Will Eisner Champion of the Graphic Novel ( PDFDrive )

Detail, original art for the front cover of New York: The Big City, Kitchen Sink Press, 1986.

Detail, splash page from “Self Portrait,” The Spirit no. 101, May 3, 1942.

Above and this page: Will Eisner in his studio in Tamarac, Florida, May 2001, photographed by Greg Preston for his book, The Artist Within: Portraits of Cartoonists, Comic Book Artists, Animators, and Others, Dark Horse Books, 2007.



Detail, original art for the cover of A Contract With God, Kitchen Sink Press, 1985.

Detail, A Contract With God, 1978.

FOR ME, THIS IS A NEW PATH IN THE FOREST. —WILL EISNER, preface to A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories

Detail, original art for an interior page of New York: The Big City, 1986.

A CONTENTS INTRODUCTION BY BRAD MELTZER PREFACE BY PAUL LEVITZ CHAPTER ONE OVERTURE CHAPTER TWO THE SPIRIT RISING CHAPTER THREE THE SPIRIT UNBOUND CHAPTER FOUR STORYTELLING BUSINESS CHAPTER FIVE RECONNECTING CHAPTER SIX TEACH THE WORLD CHAPTER SEVEN GRAPHIC NOVELS ARE COMING! CHAPTER EIGHT AN INSPIRING CONTRACT

CHAPTER NINE CENTER STAGE CHAPTER TEN CURTAIN CALL APPENDIX WILL EISNER AND THE GRAPHIC NOVEL: THE 2013 SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON PANEL FURTHER READING A WILL EISNER BIBLIOGRAPHY THE WILL EISNER COMIC BOOK INDUSTRY AWARDS BEST GRAPHIC ALBUM, 1988–2014 INDEX

Spot art from Eisner’s preface to A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories, Baronet Press, 1978.

A INTRODUCTION IT’S ONE OF MY GREATEST professional regrets. It was a local event. It wasn’t far from my house. And here was the offer: They wanted me to come give a talk with a man named Will Eisner. There it was: One time only. Me and Will Eisner. Together onstage (or at least together at a local library). I passed. Don’t look at me like that. I promise I had a good reason (though for the life of me, I can’t remember what it was). A conflicting event? A Little League game for my son? The more time passes, the more elaborate my excuse blooms in my memory. These days, I think I was helping rescue starving orphans from a flaming blimp that was about to Hindenburg in downtown Miami. The point is, I didn’t do the event with Eisner. Whatever was going on, I figured I’d have another chance. Soon after, in January 2005, Will Eisner died. I found out he lived less than a half hour from me. I know. You don’t have to say it. Read the first sentence again: It’s one of my greatest professional regrets. I mean it. It haunts me. Regularly. And yes, that story is all about me. But it’s also all about the legacy of Will Eisner. To this day, the reason my regret guts me so deeply is because I was well aware of Eisner’s place in comic book history. In many ways, the two can’t be separated. As you’ll see, Eisner wasn’t just a participant in that history. He was a builder, a finely trained mason laying the cornerstones that became our industry’s foundation. To the general public, he’s famous for giving us the term “graphic novel.” Let me just say it: To me, that’s not Eisner’s legacy. These days, the term itself is more often co-opted and used to put so-called serious work up on a cultural pedestal, while ghettoizing the more mainstream comic book and super hero portion of our industry. There’s nothing gained by snobbishly ignoring one’s own culture, and I truly believe Will Eisner would never stand for that. Don’t forget, this is the man who would proudly sit onstage as the Eisner Awards were given out in his name. And during the first year of those awards, the big winners weren’t just Watchmen or the folks who pride themselves on their New Yorker

