Schreiner. “With an illustrative style, you can really move along and see yourself getting better … The things I used were, of course, sometimes beyond my capacity at the time. I think back to what a hell of a nerve I had trying some of the shots in this thing.

“But
Hawks
was my first attempt to run the mile. It was the first chance I had to go full out. There was no precedent and there were no restrictions. It was an ideal setup for me. I probably did it at the rate of a page a day, doing everything but the lettering.”

The Eisner & Iger company had been around only a few months when the two partners, buoyed by the early response to the company, decided to create their own comics syndicate. Universal Phoenix Features Syndicate, initially designed to handle foreign clients, rose from a Joshua Powers split with his English partner, which left Eisner & Iger with the potential loss of
Wags
. The syndicate quickly found a market in the United States as well, largely due to the knowledge that Eisner & Iger had acquired from dealing with Joshua Powers. Small newspapers, they learned, wanted to publish comic strips, but their options were sharply limited because of territorial restrictions imposed by the big syndicates. Popular features could appear in only one newspaper in any given region, which left a shortage of comics available to the smaller papers. Eisner & Iger filled that need in an ingenious way that worked beautifully for a while but eventually became an accounting nightmare. The setup was simple. Eisner & Iger hired two salesmen to travel all over the East Coast and sell comics to newspapers. Each of the five-panel comics, written and illustrated by Eisner, included a blank panel at the end of the strip, which would be filled by a local advertiser—in theory giving the newspaper the strip for free. The salesmen would initially sell the ads and collect the money on a onetime basis; after that, the newspapers were on their own.

All kinds of confusion followed. The salesmen pocketed the money, wires were crossed between the newspapers and advertisers about whom the advertisers had to pay, and Eisner & Iger was caught in the middle, producing weekly strips but not knowing when—or if—the company would be paid. Frustrated newspapers canceled their subscriptions.

Fortunately for Eisner and Iger, their workload at the comic book end of their company had increased to such a degree that their attention was focused elsewhere. Other large clients were entering the picture. There was plenty of reason to train their eyes on the future.

chapter three

S U P E R M E N   I N   A
 W O R L D   O F   M O R T A L S

Basic business acumen comes from hunger. That also goes for ideas, I suspect. Many years ago, when I was giving a talk, somebody asked me what prompted my ideas, and all I could tell them … it was malnutrition.

O
ver the years, Will Eisner would point out that success in the comic book business in general, and at Eisner & Iger in particular, was difficult to gauge when it was actually happening. By the late 1930s, comic books were sprouting everywhere. Some lasted only a few issues and went under, only to reappear later under different titles but using the same characters and, in some instances, essentially the same stories. Strips could be cut up and rearranged, given new dialogue and plots, and recycled in different markets. The industry’s growth was steady enough to convince entrepreneurs that there was probably a future in the business, but when that future might arrive, and what form it would take, was anyone’s guess.

Two teenagers in Cleveland would be answering these questions in very short order.

But in the meantime, producing comics was a scattershot enterprise, dependent upon the whims and moods of very fickle readers. For his part, Eisner found himself working overtime to produce every type of comic imaginable, from continuing multipanel adventure strips to single-panel sports features; from westerns to science fiction and fantasy. He’d vary his styles to meet a publisher’s demands, hit his deadline, and head to the next assignment. The pulp magazines, virtually dead in the water, had moved on, with some of their publishers going into comics. When they did, Eisner was there to work for them.

Fiction House was one such pulp publisher looking to change direction. With such titles as
Wings
,
Planet Stories
,
Fight Stories
, and
Jungle Stories
, Fiction House had seen its popularity slipping. After consulting with Eisner & Iger, publisher Thurman T. Scott decided to try to alter his fortunes with a comic book, and his first effort,
Jumbo Comics
, was a formidable entry into the field. With its oversize tabloid format, sixty-four pages of content, black-and-white entries printed on pastel-colored pages, and a cover that screamed,
BIG PAGES—BIG PICTURES—BIG TYPE—EASY TO READ
,
Jumbo
offered plenty of promise.

