Will Eisner (4 page)

Fannie Eisner wasn’t impressed by the artists or the school’s credentials. Instead, she was mortified when her son showed her his paintings of live models.

“She was extremely shocked when I went to art school and came home with a painting of a nude woman,” Eisner told interviewer Jon B. Cooke in 2002. “She couldn’t understand how they would allow 16-year-old boys to ‘watch naked women,’ which is how she said it. And Father, he tried patiently to explain to her that this was the way art schools worked.”

Ironically, as Eisner told biographer Bob Andelman, the nude studies marked the first time he felt like a professional. He had an adolescent’s interest in sexuality and nudity—he lost his virginity to one of the school’s young models in a brief after-school encounter—but he was more interested in how the studies affected his future as an artist.

Eisner’s growth as an artist accelerated under Bridgman and Brackman’s tutelage. Bridgman had an
artiste
’s ego and temperament, but his lessons in anatomy impressed Eisner to such an extent that he eventually incorporated many of them into his own textbook
Expressive Anatomy
. Eisner was also taken by the fact that both these men were
working
artists, more than willing to set aside their more highbrow tendencies if a decent commission was involved. Art and commerce were more compatible than Eisner had believed.

There were other classes as well, federally funded by Roosevelt’s Depression-era Works Progress Administration programs, all free to students. Eisner took as many as he could, absorbing every tidbit of information as if his life depended upon it. He knew, even at that point, that it did.

Sam Eisner’s cousin Lou Stillman owned one of the city’s best training facilities for boxers, and through Stillman, Bill Eisner met two of the premier comics artists of the day. Ham Fisher, creator of
Joe Palooka
, hung out at the gym, and Stillman, learning that he was looking for an assistant, arranged a meeting between Fisher and Bill Eisner at the Parc Vendôme, the upscale Manhattan complex where Fisher lived. Eisner gathered samples of his best work, packed them into a portfolio, and turned up at Fisher’s place at the appointed hour.

Fisher was nowhere to be found. The cartoonist, one of his assistants informed Eisner, was in an apartment on another floor. Eisner took down the number and headed up. His knock was answered not by Fisher, but by James Montgomery Flagg, the renowned artist famous for his World War I Uncle Sam “I Want YOU for U.S. Army” poster. Flagg was the spitting image of Uncle Sam.

“I almost fainted,” Eisner recalled. “I was speechless with awe.”

Flagg invited him in, but Eisner stood frozen in the hall, fumbling for something to say to the artist. He avoided the “I admire your work” cliché but could think of nothing else to say. Finally, in desperation, he managed, “What kind of pen do you use?”

“After a few minutes,” Eisner remembered, “out comes Ham Fisher, a pudgy, balding little man, and he was in a blind rage about something. He looked at me and said, ‘Oh yeah, you’re Lou’s cousin’s kid,’ and I said I was. Then he told me I was a day late to get a job and that he had just fired this young cartoonist who had betrayed him and stolen his ideas, and the more he talked, the more neurotic I could see he was.”

The fired cartoonist, it turned out, was Al Caplin, who as Al Capp would go on to create
Li’l Abner
and become one of the business’s most highly regarded daily cartoon strip artists. Eisner didn’t know it at the time, but he had just witnessed the beginning of one of the most infamous feuds in comics history.

Eisner’s high school social life was a mixed bag. He was popular around the Clinton campus because of his gregarious nature and the attention he received for his art, but his duties to his family and his job, along with his devotion to art, kept him from having more than a handful of close friends. He tended to be shy around girls, at least when it came to dating. He enjoyed double dating, where he could be loose and entertaining without the pressure of having to hold up 50 percent of the conversation.

One of his favorite double-dating partners was a tall, thin, good-looking classmate named Bob Kahn, who always knew an attractive young girl looking to go out dancing. Kahn also liked to draw, and though he wasn’t nearly as skilled Eisner, he was adept at self-promotion. His chatter drove Eisner to distraction, but Eisner tolerated it, mainly because Kahn was constantly fixing him up with dates. Kahn would eventually change his name to Kane, and he would go on to create Batman and, as far as Eisner was concerned, earn more money than his talents warranted.