covers. They were Steve Rude’s Nexus, a Gumby comic, and even a Space Ghost one. Eisner stood—and still stands—for it all. In my eyes, Eisner’s legacy wasn’t that he was one of the first to create “serious” comics. It’s that he was one of the first to show the world that comics should be taken seriously. Indeed, throughout his life, he became the ambassador of exactly that. He was the one we would hold up, pointing with pride at books such as A Contract with God, praying for the one thing that had evaded comics for so long: credibility. I still remember reading A Contract with God all those years ago. I grew up in a crappy apartment building in Brooklyn. Eisner’s was in the Bronx. In my far-too-egotistical young eyes, that made us generational brethren. And then as I began to read, well … in those pages, and in so many more, I saw his ability to—Actually, I’ll let this book do its job and show you what Eisner really built. Thanks to Paul Levitz, we now have a truly definitive overview of Eisner’s forceful and instrumental work. So as you turn the pages and things look familiar, just remember, Eisner’s the one who did it first. All I can say is, his commitment to the craft is the reason I get to sit here today. His work influenced me and influenced nearly every comic book creator I draw influence from. As for my Will Eisner meeting, I learned my lesson. A few years later, I did a treasured event with artist Jerry Robinson (creator of the Joker and Robin, the Boy Wonder); got to know Joanne Siegel (widow of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel); and have picked the brains of Stan Lee and so many other of my heroes, including the author of this book. When I was growing up in Brooklyn, one of the comic book stores I used to go to (I found out years later) had an employee named Dan DiDio (currently the co-publisher of DC Comics). When Dan was younger, he used to go to a comics store that had an employee named Paul Levitz (the former president and publisher of DC Comics). Sometimes we have no idea just how intertwined our histories can be. Here’s the proof: Decades later, it was Paul Levitz who okayed a storyline I wrote for DiDio that eventually led to my winning … what else? The Will Eisner Award (Best Single Issue 2008—Justice League of America no. 11). To this day, it’s the only award I keep on display. It means everything to me. Not for the win. But for who it represents and the gifts he gave us.

—BRAD MELTZER Fort Lauderdale, Florida October 2014 Brad Meltzer is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Inner Circle, The Book of Fate, and seven other bestselling thrillers. He is one of a handful of authors to have books on multiple bestseller lists: nonfiction (History Decoded), advice (Heroes for My Son and Heroes for My Daughter), children’s books (I Am Amelia Earhart and I Am Abraham Lincoln), and even graphic novels (Identity Crisis and Justice League of America). He is also the host of the History Channel television show Decoded, as well as Lost History. You can find him at BradMeltzer.com and @bradmeltzer.

Original art for the back cover of A Contract with God, Kitchen Sink Press, 1985.

Original art for the cover of The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom, 1974.

A PREFACE IF THERE’S A FORM revolutionizing popular culture today, it’s comics—and in particular, comics in the form of the graphic novel. Providing the cutting edge for success in movies, on television, in print—as textbooks, e-books, and online —and even invading such avant-garde spaces as the theater, comics and graphic novels are rewriting the rules for creativity. Disdained a generation ago as entertainment for illiterate children and future juvenile delinquents, comics have captured our imagination and earned the respect of critics and academics the world over. But a little more than seventy years ago, one cartoonist—and only one—said that comics were “new and raw in form just now, but material for limitless intelligent development. And eventually and inevitably it will be a legitimate medium for the best of writers and artists.” His name was Will Eisner, and more than any other single creator in his field, he made the legitimacy of comics happen. As a writer, artist, entrepreneur, educator, and businessman, Eisner made crucial contributions to the medium he loved over a seventy-year period, and his influence has continued to shape the field in the years since his death in 2005. The range of his roles was pivotal to his influence: Eisner’s artistic peers were notoriously poor at managing their business activities and primarily served as cautionary tales in how not to be well rewarded for creative triumphs. Perhaps that multidimensional talent came at a price for Eisner. The two cartoonists most frequently regarded as his peers had a wider direct influence as artists on popular culture: Harvey Kurtzman’s MAD helped define the humor of America and usher in an era of sharp skepticism; and Jack Kirby’s dynamic artwork has shaped the visual sensibilities of films, television, and video games far beyond the literal adaptations of the super heroes he co-created for Marvel Comics. But of the founding generation, it was Eisner who, in the English-speaking world, most shaped comics into a recognized art form. Will Eisner’s life has been well documented, not least by Eisner himself. Directly in his graphic novel The Dreamer, and indirectly in his other tales, he told a version of his youth in the early days of comics, and of life in the tenements of New York City. The interviews he gave have been published

