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 The YEARS in which Will Eisner grew up were formative ones for comics. Born March 6, 1917 in New York City, Eisner read newspaper comic strips as a boy, which had by that time been a popular form of entertainment for some years. When Eisner began following the "funnies", many of what are now considered the classics of the golden age had not yet debuted. And the term "comic book", which would ultimately play such a momentous role in his life, had not yet been coined.
"By the time I was eight, I was drawing," Eisner said recently. "It was
something my father encouraged me to do, because he was something
of an artist — a failed artist, if you will, but he always
thought highly of art and wanted to see me pursue it. My father
used to reminisce that I was eight when I began drawing all the
time, and I would always use my drawing to tell stories." For Eisner's
mother, however, the only good art was art that had market potential.
When Eisner discusses his parents, it becomes apparent where his
own duality originates. His father, born in Vienna, was a man who
valued creativity and art, and who himself plied his trade as a
backdrop painter for vaudeville and the Jewish theatre. His mother,
conceived in Romania and born on the boat that brought her to America,
was a pragmatic, down-to-earth woman who fretted that her eldest
son would fritter himself away; he was simply being quixotic and
had to be brought back to his senses. Her question was, how to dissuade
young Willie from art? Eisner is truly his parents' child: one part
hard-nosed businessman and one part inveterate dreamer.
"Although my father was not what you or I would call 'literate'
in the popular sense, he was literate in his own way," Eisner said.
"He used to buy books because he appreciated the classics. And through
that, I got early exposure to the classics, for which I eventually
became very grateful. One of his best-loved books was a biography
of Julius Caesar, and for that book I did a drawing of Brutus murdering
Caesar. It was crude and gory, but my father really was proud."
To Eisner' s mother, making a career from art was unimaginable.
"It was my mother who was the level-headed one in the family. My father
was a dreamer, and was always getting into some scheme or another,
none of which paid off. But my mother had a very no-nonsense approach
to things. If I showed her a painting, she would ask me how much
it was worth. She actively tried to discourage me from pursuing
art as a career, being certain I'd starve. And she would be ashamed
to tell her friends I was an artist; to her, it would be like telling
them I was a pornographer."
To add to his lower-middle-class family's modest coffers, Eisner got a job
selling newspapers on Wall Street, and this also stoked a fire that
was burning within him. "I got to see all the comics every day,
from all the newspapers that were then being published in New York,"
he said. "I would take home with me at least five or six papers
at the end of every day, and it was during that time that some of
the field' s alltime greats were doing some of their best work.
"I avidly followed the work of artists like Popeye's
E.C. Segar — although then his strip was called Thimble
Theatre, George Herriman, and Lyman
Young, who did an adventure strip called Tim Tyler's
Luck. The adventure strips especially were very, very exciting
for me, and around the time I started reading them, they were entering
their heyday. It was a wonderful time for them."
Eisner said he also savored the work of the cartoonists who ran in the upper-crust
periodicals such as The Saturday Evening Post and Collier's.
Later, he would unsuccessfully try to break into those rarefied
markets.
Eisner began reading comic strips during a time when
they had tremendous popularity and a powerful grip on the public's
imagination — much more so than today. A popular skip such
as The Gumps by Sidney Smith or Little
Orphan Annie by Harold Gray could bring immense
wealth and fame to its creator, and newspaper publishers openly
indulged in all manner of chicanery to attract top artists. "The
comics were acknowledged as both circulation-builders and as a tool
that would provide the paper with a continuity of readership, although
I only learned this later," Eisner said.
"When I was eight years old, I loved them for themselves."
Although the comic strips Eisner enthusiastically devoured each day provided
him with what he described as his "first exciting reading material"
in the early 1920s, he didn' t experience an epiphany that he knew
would drive him to succeed in that magical world. "I don't think
anyone gets hit by a bolt of lightning and decides 'Ah! I'm going
to be a cartoonist,' or whatever," he said. "I think one tends to
move in the direction of one' s abilities. The skill with which
you can best express yourself is what eventually develops into your
lifelong skill. For example, I was a poor athlete, so I couldn't
use athletics to push my own ego. But I could draw, so I developed
that."
Art was the focus of Eisner' s zeal while he was a
student, but he had other influences as well. As a boy, his appetite
for reading was voracious, and some of it helped form the basis
for the philosophy that would shape much of the work he would produce
over his career. "My first true literary influences were the stories
by Horatio Alger," he said. "This was the first
reading I did where I remember being aware of the story content
and what was being said. Alger's message was that you can rise above
your circumstances and find success through your own diligence and
hard work. And as a kid in the ghetto, that spoke directly to me.
And the stories were about an average person triumphing against
obstacles, and that' s a theme that I' ve returned to many times
in my work. It was powerful stuff to me then. They still stick with
me; they had a tremendous effect on me."