For all that he learned at DeWitt Clinton, Eisner walked away from the school without a diploma—a secret he managed to keep until late in his life. He had failed geometry, a required course, and he didn’t bother to take a makeup class. He was getting a practical education elsewhere, on his job and in the art classes he attended in the evenings. Long after he’d achieved his acclaim as a cartoonist, he would admit that he might have been an entirely different artist and person if he’d graduated from high school and had a college education. At age eighteen, however, it didn’t matter. He was itching to apply his artistic talents to some kind of work, and with all that DeWitt Clinton had given him, Eisner was ready to move ahead.

The nation’s slow recovery from the Depression spelled trouble for Bill Eisner and his efforts to find a job. Good commercial art and magazine illustration work, extremely competitive to begin with, was closed to someone with Eisner’s lack of experience. The fact that he was Jewish didn’t help, either. As Eisner would discover, many Jewish artists wound up going into comics because of anti-Semitism in the ad agencies. Eisner lugged his portfolio from place to place, he sat around in the waiting rooms with other hopefuls, he showed his work to editors and art directors, and then he’d walk away, defeated. A lot of potential employers did little more than give his art a cursory glance. One outfit, a Mob-controlled company producing pornographic comic books, offered him steady work, but Eisner rejected the opportunity. He might have been desperate for work and money, but there were limits to what he would do.

These experiences taught Eisner invaluable, if painful, lessons.

“One of the difficulties of this business is that you have to learn to deal with rejection,” he said. “Every kid coming out of school, sooner or later, will walk into an art director’s office or a publisher’s office and the editor will look at his work and say, ‘now don’t take this personally … but this is the stupidest, crappiest work I’ve ever seen.’

“It happened to me,” he continued. “I remember, as a young kid, I showed my work to a magazine and the editor looked at this work and laughed and said, ‘These are the stupidest faces I have ever seen.’ And I walked out of there very dejected. And sitting out in the waiting room, waiting to see this editor next after me, was Ludwig Bemelmans, the famous illustrator [of
Madeline
]. A foreigner. And he said to me in broken English, ‘Don’t vorry, boy, somebody vill like your vork.’”

Later in his career, Eisner illustrated this encounter in a four-page story commissioned for a compilation of stories entitled
Autobiographix
, a collection devoted to personal narratives capturing important moments in the contributors’ lives. Eisner entitled his piece “The Day I Became a Professional.”

Eisner eventually scored a job in the advertising department of the
New York American
, working the graveyard shift and drawing illustrations for the paper’s “pimple ads”—the tiny ads that ran along the paper’s borders. Eisner divided his paycheck between his family and himself. Lunch was his favorite time of the day. At midnight, he’d head up to the roof of the
American
’s building, where he watched New York’s nightlife and, he’d say later, picked up the nuances of the way shadows played on the street scenes, lessons he would use to great effect in his graphic novels and
Spirit
stories.

The pay at the
American
was lousy, and Eisner tried doing freelance work on the side to supplement his income, but with little success. The advertising work posed no creative challenge, and Eisner yearned for something else, if not in comics, then in commercial art. When he heard that a new magazine called
Eve
, geared toward young Jewish women, was looking for an art director, he applied for the job, even though he knew almost nothing about what young Jewish women wanted in a magazine. He got the job, most likely because he would work for little money, and he set out to provide the magazine with illustrations of all kinds, publishing under the name “Julian Willi,” which was a combination of his brother’s name and his nickname. Neither the magazine nor Eisner lasted long. Eisner was fired when it became evident to the editors that he had very little knowledge of the magazine’s target audience and that readers would have little interest in illustrations of, say, women with firearms. The magazine folded a few months later.

A chance encounter with Bob Kahn set Eisner’s career in another direction. Kahn had been hustling his work all over town, occasionally selling single-panel cartoon jokes. He told Eisner of a periodical called
Wow, What a Magazine!
, which published cartoons and illustrated stories for boys.

“They buy from everybody,” Kahn assured Eisner. “Go up there and see.”

Eisner packed his portfolio and headed downtown to the magazine’s offices.

