Will Eisner (11 page)

The
Weekly Comic Book
, offering the exploits of the Spirit, Lady Luck, and Mr. Mystic, made its debut on Sunday, June 2, 1940, appearing in only five newspapers, but with a circulation of a million and a half readers. Eisner celebrated the occasion by going to Philadelphia and attending a party hosted by the
Philadelphia Record
, the first paper to pick up the comic book. It might not have been
Superman
, but in the months ahead, other newspapers, aware of the way the comic book bolstered sales for papers including it, decided to carry the supplement, giving Eisner the largest readership he had ever imagined.

As for the costume, Eisner exacted a small measure of revenge on the man who insisted upon the Spirit’s having one: besides the blue suit, blue gloves, and ever-present mask, the Spirit wore a fedora exactly like the one worn by Busy Arnold. This became a big inside joke around the Tudor City studio. Arnold never noticed.

No one, including Eisner himself, could ever date the exact moment he ceased being “Bill” Eisner and became “Will” Eisner. Nothing in his life—professional or personal—precipitated the change. In all likelihood, the name change became permanent with the arrival of
The Spirit
or when Eisner entered the service. He’d been called Willie at times as a child, so becoming Will wasn’t a radical departure. As Eisner explained it, the new name sounded more professional.

“It was just an attempt to be arty,” he said. “It’s like using a circle for a dot in the ‘i’ [in Eisner’s signature]. ‘Will’ just sounded better to me.”

Eisner was hitting another creative peak. With no romantic relationships or other time-consuming endeavors to take him from his work, Eisner had no constraints on his time beyond the actual number of hours in a day. He was free to work as he pleased.

The Tudor City studio, although it employed as many artists at any one time as Eisner & Iger did, enjoyed a very productive period. Over the next year and a half, between the opening of the studio and the beginning of the United States’ involvement in World War II, Eisner brought in another group of gifted draftsmen to complement the artists he’d brought over from Eisner & Iger, all providing him with high-quality work. Lou Fine, Chuck Mazoujian, Bob Powell, Nick Cardy, Klaus Nordling, Joe Kubert, George Tuska, Tex Blaisdell, Alex Kotzky, Dave Berg, Al Jaffee—this partial list comprised an impressive slice of early comics history’s most noteworthy contributors, all making their chops as budding young artists, all developing at a time when comic books were a wide-open field, receptive to new ideas and experimentation. These artists made up the rules as they went along.

They came from all over New York, from all backgrounds. They’d arrive in answer to a newspaper ad or when they were recommended by other Eisner employees. Dick French, brought in to beef up the writing staff, particularly on
Lady Luck
, was Tex Blaisdell’s brother-in-law. Klaus Nordling, who had worked briefly at Eisner & Iger, wrote plays for New York’s Finnish theater. Nick Cardy took a circuitous route, working for Jerry Iger at Eisner’s recommendation before catching on later with Eisner, after the departure of Chuck Mazoujian. Joe Kubert, just a teenage kid, turned up off the street, an aspiring artist looking for something to do. Eisner gave him a job sweeping and cleaning the place, but after seeing some of his sketches (and perhaps remembering his own days as a high school upstart), he had some of the staff, mainly Tex Blaisdell, coach him on his art.

Kubert would always look back fondly at the Tudor City bullpen and his on-the-job training.

“I was just starting out in high school,” he said. “I was just erasing the other artists’ work and sweeping out the place. Those guys were extremely kind to me. These were older people. I was just an obnoxious kid coming up there, trying to find out what the hell was going on, and these guys extended themselves in every way. They had the patience of several saints to correct my work, tell me about the materials, and help me along.

“The room was comparably small, maybe fifteen by twenty, and it was very quiet, as I recollect. The guys who did the work all sat in the same room. Will had a separate office. It was very, very businesslike. There was no nonsense going on. The guys had fun, but it was not a noisy place. I was a kid dealing with adults, and they dealt with me as an adult. I talked to them on an equal level. During lunchtime, Tex Blaisdell and I used to play handball downstairs, in the handball court across the street.”

Al Jaffee was just out of high school himself when he visited the Tudor City studio, looking for work. His sense of humor (which later became legendary through his work with
Mad
) won him a job.

“I had to create an idea,” he recalled, “and I didn’t have an idea except a silly drawing of a character called Inferior Man. He was bald and had a little mustache and looked like a pipsqueak. By day he was a little accountant, and then by night he would put on a cape and, for some reason, I had him flying. I don’t know where he got the power to fly, but he did. I took this up to Will and he said, ‘Great. Your drawings are funny. I have a drawing table here, right behind Dave Berg. I’ll pay you ten dollars a week and you can just draw this thing as a filler for
Military Comics
.’”

Inferior Man
wasn’t long for the world, but Jaffee’s association with Dave Berg would be very fruitful in later years, when both contributed significantly to
Mad
.

To Eisner, shop chemistry and the ability to produce quickly weighed as heavily as artistic ability in his personnel decisions. Eisner’s ability to spot talent was almost unparalleled in the industry, but as he would joke long after he’d quit running a shop, the real key to running a successful studio involved his having one foot under the drawing table and one under the desk. Finding individual artists was relatively easy; assembling a team that worked well together, with a collective eye on churning out quality material on tight deadlines, required an instinctive understanding of human nature.

“I hired guys based not so much on their portfolios, but on their personalities,” he said. “I would interview a guy before I even looked at his portfolio. One of the things that you learn over the years is that you can hire a guy based on his portfolio, but that doesn’t mean that, when he works in your shop, he can deliver the same quality of work. He might have taken ten hours to do one piece, and in a shop you can’t spend ten hours on one piece.”

