When WOW magazine folded
after only four issues, Eisner formed a partnership with
friend Jerry Iger, and the Eisner-Iger Studio was born.
The studio was a veritable comics factory,
churning out strips in a variety of genres in the hopes
of placing them with American newspapers. Towards this end,
Eisner-Iger recruited a number of young artists who would
go on to become comics' legends in their own right: Bob
Kane, the creator of Batman,
Lou Fine, and Jack Kurtzberg (later Jack
Kirby), co-creator of Spider-Man
and The Fantastic Four, and Mort
Meskin.
The most enduring of Eisner's work to
come out of this period is Hawks
of the Seas, the high-seas buccaneer strip
that had begun as The Flame.
While partnered with Jerry Iger, Eisner
created Sheena, Queen of the Jungle,
Yarko the Great and soon after, Dollman
and Blackhawk. Eisner also famously
turned down a crude submission called Superman
by equally young creators Jerry Siegel
and Joe Shuster. An autobiographical account
of those formative years can be found in Eisner's
The Dreamer.
* * *
The 19-year-old Eisner, determined to forge
a victory from the rubble of Wow!, responded to the
magazine's cancellation by displaying the tenacity and inventiveness
that would mark his career.
His first step was to approach Jerry
Iger, Wow!'s suddenly unemployed
editor, about forming a partnership to capitalize on what
both men believed to be the prosperous future of original
comic book material, which had heretofore comprised mainly
repackagings of previously published newspaper comic strips.
Eisner's plan: He would create the material, and Iger would
peddle it to client publishers.
Iger was initially reluctant. Embroiled
in a divorce, he wanted to avoid sinking money into what
was undeniably an entrepreneurial venture, risky given the
times. Sensing Iger's hesitation, Eisner attempted to reassure
him by, among other efforts, fibbing about his age. Eisner
was 19, but he told Iger he was 25.
"He found out when we drew up the papers
of incorporation, and I had to tell the truth about my age,
but by then things were far enough along that it didn't
matter," Eisner said. Though not well off by any definition,
Eisner put together the cash — $35, which covered the
first few months' office rent — that enabled the partnership
to get off the ground.
With Eisner's cash, the two rented office
space on 40th Street in a building that still stands. "They
were very small offices, and they were generally rented
out to bookies and other fly-by-night operators," Eisner
said.
Eisner and Iger formed their shop at a
propitious time, and in fact the timing helped pave the
way for the success of their young company. After years
of being the 800-pound gorilla of the periodical world,
the pulps' sales were faltering. In 1935-36, all periodicals
faced lower circulation. Some of the publishers hoped original
comics material could serve as a nostrum.
One of Eisner's oft-recounted tales involved
a pulp publisher — whose name was lost to time —
who came to them in desperate need of original comic material,
and who was willing to pay the reasonable price of five
dollars per page for the finished product. But first, the
publisher had to be sure Eisner and Iger's outfit was capable
of producing an adequate supply of material — he wanted
to know how many artists were on staff. Eisner told Jerry
to tell him they had five guys, and Eisner made good on
it by drawing material in five different styles, signing
five different names!
In short order, Eisner assembled a staff
of older, experienced artists who were prepared to learn
how to tell a story on a page, and young, hungry talent,
thrilled to get in on the ground floor of the new medium.
At the ripe age of 19, Eisner was in the vanguard of it.
Staffers would eventually include Jack Kirby, who
was then working under his given name Kurtzberg; Lou
Fine, whose style could at times appear similar to Eisner's;
Bob Kane, a highschool classmate of Eisner's; Dick
Briefer, Chuck Mazoujian, who would later follow
Eisner to the Quality shop and who would gain more renown
as the artist of the Lady Luck portion
of the Spirit sections; Bill Bossert, who later married
staff writer Toni Blum; Bob Powell, perhaps
best known for his work on Mr. Mystic
in the Spirit section; and George Tuska, who went
on to do a great deal of work for Marvel Comics.
Once the foundation was in place, Iger
set out to secure work that would keep the staff busy churning
out material. Soon, contracts began rolling in. Building
on their reputation developed by producing quality work
for pulp publishers, Eisner and Iger began creating stories
for the first wave of comic book publishers. One of the
first significant clients was the new publishing house founded
by Victor Fox, who had previously been a bean counter
at National Periodicals (now DC Comics), and who decided
to strike out on his own to cash in on what appeared to
be comic books' imminent bonanza.
The first package Eisner and Iger's shop
created for Fox had specific stipulations: The lead character
had to possess super powers, wear a red costume, have a
chest insignia, etc. It was obvious that Fox was requesting
a knock-off of Superman, which had
appeared in mid-1938 and was fueling the comic book boom.
