Will Eisner (5 page)

The challenge with comic books, as with all other forms of publication, was in the printing and distribution. Wheeler-Nicholson had connections with
McCall’s
magazine until his luck and money disappeared. Other comic book producers boasted of connections that reduced financial risk. Maxwell C. Gaines, a salesman for the Eastern Color Printing Company and, later, founder of the formidable EC Comics company, and Eastern’s sales manager, Harry Wildenberg, had teamed up in 1933 to publish
Funnies on Parade
, a collection of reprints designed as radio show giveaways for such sponsors as Wheatena and Canada Dry. Their access to Eastern’s printing press during the third shift, when the presses were quiet, made publication possible. The comic books were free to customers until the two decided to test a paying market by affixing a ten-cent price sticker on the cover and selling them on newsstands. To their surprise, a lot of people were willing to pay for reprints of comics they’d already read.

New titles, produced by both big companies like Dell and fly-by-night operators, surfaced in the wake of Wheeler-Nicholson’s
New Fun
. Sales figures, although not overwhelming, moved upward, to the quarter-of-a-million-copy range—enough to encourage aspiring publishers like John Henle to take a flier on issuing a magazine like the ill-fated
Wow.

Bill Eisner had watched the birth and growth of the comic book business, and as he sat up in the Bronx, pondering what he would do after the failure of
Wow, What a Magazine!
, he reasoned that there had to be a way for him to capitalize on the popularity of this new entertainment medium. He was confident of his ability, which, he judged correctly, was equal to or better than what he was seeing on the newsstands. All he had to do was find the proper entrée into the business.

And that realization—that it
was
a business—provided his answer. For years, he’d listened to his mother harp about how
art
never paid off and how he needed to pursue a career with a need for his services; he’d worked hard at developing as an artist, with the hope that somebody out there would appreciate his talent and reward it with steady work. But artists could be found anywhere and everywhere, so to be needed, Eisner suddenly concluded, he’d have to become a businessman. He would provide a service the comic book publishers badly needed.

And the need, he saw, was right in front of him. With the increasingly large number of comic books hitting the newsstands every month, publishers were bound to discover a shortage of material to reprint. There would be an urgent call for new comics to fill the books, and this was something Eisner could provide. What would happen if he wrote and illustrated camera-ready stories for the publishers? He would be his own company, beholden to no individual publisher, and if he could drum up enough accounts, he could make a serious go of it in the field. As a packager, he wouldn’t have to worry about how to get his material printed or distributed; that would be up to his customers.

The problem, he realized, was in his business connections: he had none. He needed an aggressive salesman to contact companies and push his art, somebody with connections and experience in the business, somebody who could do the legwork and leave him with the time to create comics. That person would have to be available immediately, and he would have to be willing to work with a young, relatively inexperienced artist. Eisner knew of only one such person: Jerry Iger.

Eisner gave it some more thought, conducted additional research and developed his plan, talked it over with his parents, and finally, despite reservations about working with a man who on even his best days could be difficult to deal with, he gave Iger a call.

Since the demise of
Wow
, Iger had been doing nothing but watch his money disappear. He had appreciated Eisner’s enthusiasm when they’d worked together, but he’d knocked around enough to know that he was in a really bad spot. With a pending divorce, he was looking at losing a sizable chunk of his money and possessions, and losing both a wife and a job in short order had left his motivation at a low ebb. When Eisner called and suggested that they get together for lunch, he wasn’t optimistic about anything productive coming out of the meeting.

The two met at a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant on Forty-third Street, across the street from the
New York Daily News
press shop. Eisner would eventually depict the meeting in
The Dreamer
, his roman à clef graphic novella about his early days in comics, as well as in numerous interviews. As he recalled, both of them were unbelievably broke, yet even after listening to Eisner’s plans, Iger was hesitant about entering into a business partnership. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be involved in the kind of company Eisner was proposing, but even if he was interested, he had nothing to contribute in seed money. That was no problem, Eisner countered: he had $15 he’d earned from a freelance advertising job he’d done for Gre-Solvent, a grease-cutting soap, and he could borrow an equal amount from his father. The thirty bucks would get him a couple months’ rent in a small room in an old office building on Madison Avenue and Forty-third Street. The place was a popular spot for bookies needing only enough room for a desk, chair, and telephone; and the room Eisner was looking at, about ten by ten, wasn’t going to give its two occupants more than enough space to shoehorn in a desk, drawing board, and maybe a filing cabinet and coatrack. Still, it was a place to start.

The firm, Eisner & Iger, Ltd.—“my name was first because I was the big money man,” Eisner quipped later—was born. It would be a fifty-fifty partnership, with no outside owners or stockholders—not that anyone at that point would have been crazy enough to invest in the company.

Feeling every bit the hotshot, Eisner insisted on paying for lunch. The bill came to $1.90, a nickel less than what Eisner had in his pocket, leaving him with just enough to catch a subway back to the Bronx, but not enough to avoid admonishment from his new business partner.

“Y’know, Billy, that wasn’t nice,” Iger said as the two were leaving the restaurant. “You didn’t leave a tip.”

Eisner shrugged him off, claiming he’d forgotten. He had other things holding his attention. For one, before formal business papers were drawn up, he’d have to come up with a way to tell Iger that he’d lied about his age when the two of them first met. He wasn’t twenty-five, as he’d claimed then; at nineteen, he was barely old enough to hang out and drink in one of Iger’s favorite watering holes.