In a shop boasting this kind of talent, holding egos in check and avoiding flare-ups and hard feelings could be a challenge. Eisner ran his shops the way Walt Disney ran his animation studio: even though you employed talents with disparate styles, you aimed for a studio
look
, a sense of singular vision.

“Everything had his name; he was the brand,” noted David Hajdu, author of
The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America
. “He ran this shop on the production model. He ran this little art-making factory—it was a factory, but what it made was art, and it was important to Will that the product be art. The best way to really understand Will is to apply the matrix of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, because Will was to comics what Duke Ellington was to jazz. Will has created in this factory a laboratory and a hot house that gave opportunities for people not only to work, but to achieve a kind of greatness in a place where greatness mattered, where they would be rewarded for being great. This was largely in part to make money and to gratify Will’s ego, which was insatiable. You could not have enough talent in that room. They could not do enough great work on a high enough level to satisfy him. That stimulated people. They’re playing off each other, they’re learning from each other. He’s empowering individuals who might not have been empowered in other ways, not just to do Will Eisner work but to contribute in a creative way, and to bring their own styles and voices and sensibilities to work, to serve this larger whole. This kind of system is a complicated way of making art. The standard perception of the creative process is that art is the expression of an individual communing with the Muses. Will represented something a lot more complicated: a kind of a collaborative, a communal way of making art, the coming together of art and commerce in a way that doesn’t negate the value of either one, or doesn’t corrupt either one.”

Eisner took special pride in his ability to write as well as illustrate his comics stories. (© Will Eisner Studios, Inc., courtesy of Denis Kitchen)

Eisner was actively involved in all aspects of the art being produced in his studio. He’d wander up and down the aisles, glancing at pages over the artists’ shoulders, offering advice that he hoped was more coaching than criticism. “Since the comments were not personal, no one registered annoyance over a suggested change,” he explained. Eisner liked to believe that the easygoing yet professional work setting could be attributed to a young, talented staff “open to criticism, unafraid of competition, and in a work environment that respected them.”

Yes, Eisner liked to believe that, but it wasn’t the whole story. On a day-to-day basis, his staff
did
respect him as a boss, and they worked well together as a team. There was a sense of camaraderie that extended after hours, when some of the guys would get together and wind down at a bar or restaurant. But Eisner’s managerial acumen wasn’t infallible. There were times, as there are in any shop setting, when members squabbled among themselves, complained about the long hours and low pay, or mumbled under their breath about Eisner’s demands. It was no secret that Chuck Mazoujian and Lou Fine had their sights set on leaving comics and going into commercial illustration, or that Chuck Cuidera, whom Eisner regarded as a shop leader, actually disliked Eisner intensely, or that some of the artists would happily take their talents elsewhere if someone offered them a better deal.

Busy Arnold, of all people, tried to entice Bob Powell and Lou Fine into leaving Eisner and coming to work for him directly at his Quality Comics studio in Connecticut. Both would have gone if Eisner hadn’t raised hell about it. Eisner’s working relationship with Arnold had cooled considerably after their partnership agreement—largely, Eisner felt, because of a difference in the way they perceived each other. Despite their agreement, Eisner complained, Arnold still saw and treated him like an employee, not a partner.

Arnold’s thinking, Eisner concluded, stemmed from the fact that, aside from their partnership, Arnold had his own publishing company—one that Eisner & Iger had worked for—and now, with the dissolution of Eisner & Iger and the formation of a new Eisner company, they were competitors as publishers, even as they worked as collaborators on
The Spirit
and two other books.

This misunderstanding boiled over when Arnold tried to hire Powell.

“He offered Bob Powell an increase on what I was paying him for working on
The Spirit
section,” Eisner recalled. “Bob came to me and said, ‘I can make more with your partners.’ I called up Arnold and said, ‘You want a lawsuit?’ Arnold apologized, but Powell got very angry, and he said, ‘You ruined my career! You cut me off!’ I said, ‘Well, you want to quit me and go down the street and work for someone else … well, all right. But you’re not going to work for my partner while I’m around.’”

It was the kind of double standard that could set off grumbling around the studio. Eisner might have taken Powell from his earlier partnership with Iger, but he wasn’t going to let Arnold do the same.

Chuck Cuidera’s problems with Eisner ran much deeper—more than Eisner ever realized. Cuidera, who had graduated from the Pratt Institute with Bob Powell and had taken a job with Eisner at Powell’s urging, disliked Eisner from the beginning. “I didn’t like the way he handled people,” he said, admitting that he admired Eisner as a writer and artist but had great issues with him personally. “There was no way I was ever going to get along with him.”

Eisner wouldn’t have been the only name on Cuidera’s list. A man of emotional extremes, Cuidera could be fiercely combative or unbelievably loyal, generous with his praise or scathing with his criticism, and hyperbolic in stating his opinions. One of his problems with Eisner, he intimated, originated with Eisner’s refusal to allow Lou Fine to leave for Quality Comics, just as he had Powell. Cuidera was very close to Fine, and he seethed when he learned of Eisner’s actions. “I wanted to knock Eisner on his butt like you wouldn’t believe,” he said.

Cuidera was directly involved in the lengthiest, most storied feud of Eisner’s career, one that puts Eisner’s earlier fight for control over his creations in a new light. Early in his career, while working at Victor Fox’s shop and, eventually, Eisner’s Tudor City studio, Cuidera contributed extensively to two popular features,
The Blue Beetle
and
Blackhawk
. Cuidera believed that he’d created both of the long-running features, and he was infuriated later on when historians credited Eisner with creating
Blackhawk
—a claim Eisner didn’t publicly contest. Cuidera stewed over being denied that piece of comics history.