extensively, and even more unusually, the interviews he conducted with other cartoonists are in print to illuminate their commonalities and differences (including a book-length discussion with Frank Miller, revealing agreements and disagreements between top talents of two very separate generations). Eisner is the subject of many articles, two biographies, two documentaries, and innumerable scholarly papers. This book does not attempt to chronicle his personal life, or to provide a comprehensive look at the thousands of pages of artwork he created over seven decades. Much of his work is in print, and little of it can be described as unexamined. Eisner’s art speaks for itself. Its beauty, and the personalities that spring to life in it, quite literally tell their own tales. Besides the emblematic choices, the pieces included here are long unseen or were last published in collections when Eisner had barely begun the graphic novels that were the triumphant last act of his long and celebrated career. Eisner is sometimes referred to as the “father of the graphic novel,” but it is fairer to see his life’s work as a quest to champion the respect and recognition of comics as a legitimate art form in America—a quest that was ultimately fulfilled through the creation of the graphic novel format. Though that journey took many turns, and Eisner’s approach was uniquely multifaceted, he lived to see his goal accomplished. I lived through this journey with Eisner. First as a comics fan, interviewing him for an early fanzine. Then as a writer and editor for DC Comics, using skills often gleaned from his work. Finally as publisher of DC, having the opportunity to publish his work and become his friend. Our lives crossed in many ways. In interviewing Jules Feiffer for this book, I discovered how many friends we had in common from when we were each sixteen and breaking into comics, Jules at Eisner’s studio in the late 1940s, and me at DC Comics in the early 1970s. Jules knew Eisner and so many others early in their careers, while I knew them in their later days. Many of us came to share Eisner’s belief that comics were an art form; none of us shared his lifelong, dogged pursuit of making that belief a recognized fact. Despite all the documentation and analysis, we still lack a solid, single- volume overview of the career and work of this innovative creator. There needs to be a book that places Eisner’s work in the context of its times and makes an argument for why he was of singular importance, particularly in the evolution of the graphic novel, which we can now safely consider one of the most creative and exciting contributions of pop culture. That is the task of this book. Exactly, I hope, as Will Eisner would have wanted.

—PAUL LEVITZ New York City August 2013

Detail, “The Last Hero,” unpublished Spirit story, 1996.

“At the ‘Forgotten’ Ghetto,” the Clinton News (DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx), December 8, 1933. Eisner’s first published cartoon, at age sixteen.

A THE IMAGES THAT WILL EISNER spent a lifetime illuminating were burned into his eyes when he first opened them: the teeming life of immigrant New York City in the years between the two World Wars. While Eisner’s brush would sweep over alien landscapes, military battlefields, and even effete pursuits such as tennis, it would never seem as at home as when shading the crumbling wall of a tenement or capturing the shadowy folds of laundry dangling on a makeshift line and dripping onto the street below. Eisner became the cartoonist laureate of the Jewish immigrant experience, leaving those slums behind but taking their joys with him, seeing their many challenges through a lens that found the humor and optimism within. And despite the obstacles surrounding a young man coming of age in the heart of the Great Depression, Eisner told his stories to millions and ended up as the champion of an emerging creative form that would change popular culture. All quite unimaginable when he first opened his eyes. Eisner’s father, Shmuel (or Sam, when Americanized), had been born in Kollmei near Vienna and moved to that city as an adolescent and apprenticed with a muralist. They painted frescoes in the wet plaster of churches or for

with a muralist. They painted frescoes in the wet plaster of churches or for prosperous homes of the Viennese. The Jews of Vienna were a largely assimilated minority, mostly working-class tradesmen and shopkeepers— generally a more comfortable group than those in the Russian Empire to the east. However relatively comfortable, Sam followed other family members to America in search of a better life. He settled in New York City, finding work painting scenery for vaudeville and the then-thriving Yiddish theater … and with an introduction from relatives, marrying a distant cousin named Fannie Ingber, who had the unusual start of being born on the ship bringing her mother over from Romania. William Erwin Eisner, age one, 1918.