Eisner & Iger supplied the entire content for the book’s first issue. Eisner had no trouble scaring up ideas for
Jumbo
’s contents, but he could no longer consider shouldering the shop’s workload by himself. He’d already been using the work of Dick Briefer, an older artist who was more of a painter than inker and colorist, and Jacob Kurtzberg, a diminutive, scrappy young artist now calling himself Jack Curtiss, on other endeavors, and for
Jumbo #1
he assigned Curtiss the task of adapting
The Count of Monte Cristo
to sequential art form, while Briefer did the same with
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
. Eisner contributions included a recycled
Hawks of the Seas
and, to assure an issue packed with action and adventure, a new feature called
Sheena, Queen of the Jungle
, a
Tarzan
knockoff written under the nom de plume W. Morgan Thomas and illustrated by new staff artist Mort Meskin.

Sheena
would last long after Eisner had abandoned the feature and left Eisner & Iger. Will Eisner and Jerry Iger would both stake claims to having created
Sheena
, though the feature’s development and continuity were clearly Eisner’s and Meskin’s. In the shop environment, the creation of a comic could be a group effort, with ideas being bandied about at a dizzying pace and work on a project being rendered by several people. Eisner would become known for generating an idea, providing sketches of the principal characters, and even coming up with plots for the stories. He would then assign the feature to another artist (or artists), who would do the breakdowns, pencils, inking, lettering, and (if the comic was in color) coloring. Eisner usually handled the cover art. Each artist’s contribution was vital to the success of the feature, though usually only one name—Eisner’s or one of his pseudonyms—was placed under the title.

Sheena
came about as the result of the enormous popularity of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s
Tarzan
books and as a natural extension of the type of material published in Fiction House’s
Jungle Stories
. As scantily clad as her male counterpart, Sheena took on man and beast in a series of entertaining but preposterous adventures. This was the stuff of dreams for teenage boys, a combination of adolescent pinup and action story, and it didn’t seem to matter that this young woman, born in deepest Africa, always had perfectly cut and brushed blond hair, spoke textbook English, and wore outfits, albeit leopardskin ones, that seemed to be designed by a Hollywood tailor.
Sheena
was a creation on demand and definitely not the type of character Eisner would have preferred to deal with, but he wasn’t about to turn down work, either.

By 1938, Eisner & Iger had developed into a full-blown comics studio, employing an expanding roster of writers and artists and supplying material to nearly every comic book company in the business. Eisner recruited his staff by placing an ad in the
New York Times
and carefully reviewing each respondent’s portfolio, his final decisions based on both talent and the way an applicant might fulfill the stylistic needs of Eisner & Iger’s clients. Eisner was no older than most of the people he hired, yet his ability and accumulated experience in the business gave him an authority that belied his years.

Working on
The Spirit
with Nick Cardy (with pipe) and Bob Powell. (Will Eisner Collection, the Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum)

In terms of comics history, the artists and writers passing through the Eisner & Iger shop between 1937 and 1939 is a staggering list of some of the most respected names in early comics history. Lou Fine, Bob Powell, Bernard Baily, Mort Meskin, Bob Kane, George Tuska, Klaus Nordling, Gill Fox, Reed Crandall, Nick Cardy, Vern Henkel, Chuck Mazoujian, and Jack Kirby—all logged time at the shop as employees or freelancers. With the arrival of new help, Eisner & Iger moved to a bigger place on Madison Avenue and Fortieth Street, with a large room to accommodate the bullpen and a small room, located in the front, for Jerry Iger’s office. Eisner sat at a desk at the head of the big room, facing the artists like a teacher in front of his students.

The star of the group, beyond question, was Lou Fine, a thin, redheaded twenty-three-year-old former student at the Grand Central Art School and Pratt Institute. A childhood bout of polio had left Fine with a badly weakened left leg and noticeable limp, and from the long recovery period away from school, he developed a quiet, almost withdrawn personality. He’d begun drawing during his long hours alone. As good as, if not better than, Eisner as a draftsman, Fine was a point-and-direct kind of artist with no inclination to write his own material. Fine preferred to go off on his own, in a private office if possible, and work in his slow, tediously methodical fashion, treating each panel as if, upon delivery, it was going to be shipped to an art museum and viewed in perpetuity. He liked to work with a mechanical pencil, though he was gifted enough to ink directly onto the page with no pencils acting as a guide. When he submitted one of his completed pages, the other artists gathered around to admire the kind of exquisite work they could only dream of accomplishing.

Joe Kubert was one of those artists. “When his work came out every month,” Kubert said, “every artist I knew wanted to get his hands on the stuff he was doing, just to look at it. It was like magic. I don’t think it was so much that they wanted to work
like
him, but he was a kind of beacon: that’s where you could go, the direction you could take, if you pushed yourself. You could accomplish what this guy was accomplishing—the way
you
wanted to do it.”