The fifteen dollars earned from this ad, Eisner’s first paying job, along with a small loan from his father, financed the opening of the Eisner & Iger Studio. (Will Eisner Collection, the Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum)

Eisner’s idea of starting a comics packaging company was not original, nor was the Eisner & Iger shop the first of its kind. Harry “A” Chesler Jr., a short, stocky, transplanted Chicago advertising salesman, already ran a shop at 276 Fifth Avenue. Called “the Chiseler” by some of the artists working for him, Chesler was one of the more colorful characters populating a business known for its colorful characters. No one knew what the “A” stood for—he said it meant “anything”—or why he chose to bracket his middle initial in quotation marks, but, like the “Jr.” tacked on at the end of his name (he wasn’t one), these were suitably quirky ornaments, as inextricable from the man as the cheap cigars he was constantly smoking or the derby that he perched on the back of his head and refused to remove, even indoors. He stationed his desk at the front of the studio, near the elevator and stairway, so no one could enter or leave without walking past him.

Chesler had tried his luck at comic book publishing with very little success. Under the name Chesler Publications, Inc., he had published
Star Comics
and, in a new twist in the business,
Star Ranger
, a book devoted entirely to westerns. Both fizzled at the newsstands. Part of his problem could have been format—the entries were very brief, only a page or two, more in the style of newspaper strips than the fully developed stories that Eisner would favor—but whatever the reason, Chesler dumped the titles and concentrated on his shop. As comics historian Ron Goulart would note, “Chesler never did manage to produce a really successful comic book of his own, [but] his various shops developed and trained a great many artists who became successful after they left the field.”

Depending upon the person you were talking to, Chesler was either a no-nonsense taskmaster demanding maximum effort for minimum pay or a tough but reasonable patrician who, on occasion, could display a heart of gold.

Joe Kubert would remember Chesler—and Will Eisner, for that matter—as being open to letting a young kid hang around the shop and learn the craft by watching the other artists at work.

“Harry was extremely kind to me,” Kubert said. “When I first started out as a kid, I learned all the addresses of the publishers in New York. I attended the High School of Music and Art, which was up on 135th Street and Compton Avenue in Manhattan. And Norman Maurer, a buddy attending school with me, who was later my partner, and I would make the rounds from place to place. One of the places we stopped off at was Harry Chesler’s. I went up there with my work, not knowing what the hell was happening or what was being done there, with the hope that I might get something to do.

“Harry allowed me to come into his place after school, on my way home to Brooklyn. I would stop off there and stay until maybe five, five thirty, and I would do an old script or something that he would put me on. He would tell the other guys, ‘Keep an eye on the kid and help him along.’ It was terrific. It was one of the first situations I found myself in where I was actually sitting next to professional people. This was a nonpaying job, but eventually he gave me five dollars a week for doing nothing. He’d say, ‘Here, kid, buy yourself a couple of hotdogs or something.’ Five dollars a week was a lot of money at that time.”

Carmine Infantino, another artist who would rise to the top of the comics business, had similarly positive memories of dealing with Chesler when he was learning the ropes.

“I loved Harry,” he said. “He had this broken-down studio. You’d take an old-fashioned elevator up to the third or fourth floor, and when you’d get to that floor and the door opened, there, sitting in front of you, was Harry, in front of an old beat-up desk, with a soiled derby on. He gave me money to come up there and sit and watch artists work, which I thought was terrific. It was the Depression, and this guy couldn’t afford it, but he did it. Harry gave me a great break, meeting these interesting artists. I hear all kinds of terrible stories about him, but this was not the man I knew.”

Irwin Hasen, who created single-page sports cartoons for Chesler, experienced one of those terrible stories. “Just don’t work for him,” Hasen said, laughing, when asked about Chesler. Hasen worked in the bullpen with such notables as Mort Meskin, Jack Cole, and Charlie Biro, and while he admitted that Chesler was a “nice guy and a worker,” he bristled when the topic of payment was raised.

“At the end of the week, you’d go up to him and he was like a teacher at a desk,” Hasen recalled. “He would say, ‘How little do you need to live on?’ I swear to God.”

Rather than pay his artists by the page, as was the custom of the day, Chesler paid a flat rate, usually $20 a week, in exchange for all the rights and original artwork produced by his staff. The studio consisted of a large, wide room, with the artists’ and writers’ desks lined up in rows, not unlike a classroom. Pages would be roughed out, penciled, and inked by different workers, assembly-line style, with the pages passed around under Chesler’s watchful eye. Workers were expected to report to work on time and could be docked a day’s pay if they showed up even a few minutes late. For all his reservations about Chesler’s methods of payment, Irwin Hasen conceded that Chesler’s English schoolmaster approach to running a shop was probably necessary. “You needed a guy like that around,” he said, “because he had all these guys working with him and for him.”

Eisner adopted a similar approach to running a shop when Eisner & Iger had expanded to such an extent that he could no longer produce the artwork by himself. He initially brought in his high school buddy Bob Kahn, now going by Bob Kane, to work as freelance on an animal feature called
Peter Pupp
, a Disney cartoon knockoff he’d been developing in his days of freelancing for
Wow
. He brought in writer/artists Gill Fox and Dick Briefer as well. Others, most notably a young artist named Jacob Kurtzberg, came later. Eisner would state, half-seriously, that he ran his shop “pretty much the way a Roman galley operates. I sat at the end of a row of sweating artists.”

Eisner treated his work very seriously, as if comics were a sacred vocation, but he never fooled himself into believing that those working under him felt the same passion for their work. A good number of them, like those toiling for Chesler, aspired to move into commercial art, and for these men, comics represented a steady paycheck, a means of treading water until the effects of the Depression passed and better opportunities opened up. In fact, many of the artists were ashamed of their jobs. You could have studied with the most respected teachers in New York’s finest art schools and be producing work that stood up against the best being rendered by gallery or commercial artists, but when the sun went down and you pulled off your shoes for the night, you still had to live with the knowledge that you were creating something designed, as the disparaging saying went, for “ten-year-old cretins from Kansas City.”