*
One of Sam Eisner’s prized possessions was a book about Julius Caesar, given to him by a teacher upon his completion of his English class. Sam eventually gave the book to his son Billy, who, in one of his earliest artistic exercises, drew illustrations based on the text.

chapter two

A   B U S I N E S S   F O R   T H I R T Y   B U C K S

You stop anybody on the street and ask him, “What is art?” They’ll say, “Well, an oil painting—that’s art. And an etching—that’s art.” But how about a series of pictures in sequence with words and text over it. He’ll say, “Oh, that’s not art. That’s comics.”

W
hen Bill Eisner first set foot in the
Wow, What a Magazine!
offices, he was not stepping into the nerve center of a modern publishing magnate. The magazine, like so many comics magazines of the time, operated on an extremely limited budget, with the understanding that the current issue could very well be its last. The magazine’s editor, Samuel Maxwell Iger, who preferred to be called “Jerry,” was, to be charitable, a dynamic presence, a one-man show who sold ads, worked as the magazine’s distribution director, hired freelancers, edited copy, dealt with printers, and, when necessity dictated, did artwork.

The
Wow
offices reflected the magazine’s borderline existence. Located on Fourth Avenue in Manhattan’s garment district, the offices were little more than a shoebox. John Henle, the magazine’s owner, wanted to be a publisher; he had enough business acumen to know that shirts were a safer bet. Henle gave Iger control over the magazine, but he made it clear that there was only so much money he could sink into it.

Iger was the kind of man who desperately wanted to be everything he wasn’t. He would have liked to be six or so inches taller, better looking, wealthy, and much less harried. He would have liked to be a better draftsman, when in fact his lettering was only passable and his cartooning was embarrassingly rudimentary. He was broke, overworked, and in the process of divorcing his second wife. Yet his bluster could take paint off a wall.

He got by—partly on his exceptional salesmanship, partly on unadulterated chutzpah. He had a way of balancing his personal books by living over his head by night and pinching pennies by day. He liked to be seen at the right places, with a beautiful woman or two (often prostitutes) at his side, and he talked as if he owned a sizable chunk of Manhattan. People would see through it, but that didn’t prevent Iger from carrying on.

Nick Cardy, who worked for both Eisner and for Iger in his early years in comics, recalled a time when he was asked to deliver drawings to Iger’s apartment, only to get a firsthand look at the way Iger tried to impress people in ridiculous ways.

“I went up to this little apartment—it must have been eight by ten—and this fella opened the door. He was the
butler
! I mean, how would you use a butler in an eight-by-ten room? He said, ‘I’ll see if he’s in, sir.’”

If not for Eisner’s persistence, his initial meeting with Jerry Iger would have fallen through. Eisner had just begun showing his portfolio when Iger picked up the phone and learned that he had still another crisis on his hands. There was a problem at the engraving plant requiring Iger’s immediate attention.

“I don’t have time to talk to you now,” he told Eisner. “I’ve got a serious problem. Come back another day.”

Eisner knew better than to go along with that. It was tough enough to get an editor to glance at your work; there were no guarantees that Iger would see him at another time, let alone remember talking to him. As the two took the elevator down to the lobby, Eisner suggested that he might show Iger his portfolio while they walked to the engraving plant. Iger reluctantly agreed. Eisner presented his work as well as he could while they walked briskly down the sidewalk, but Iger’s attention was elsewhere.

At the engraver’s shop, they found several men standing at a huge stone table in the center of the room. The engravers used the table to inspect the plates when they came out of the acid bath. The problem here was that the plates were punching holes in the mattes used in the reproduction process, and the men were at a loss as to how they might correct the problem.

Eisner listened to the discussion before clearing his throat and addressing the group.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Does anyone have a burnishing tool?”

“I had been working for years in a print shop on Varick Street, and I’d seen this before,” Eisner told the
Comics Journal
in 2002. “What happens is when the etching is complete, it frequently left burrs along the indentations, and these burrs were what was making holes in the mattes. They handed me a burnishing tool, and I rubbed the burrs off the edge of the plate.”