William Erwin Eisner came along on March 6, 1917, sharing his birthday with his father; his brother, Julian, arrived four years later; and a sister, Rhoda, eight years after that. The family, like so many immigrants of the time, lived on the tenuous edge of the city’s economy, moving from place to place as work (and landlords) permitted, sometimes changing apartments monthly. They moved often enough, in fact, that Eisner himself wasn’t sure where he’d been born, though Williamsburg seemed a likely possibility. Sam painted homes and metal beds, to give the illusion that they were wood, and then abandoned his brush to sell furniture. When that failed, he joined a venture making fur coats, until that business, too, went under. The family lived in Manhattan, in New Jersey, in Brooklyn, and ultimately in the Bronx, which Will’s memories would always call home. Memories of the Bronx weren’t all sweet ones. A particularly vivid moment was an after-school confrontation for a very young Eisner, still called “Billy,” and his even younger brother, Julian. Neighborhood bullies accosted them for not being Catholic and turned Julian’s name into an anti-Semitic taunt, “Jew- lian, Jew-lian. A sissy name.” One street fight later, a roughed-up Billy brought his brother home and announced to him that from now on his name was going to be Pete. Eisner took the disrespect personally, not simply as the tribal matter it so often was on New York streets (with gangs united by their ethnicity claiming territory by the block and patrolling their invisible borders). He would recapture the moment sixty years later in To the Heart of the Storm, and he would carry his personal fight against anti-Semitism through his entire life. His final work, The Plot (published posthumously), was a graphic exposé of the virulent screed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Whether fighting for his family, his tribe, or his chosen medium, respect was always a critical goal for Eisner. By the time the Depression hit, Billy was not only protecting his brother, he was also an important contributor to the family’s stretched coffers. Eisner found himself selling afternoon newspapers in front of 37 Wall Street, miles from their Bronx apartment (and, coincidentally, a building where years later he would have his offices). Distressed as the stockbrokers and investors on the street were, the two cents that Eisner hawked his papers for put him even further down the economic ladder. The fringe benefit of the job was that Eisner got to read the daily and Sunday comics in many different papers. E. C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre was a personal favorite. Eisner looked back on discovering George Herriman’s Krazy Kat in those papers as well, and spoke of Segar, Herriman, and, later, Milton Caniff as having “taught me an awful lot.”

Eisner photo album: young Will Eisner and family, c. 1920.

Illustrations from the Clinton News.

Economic security was a regular topic at the Eisner table: Billy had started drawing at age seven or eight on paper when he could and, like other future great cartoonists of his generation (Jack Kirby, Shelly Mayer, and Harvey Kurtzman, to name just three), on the sidewalks of New York when the paper ran out. In Eisner’s case, he was often sketching airplanes, notably the Spirit of St. Louis. Sam encouraged this, proud of his son’s budding talent, despite the fact that his own life in art had been, to put it kindly, economically unstable. Fannie worried about her son’s future prosperity and tried to persuade him to consider at least becoming an art teacher. It was a more dependable, respectable profession … with a pension, even. As Eisner later put it, “My mother had grave doubts about how I would grow up.” Biographers have theorized that the dichotomy of Eisner’s professional life was in part an effort to satisfy both his parents: create art for his father and become a businessman to please his mother. As a young man, however, his critical moment came via a visit with the Fleischer brothers at their studio on Broadway. The tour was arranged by a friend’s brother who was working there as an animator. The Fleischers were making short cartoons with synchronized soundtracks, including By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1927). Their groundbreaking work on Betty Boop, Popeye, Gulliver’s Travels, and Superman was still to come, but the magic of making a living drawing crystallized into reality for the eight-year-old Eisner, and he decided illustration was going to be his chosen career.