According to several of the Eisner & Iger shop artists, Eisner envied Lou Fine’s abilities, though he was frustrated by his unwillingness to handle other chores.

“Lou had never had any interest in the writing end of the business,” Eisner recalled. “He had a brilliant technique, the best of anyone working then, and when I did the writing he was free to spend his time rendering a magnificent piece of art. There are writers who are capable of inspiring an artist, bringing things out of him that he might not have known were there. There has to be a kind of emotional welding between the two where trust takes place. That’s why we worked so well together.”

Bob Powell was Eisner’s kind of man, at least in terms of what he did around the shop. Loud, abrasive, opinionated, and aggressive, with a streak of open anti-Semitism that irked Eisner no end, Powell could do anything that needed doing at Eisner & Iger. Powell worked quickly in any genre and required no supervision—the kind of pro’s pro Eisner could appreciate. Born Stanislav (Stanley) Pawlowski in 1916 in Buffalo, New York, Powell moved to Manhattan and studied at the Pratt Institute before latching on to Eisner & Iger. Eisner appreciated his leadership skills enough to make him shop foreman, but his style, the polar opposite of Eisner’s laid-back but hands-on way of treating employees, grated on those working under him.

Bob Fujitani, who worked with Eisner later, after Eisner and Iger had parted ways, remembered Powell as the kind of guy who let the power of his position go to his head. “When Eisner would leave, Powell would take over. He was the boss then. And immediately, as soon as Eisner was out the door, it would be, ‘All right, you guys, let’s hear those pencils sing.’ I never liked him.”

“He was a hell of a nice guy, but he was very brusque,” allowed Nick Cardy, who joined the Eisner & Iger staff when he was very young and still going by the name Nicholas Viscardi. Powell looked out for him and helped him with his art. But even Cardy could be put off by Powell’s bluster. “Every time I think of Powell,” he said, “I think, ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’”

One Eisner & Iger employee, artist George Tuska, took great exception to Powell’s bluster. Muscular and blond, Tuska looked like one of the superhero characters the shop might draw. When he started at the shop in 1939, he instantly developed a huge crush on Toni Blum, a staff writer and the only woman working in the studio. Tuska was painfully shy, however, and he never approached Blum, even though his feelings were known by everybody in the bullpen. One day, Powell was shooting off his mouth about Blum, about how he could sleep with her anytime he wanted. Without uttering a word, Tuska carefully and deliberately cleaned off his brush, put it down, walked over to where Powell was holding court, and decked him with one punch. “You shouldn’t have said that, Bob,” was all he had to say.

Of all the writers and artists logging in time at the Eisner & Iger shop, none would achieve the acclaim and influence of Jack Kirby—the former Jacob Kurtzberg, Jack Kurtzberg, Jack Curtiss, et al., who with Joe Simon would create
Captain America
and, after a noteworthy partnership with Simon, go on to co-create, with Stan Lee, such Marvel Comics mainstays as
The Fantastic Four
,
The X-Men
,
The Silver Surfer
, and
The Hulk
. Only nineteen when he began working for Eisner & Iger, Kirby had obvious talent but was still learning the ropes, penciling and inking whatever he was assigned. He legally changed his name to Jack Kirby after he’d put in his short stint with Eisner. In time, his nickname would be “King,” as in “the King of Comics.”

One of his most memorable moments in the shop, recounted in Eisner’s
The Dreamer
, involved Kirby saving Eisner’s hide during a brief but intense visit from a Mafia thug sent to the Eisner & Iger studio to strong-arm Eisner in a dispute that would have been funny had it not been so serious. The misunderstanding began shortly after Eisner & Iger had moved to a new location. Eisner, disappointed with the building’s towel service, had contacted the towel firm and inferred that he was thinking of switching to a better, cheaper service. As Eisner told the story, he was unaware at the time that the Mob controlled the business—thus the visit from the huge, imposing, walking stereotype dressed in a black shirt, black suit, and white tie, complete with a broken nose and shoulders that looked to be about two ax handles wide.

The strong-arm took what he considered to be a reasonable approach at the beginning of his conversation with Bill Eisner and Jerry Iger.

“Look, we don’t want to have no trouble with you,” he told them. “We want everything to go nice, see? You tell me what your problem is, and we’ll try to fix it.”

Eisner responded by saying that he wanted another service, that there were other places to call.

Negotiations broke down; some shouting ensued. The visitor insisted that his boss controlled the building’s services and that was all there was to it.