The men standing around the table couldn’t believe what they’d just seen.

“Who is this kid?” they asked Jerry Iger.

Iger responded without missing a beat.

“He’s my new production man.”

Eisner, of course, had no interest in the production end of the business. He and Iger talked all the way back to the
Wow
offices, where Iger took a closer look at Eisner’s portfolio. He liked what he saw and asked what Eisner might be able to do for his magazine. Eisner proposed doing an adventure series modeled after the kind of story that H. Rider Haggard wrote for the pulps. Iger gave him the go-ahead. The piece would appear in
Wow
’s August 1936 issue. More significant, Eisner would get a crack at illustrating that same issue’s cover.

Energized by this unexpected success, Eisner responded with a story about a heroic character named Scott Dalton, a sort of precursor to Indiana Jones. Eisner hoped the feature would be a regular installment in the magazine. His cover painting, also of Dalton, depicted a handsome, blond-haired hero, his shirt open to the waist and a holster at his side, waving a smoking pistol in the air. Eisner also revived a couple of characters he’d created while still at Clinton High—
Harry Karry
(then called
Harry Carey
), a detective strip that he’d originally hoped would work for the syndicate, and
The Flame
, a buccaneer adventure strip heavily influenced by Milton Caniff. Eisner would always be known as an artist with more ideas and energy than time, and as a nineteen-year-old looking at a future that had been a dream only a couple of years ago, he was ready to prove to the world that a new, formidable comics artist had arrived.

The euphoria was short-lived. After failing to make a dent in what was proving to be a rapidly growing and saturated market,
Wow
suspended publication following its fourth issue. A depressed Bill Eisner returned to the Bronx and considered his next move.

In the beginning, comics weren’t intended to be highbrow entertainment. They’d started in the late 1800s and early 1900s as strips or single-panel newspaper entries and, over the course of the next three decades, entertained newspaper readers while businessmen schemed over how to make them more profitable. The comic book itself was a happy accident, its appearance the result of a happenstance. In
Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book
, Gerard Jones described the setting in which the comic book was born as “counter-cultural, lowbrow, idealistic, prurient, pretentious, mercenary, forward-looking, and ephemeral, all in the same instant.”

When Joseph Pulitzer began publishing
Hogan’s Alley
, generally regarded as America’s first comic strip, in the
New York World
in 1895, the strip was strictly populist fare, a circulation booster aimed at the masses at a time when the circulation wars among the New York newspapers were fought with no holds barred. The comic’s central character, an unnamed boy known by readers as “the Yellow Kid” (for the yellow nightshirt-type garb that he wore every day), was a kind of street urchin capable of getting into all kinds of mischief, with or without the help of his ragtag bunch of friends. Kids and adults could laugh at him, not so much because he was innately funny or clever, but because no matter where they hailed from, he was everything they were not. Heavy immigration had divided New York’s neighborhoods, and to readers, the Yellow Kid, although never identified as being from any particular European background, was the kid who lived two blocks away—backward, uneducated, from some other country, capable of only poor or broken English, a little dirty (and possibly smelly), always in some kind of trouble, and facing a future you wouldn’t wish on your own kids. Subtle social commentary ran like an undercurrent in his daily travails.

The Yellow Kid was a huge hit, so much so that William Randolph Hearst, after buying the
New York Journal
, made certain, when raiding Pulitzer’s staff, that he managed to secure the
Hogan’s Alley
strip and the services of its creator, Richard Felton Outcault. A lot of screaming, finger-pointing, and litigation followed, with Pulitzer even going so far as to publish his own Yellow Kid feature, written and drawn by another cartoonist. But by this point there were enough dopey kids, foggy-minded immigrants, stump-jumping hillbillies, stereotyped African-Americans, and confused souls to go around. Such comic strips as
Happy Hooligan
,
Katzenjammer Kids
,
Hairbreadth Harry
,
Skippy
,
Barney Google and Snuffy Smith
,
Bringing Up Father
,
Mutt & Jeff
, and a host of others captured the fancies of New York readers and, with the development of the newspaper syndicates, the rest of the country. Soon,
Little Orphan Annie
,
Krazy Kat
, and
Thimble Theatre
, all heavy influences on Will Eisner, elevated the comic strip to a higher artistic level. Newspapers ran as many of these black-and-white comic strips as they could squeeze in on weekdays, but the comics’ strongest appeal fell on Sundays, when color versions of these same strips ran in separate sections of the newspapers. The humorous content of most of these comics sections led people to label them “the funny papers,” later shortened to “the funnies.”