“What Is His Name?,” the Clinton News, 1935. Eisner’s first published comic strip.

Cartoon from the Clinton News

Art-school sketch, February 2, 1935.

Eisner and one of his paintings. The art is from 1936; the photo, 1941.

Despite his choice, Eisner did not make the decision to commute to one of New York City’s new specialized high schools—the School of Industrial Art or the High School of Music & Art—where many of his fellow first-generation comic book artists would go. Eisner stuck to his local high school instead but had the good fortune that it was DeWitt Clinton High School, which had just relocated to a twenty-one-acre Bronx campus in an area rapidly expanding from the extension of the IRT elevated trains. The school had an extremely large and diverse population, with new immigrant families filling the apartment buildings clustered under and near the rattling tracks and sending their boys under the new law that made high school education compulsory in New York City. His high school years were extraordinarily formative for Eisner, giving him not only his first taste of being published, but also of being a publisher. Eisner recalled teacher Ray Phillipson in particular and was still in touch with him four decades later. Phillipson ran the journalism program, including the school paper, the Clinton News, which published Eisner’s first comic strip. With fellow student Ken Giniger (a future book publisher himself), Eisner started an underground literary journal called The Hound and the Horn, full of poetry, erotica, and illustrations that he made as woodcut engravings (a more economical form than preparing drawings for print in those days). Eisner worked briefly at Bronfman Printing on Manhattan’s Varick Street, learning some of the relevant skills, cleaning presses, and watching everything carefully. His lifelong curiosity was already formed and would soon serve him well. Eisner also became interested in the theater at Clinton, working with Adolph Green (later a seven-time Tony Award–winning lyricist) on class shows, and attending inexpensive theater in New York. The school’s drama club was filled with energy from other young Jewish immigrant kids as well, with Eisner’s time there overlapping with future actors Alan Arbus and Martin Balsam. Movies, on long Saturday afternoons in the darkened “palaces” of the Bronx, were, as he later put it, “the drug for all of us.” He would later single out the experimental films of Man Ray, which he watched at the New School long after their release, as a particular fascination. Pulps, such as copies of Black Mask Detective slipped to him by a neighbor, rounded out the trifecta of cultural influences. Eisner found his joy in story, not in the particular medium in which it was delivered or (if there is such a thing) its level of artistic class or merit. Although the production work for the school shows absorbed Eisner, and he would consider becoming a set designer following his father’s work in the theater, other forms of art had greater allure. He’d attend lectures and courses offered by the WPA (Works Progress Administration, a New Deal federal agency set up to counter some of the Depression’s effects) or get scholarships to

agency set up to counter some of the Depression’s effects) or get scholarships to the Art Students League (arranged in part by attracting other, paying students) and use them to study with legendary teachers such as George Bridgman (a master of anatomy who wrote the definitive textbooks for life drawing). Eisner not only learned the subjects; he also learned to appreciate the power of teaching. While teachers at Clinton and elsewhere were inspirations for Eisner, fellow students were important as well. Bob Kahn (who would change his name to Kane and collaborate with yet another Clintonian, Bill Finger, to co-create Batman a few years later) soon opened a vital door for him.

Sketch, mid-1930s.

Eisner inking The Spirit dailies, 1941.