Eisner, who had little training in copyright law but plenty
of common sense, balked at infringing so blatantly on National's
property. Iger tried to assuage Eisner's misgivings by arguing
that the two men had little desire to go hungry. Fox himself
dubbed the character Wonder Man.
 |
| Cover to the short-lived Wonder Comics, starring Wonder Man (1939). |
It took National's legal department no
time at all to pull the plug on Wonder Man.
One night, Fox called Eisner to his office and told him
that when the time came for Eisner to take the witness stand
in National's instant law suit, Eisner was to swear that
there was no intent to copy Superman.
Eisner replied that, indeed, he was not copying; rather,
he was merely following Fox' s dictates. Less than pleased,
Fox informed Eisner that if he told the court the truth,
he would never see the $3,000 Fox then owed Eisner and Iger.
Although $3,000 was more than Eisner had ever seen in his
life, he told the truth on the stand, and Fox lost the suit.
Wonder Man died, and Fox made good
on his threat to stiff Eisner and Iger. The two thought
their young company was doomed.
Fortunately, Fiction House came to the
rescue. Fiction House, a pulp publisher, had been seeking
a way to carve its own niche in comic books. So it contracted
with Eisner and Iger, and from that was born Sheena,
Queen of the Jungle. Sheena
debuted in Jungle Comics, Fiction
House's comic book complement to its jungle oriented pulp
magazines. Sheena became popular
and enjoyed a run through 1953. Eisner conceived the character,
drew the cover for the first issue, and had Mort Meskin,
a staffer, render the interior art. Eisner said he created
Sheena as a female counterpart to
Tarzan, and that he cribbed the
title from H. Ryder Haggard's novel She.
 |
| Panel from Eisner's pirate series Hawks of the Seas (1939, Fiction House). |
For Fiction House, Eisner created a wide
variety of characters and concepts, the best-remembered
of which are Sheena and Hawks
of the Seas. But others include the SF-oriented
The Diary of Dr. Hayward, the "bigfoot"
rendered Uncle Otto, and Sports
Shorts. Eisner said that at one point he was
single-handedly producing so much of the content for Fiction
House's Jumbo Comics, he deliberately
adopted a crude rendering style for some stories, lest his
client become upset that the production of one of their
most popular comic books relied so heavily on one man.
Using pseudonyms became a way of life
for Eisner during these years. Eisner used them with gusto,
incorporating into his work such imaginative noms de
plume as Mr. Heck, Willis B. Rensie ("Eisner"
spelled backwards), W. Morgan Thomas (used on Mr.
Mystic), Erwin Willis, Wm. Erwin,
and a host of others.
As Eisner and Iger's contract work increased,
the two evolved a comic book equivalent of an assembly line.
A job traveled through the shop and each employee tightened
a bolt or inked a line, and at the end of the line there
was a completed story. Eisner's role was to create new characters,
edit copy and art, write stories for others, and write and
draw stories for himself. Typically, when launching a new
character, Eisner would fly solo for the first couple of
stories, then turn it over to one of his associates. This
method was the only way Eisner was able to sustain the sizable
output — around 100 pages at its peak — required
of his company each month.
Eisner was never reluctant to improve
on what one of his shop men had done. Talented greats such
as Kirby and Fine often found Eisner superimposing his own
work onto their own in sequences that he didn't feel passed
muster.
Eisner's success made a believer out of
his mother, who had despaired that her son would starve
if he chose to pursue an art career. It was Eisner's work
that was putting food on the family table. "The family dynamics
changed with the success the shop was having," he said.
"My father was still out of work — it was still the
Depression, despite the fact that I was doing okay —
and I was supporting the family. That was all right with
them. My father was pleased that I was using my art to make
a living, and while my mother had no real aesthetic judgments,
she was happy that I was doing well."
* * *
At 22 years of age, Will Eisner
had fashioned the kind of success that many of his colleagues
could only envy — never mind the fact that the year
was 1939, and the United States was still economically wobbly
from the Depression. Eisner and Iger, as well as their staff
of writers and artists, were all making money, and the future
for Eisner, already acknowledged by client publishers as
one of the most gifted young artists in the business, looked
promising.
But even at this early stage, Eisner was
engaged in what would become a lifelong trait — that
of peering at the next mountain, longing for the fresh challenges
that would confront him there.
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This article in its unaltered form was
originally published in The Spirit: The Origin Years
#1-4 (Kitchen Sink Press, 1992). Text © Tom Heintjes. All
rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