But it wasn’t all jokes, slapstick, and lowbrow humor. Beginning with Winsor McCay’s
Little Nemo in Slumberland
in 1905, comics combined classic storytelling with realistic—even surrealistic—artwork, and with stories continuing from day to day, these comic strips played a significant role in their newspapers’ circulations. These strips were filled with action, adventure, danger, romance, flights of imagination, and, in the cases of
Buck Rogers
and
Flash Gordon
, speculation on the future. The popularity of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s
Tarzan
novels led to a comic strip adaptation. Chester Gould’s
Dick Tracy
introduced crime and detective stories, later to become a comic book staple, to the newspaper strip. Young Bill Eisner followed these and other strips and saw the potential for making comics creative outlets for serious stories. He drew a connection between the prose he read in pulp magazines and sequential art, rendered in the supreme draftsmanship of such artists as Milton Caniff and Alex Raymond.

The comic book as we know it today didn’t exist in America until 1929, when George Delacorte issued the
Funnies
, a weekly tabloid publishing comic strips that hadn’t made the grade with the newspapers. It featured all original material but failed to catch on with readers. Prior to that, comic books were strictly reprint vehicles, packaging previously published newspaper strips such as
Little Nemo in Slumberland
,
Mutt & Jeff
, or
Buster Brown
into cheaply produced magazines meant to compete with pulp magazines on newsstands. Retailers found uses for comic books as well, reprinting newspaper strips into small booklets and handing them out as promotional giveaways. Publishers of pulp and girlie magazines, clawing away at one another for every dime they could wrestle from consumers, couldn’t help but notice the upswing in these books’ popularity at a time when their publications were in a downturn.

Enter Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, a character so colorful that he might have sprung from the pulps themselves—or, to go further back in time, the dimestore novels. A master of self-promotion and tall tales, Wheeler-Nicholson was in his mid-forties by the time he made his presence known on the comics scene in 1934—and with his Panama hats, cigarette holder, fashionable suits, and cane, he was quite the presence. According to the legend—and one could never be certain what was fact and what was fiction with the Major—Wheeler-Nicholson had fought Pancho Villa in Mexico before earning his rank while serving in the cavalry during World War I. He’d gone on to fight the Bolsheviks in Russia, married a Swedish countess, and survived an assassination attempt, during which he was shot in the head. He’d also survived a court-martial, which he instigated when he complained to the wrong people, including President Warren Harding, about practices in the military. Back in the States, he published a book and scads of magazine and newspaper articles about his adventures, then decided to try his luck at publishing comics. Problem was, he was a poor businessman and often had very little money—an issue that would plague him throughout his spotty business career. He always found a way to get by—but barely.

Still, his contribution to comics was noteworthy. His comic book,
New Fun
, a thirty-six-page magazine featuring all new material, initially appeared in 1934 and ran for six issues until a lack of interest forced it out of existence. Wheeler-Nicholson wasn’t concerned with the comic book’s value as a periodical; instead, he hoped that the syndicates would look at his books’ contents and sign the comics they liked for regular inclusion in newspapers. It wasn’t a bad idea, and it might have worked if he’d had quality work to offer. As it was, he operated on a shoestring budget, picking up newspaper strips that nobody wanted and advertising for submissions from up-and-comers looking for a chance to break into comics and willing to take next to nothing to do so. Aesthetically, the books weren’t much—the Major couldn’t afford color except for the covers, and the contributions tended to be amateurish—but
New Fun
served as a marker, evidence of the possibilities for a well-financed publisher willing to take a chance on original material. Wheeler-Nicholson lost two editors because he couldn’t afford to pay them, but he was just sly and charming enough to talk his creditors and contributors into floating him long enough for another issue.