Leaving Clinton without a diploma in hand because of a failed geometry class, Eisner entered the workforce at a time when unemployment was still over 20 percent, and no doubt to his mother, at least, his plan to support himself as an artist was impractical and unrealistic. But, as Eisner recalled, “What turned me on, really, was the idea of print … there’s a permanence to it. There’s an intimacy in reading.” His search for a suitable publication for his art led him to a night-shift job at the New York American, Hearst’s morning paper for the city. Eisner would assemble small ads in the wee hours, writing copy, doing an occasional illustration, and even doing what he’d described as “atrocious lettering.” Trading up to Eve, a new magazine for Jewish women, Eisner got the lofty title of art director … and was fired fairly quickly when it became clear that his willingness to work at the low salary was an indication of his lack of fit with their subject matter in addition to his general inexperience. It was the last time Eisner would have a job working for someone else; he wasn’t yet twenty years old. Eisner returned to looking for work and trying to sell his art, one cartoon or drawing at a time. The big magazines that bought cartoons wouldn’t buy any of his, and even fashion illustration was a nonstarter. But Bob Kahn—now Kane— had made some sales where Eisner couldn’t and mentioned an opportunity. He’d sold some work to Wow, What a Magazine! Eisner had a new door to knock on, and it would lead to the rest of his life.

Panels from the detective strip Harry Carey!, 1935. Possibly Eisner’s first introduction of a continuing character, these sample comic strips were created while at DeWitt Clinton High School to pitch to syndicates. In 1936, Eisner renamed the strip Harry Karry, and it appeared in the comic book anthology Wow, What a Magazine!

WOW! WAS A SHORT-LIVED venture, destined to last only four issues in 1936. Its most meaningful contribution to comics was the meeting of Eisner and Samuel M. (“Jerry”) Iger, nominally the magazine’s editor but functionally the entire staff for the owner, John Henle, a garment manufacturer toying for a moment with publishing. In a tale Eisner retold in interviews and in his graphic novel The Dreamer, he went to show his portfolio to Iger and was dragged along on a walk to the engraver, where Iger needed to deal with a crisis. Wow!’s engravings included a botched Benday screen (a method of adding tone to line drawings), and Eisner grabbed a burnishing tool and fixed it—a skill from his time working in the printing plant. On their way out, Iger offered him a production job, and when Eisner pressed him instead for the opportunity to do comics, he gave the young artist a shot. Eisner was a comic book artist at last, writing and illustrating Harry Karry (a detective strip), The Flame (a pirate adventure), and other forgettable features. But the experience was unforgettable, with Eisner’s artwork even decorating an issue that included some of Segar’s Thimble Theatre strips, providing validation by proximity. Wow! faded out of existence quickly; it was a tumultuous time in the evolution of comic books, with publishers jumping in to explore the format that had begun three years before with Famous Funnies. Most of the content was still reprints of newspaper comic strips, without even being reformatted significantly. But like Wow!, many comic books were starting to include new material, since the best strips were already committed elsewhere or were simply too expensive for the entrepreneurs, who, like Henle, were mostly small businessmen sensing a (literally) colorful opportunity. And many, also like Henle, would end up owing their contributors money when the publications folded. Eisner approached Iger with an idea over lunch: There was a growing need for original comics material for these new publishers, and the publishers lacked editors, much less writers and artists, who could supply it. If they combined Iger’s hustling sales skill with Eisner’s ability to create the material, he speculated, there was a business to be built. Iger was broke, but Eisner fronted the money they needed and therefore he got his name first on Eisner and Iger, Ltd. It may not have been the first of the comic book “shops” or packagers (Harry “A” Chesler may have already opened), but the concept was new enough that Eisner probably developed it independently. Either way, it was an act of remarkable business entrepreneurship. An artist without assignments having the confidence to team up with an out-of-work salesman to produce material for an industry that was just starting up, filled with financially unstable clients struggling to meet the minimal definitions of being publishers.

Okay Comics Weekly no. 2, October 23, 1937. Eisner doing a credible imitation of Milton Caniff to supply a cover for a British weekly running reprints of Terry and the Pirates.

Wags no. 25, 1937. Eisner using a lighter cartoon style for the cover of an international weekly tabloid.

Okay Comics Weekly no. 11, January 22, 1938. Eisner channeling Ham Fisher doing Joe Palooka for Eisner and Iger’s Editors Press Service.

Original art for Black X, 1939, signed by Willis B. Resnie, one of Eisner’s more transparent pseudonyms.

Yet for Eisner, it was the answer to the conundrum of his life: He wanted to be an artist, but it was a life full of instability, as his mother had drilled into him since he began drawing. But if he was a businessman producing art, he could have his stability and get to do what he loved. It was a respectable solution. That realization, also before his twentieth birthday, served to guide him through the next five decades of his life. The shop structure was a simple but innovative application of mass production to art: Divide the multiple talents that a truly great cartoonist required into constituent parts, their drawing boards crowded into a small office or apartment. One man might write scripts, another would rough out layouts, someone good at architectural rendering might tighten up the backgrounds, another would ink in figures, and the least of the apprentices might fill in areas of solid black, erase leftover pencil lines, and sweep up at the end of the day. And it was a disproportionately male preserve. These were young men who were getting to draw for a living at a time when the alternatives were factory work or the garment sweatshops that pervaded New York City. The hours were long, but the modest pay was steady (at least compared to the vagaries of being an artist), as long as the team included someone who could sell their services to publishers. Iger did that well, connecting with clients who wanted to be in the comics business without particularly caring what characters or content filled their pages. Then it was up to Eisner to deliver on Iger’s promises. IN THE BEGINNING, there was no need for a roomful of artists. Eisner was his own mass production, varying his style and using pseudonyms so that Iger could sell the publishers on his stable of artists. One good habit became obvious early on: Eisner made his deadlines, a behavior not common among artists in any generation, and that endeared Eisner and Iger to their clients. The work was varied and even international. Through Editors Press Service, Eisner’s old The Flame was rechristened The Hawk and then Hawks of the Sea and ran in Wags, a weekly tabloid in England and Australia. Another international weekly gave Eisner the chance to mimic one of the strip artists he most admired, Milton Caniff, whose Terry and the Pirates had debuted two years before and was being reprinted in Okay Comics Weekly, when Eisner was commissioned to do a matching cover illustration for the second issue (October 23, 1937). Caniff “had the ability to stage a story so you followed it,” Eisner recalled, with “a high level of drama,” both qualities that would evolve powerfully in Eisner’s own work. Syndication seemed so profitable, the partners even branched out into forming a syndicate of their own. But in the end, their success

branched out into forming a syndicate of their own. But in the end, their success came from the work the shop produced. Iger kept selling, Eisner kept drawing, and in a short time the original two- man office that Eisner’s seed money had paid the rent on was far too small. Even Eisner’s five pseudonyms couldn’t produce all the work required, since he still was only one man, no matter how hard he worked. Then another of Eisner’s skills manifested: He knew how to pick talent. At a time when publishers and the other shops were seemingly hiring anyone who could lift a pencil to fill their pages, an abbreviated list of the important artists who came through Eisner and Iger, Ltd., includes Bernard Baily, Nick Cardy, Reed Crandall, Lou Fine, Bob Kane, Mort Meskin, George Tuska, and a wiry little guy named Jacob Kurtzberg, who drew very fast and with a dynamic that would shape more than just the comics field when he changed his name to Jack Kirby. The collaborative nature of comics has frequently contributed to confusion over credit, particularly with regard to the creation of new characters. The shop structure only made that confusion more likely, as there were no firm boundaries between different people’s roles in the process, and collaborations were likely to be unsigned and certainly undocumented. Eisner and Iger, Ltd., had its share of those dilemmas, including one between the partners themselves: Both of them would take credit for the creation of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle for the initial launch of Jumbo Comics (September 1938), a new title the shop packaged for Fiction House. Eisner had written the script, and Meskin provided the artwork, but Iger claimed to have come up with the concept. If he had, it would have been an unusual creative moment in a long career; for Eisner, it would have been the first of several enduring characters he would birth. A different kind of dispute over the circumstances of the birth of Wonder Man lasted far longer than the hero himself. Eisner and Iger’s short-lived syndicate had rejected one submission, which was also turned down by syndicate after syndicate and publisher after publisher. But when Superman finally saw print in Action Comics no. 1 in 1938, it redefined the comic book world and created opportunities for a host of imitators. The line between what was generic to the idea of a super hero and what was specific to Superman was impossible to delineate in those early days, but Eisner and Iger ended up clearly on the wrong side of it. Along with Fiction House, another large customer of the shop was a new company, Fox Publications, named after its owner, Victor Fox, a former accountant at the publisher of Superman and Action Comics. Fox had been giving Eisner and Iger a lot of work already, when he came in with a very specific request for a look-alike hero to compete with Superman. The legality of

the request wasn’t completely clear to the partners, but both the dubious morality and the potential consequences were: If Fox pulled its business from Eisner and Iger, leaving a large debt unpaid, it might be enough to close the firm. Eisner created Wonder Man to order.

Eisner at work, November 1941.

A nostalgic look back at Eisner’s early characters, 1974. Eisner’s poster combines the probable but unprecedented combination of the Spirit and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, with less probable appearances by Uncle Sam and the Hawks of the Sea.

Unsurprisingly, Superman publisher Harry Donenfeld sued faster than a speeding bullet … and with equally deadly aim. It was possible for cases to move through the courts more quickly in those days, and Eisner found himself in the witness box, being grilled on the circumstances of Wonder Man’s creation. As Eisner told the tale in The Dreamer, he refused to defend Fox and accepted the consequences. Several years after Eisner’s death, however, trial transcripts were uncovered in the National Archives by Warner Bros. attorney Wayne Smith, a lifelong comics fan doing research on Captain Marvel, another hero who attracted ire and litigation from Superman’s publishers. The transcripts told a different tale: Eisner had denied the Superman connection and tried to protect Fox. Regardless, Fox lost the suit and dropped Eisner and Iger, stiffing them on his bills. These transcripts, found after Eisner’s death, were discovered too late for Eisner to clear up whether his usually excellent memory had failed him or whether the embarrassment of the moment had led him to fudge the details in his retelling. In any case, the youthful transgression under pressure proved very unlike the consistent morality demonstrated by Eisner throughout the rest of his days. The third-largest customer of Eisner and Iger, Ltd., had a different attitude, from its name through its practices. Quality Comics wanted to be just that, and owner Everett “Busy” Arnold wanted the best that the shop could produce. Their most successful creation for Quality was Blackhawk, the story of a group of international pilots, perhaps inspired in part by the Lafayette Escadrille in World War I, and foreshadowing how the Free French would recruit from other nations for their air squadrons in World War II. The series would be Eisner and Iger’s biggest hit, outlasting the war, the shop itself, and even Quality, who sold the character to DC Comics. It would be in continuous publication until 1968, putting it in a rarefied list of early comic book properties that survived from the 1940s to entertain a very different generation. Blackhawk would even be translated into a brief radio serial in 1950 and its own movie serial from Columbia in 1952 starring Kirk Alyn. Blackhawk also inspired the longest-running discussion over credits to emerge from the Eisner and Iger studio. Artist Chuck Cuidera, who drew the series for many years and had worked on the first installment with writer Bob Powell, sparred with Eisner for decades thereafter over their claims of creator credit. The two men were finally brought together on a panel at Comic-Con International in 1999, and Eisner conceded that Cuidera was the one who “made something important out of it” and deserved the credit … but it continued to nag

at Cuidera. Looking back from that distance, though, it was clear that the most important thing to arise out of the shop’s relationship with Quality was the connection between Eisner and Arnold. Creative business packagers are intrinsically built on thin margins, and although the partners had prospered, Eisner was ready for something more. Arnold would bring him that opportunity—and it was one that would make him a legend.