Eisner was also attracted to the pulps. "I remember just devouring
the pulps from the time I was 10 or so," he said. "And I was always
going to the movies, which back then were a very inexpensive form
of entertainment. The movies were my Saturday afternoons. They showed
the serials, which were very much like pulps, with characters like
the Black Arrow. But it was mainly my fascination with pulp magazines
that gave me a sense of storytelling. Really, at that time, the
pulps formed the basis of popular storytelling. They were everywhere,
and I read as many as I could.
"In fact, I recall my father forbidding me to read what he considered washy
literature. He thought it would warp my mind. In our building, a
policeman who lived upstairs from us subscribed to Flynn's Detective,
which was a popular pulp of the time. And on his way out of the
building in the morning, he would drop the issue in front of our
door so I could come out and get it, and I would shove it under
my pillow. It was like smuggling contraband."
When Eisner entered DeWitt Clinton High School, both
his artistic and writing skills flourished under the tutelage of
the top-notch staff the school employed. (Bob Kane, who would
later gain renown as the creator of Batman, was a fellow
student.) Here, Eisner created comic strips, art directed magazines
created stage designs, illustrated various magazines published at
his high school, and in general honed the skills that he would rely
on so profoundly in a few short years. "My teachers were not particularly
enamored with comic strips or the fact that I was fascinated by
them, even though I was sort of a big-man-on-campus because I was
one of the better artists there," he said. "They were pushing me
toward illustration, and I did some illustration for the school
yearbook and other school publications.
"It would be hard for me to overstate the depth of the effect my high school
experience had on me," he said. "It meant everything to me, and
in large part was responsible for the person I became and continue
to be. I had the opportunity to try so many things, to find the
things that suited me the best. I tried for a while to be a gallery
painter, because I thought that was the pinnacle of what an artist
could aspire to. It didn't last, though — I found myself, as
I do today, always looking for the next big thing. Looking back,
I can see that that' s always been my stock in trade — moving
on to the next project that I can immerse myself in."
Among his early publishing ventures was a project
he entered into with a classmate, Ken Ginniger.
"We wanted to publish a very snooty literary magazine — I guess
to be properly snooty it would have to be called a 'literary journal'
— because it was a very intellectually trendy thing to do back
then. We called it The Lion and Unicorn because it was something
very literary-sounding. And it was full of arty drawings and verse,
and we put in some Marcel Proust and Albert
Camus. It also had some erotic writing and poetry, or at
least what then would have been considered erotic. When it came
time to prepare the plates for printing, it came to our attention
that using metal plates for printing artwork was quite a costly
proposition. And it was that sort of problem-solving that made these
experiences so valuable to me. What I did was leam to cut wood engravings,
which the printer used along with the typeset material.
"That woodcut experience was important to me, because it taught me the value of
learning to work in other media," Eisner added. "It' s something
I still talk to my students about, not to resist dabbling in other
media. They all have value."
Although Eisner sharpened his already formidable skills at DeWitt Clinton,
it was in summer school that he was challenged to aspire to new
heights. He attended the Art Students League one summer, not because
his family could afford the tuition fees, but because of his prodigious
talent. He was welcomed because he brought with him fellow students
who could afford tuition. While at the ASL, Eisner had the opportunity
to study drawing under the direction of the legendary anatomist
George Bridgman and painting under the redoubtable Robert
Brachman. "But apart from that, I was always drawing," Eisner
said. "It seemed like I never stopped. It was part of my self-education,
which continues to this day."
At 19, Eisner left school and became gainfully employed, but not very. "I got
a job in the advertising department of the New York American,"
Eisner said. I worked the graveyard shift, from nine at night until
five in the morning. The ads I was working on were very small, one
or two inches high and one column wide, and I would do any art the
ads required, and some hand-lettering, which I was not good at.
I've had to work hard on my lettering; I started out as a very poor
letterer."
Eisner said this job had one important influence on him — the hours. "Since
I began work at nine at night, I would have my 'lunch,' as it were,
in the wee hours," he said. "My mother would have packed me something
like a sandwich or a danish, and I would go outside with my lunch
and sit by a dock and watch the people working. I saw all sorts
of characters because of the odd hours, and I learned a lot about
shadows and lighting at the same time."
Since the job at the American was not entirely to Eisner's liking,
to put it mildly, he left to fend for himself as a freelancer. It
was during this period, 1935 and 1936, that he was picking up a
few accounts as well as putting in time as a printer's assistant.
One account represented his first professional comics work, since
he got paid for it. He created the art for an insert inside a hand-cleanser
called Gre-olvent. "I recall getting that job through the printer
I was working for, so it was largely a matter of timing and luck,
as so many things are," he said.
At the same time Eisner had experienced the heady thrill of creating
comics and getting paid for it, he tried to crack the lucrative
magazine cartoon market. "I never had much luck at it, but I kept
trying because that market was perceived as the top. Whenever editors
critiqued my work, they would tell me it looked like comic-book
work. And they were right."
Alger's brand of "up by your bootstraps" philosophy was a powerful motivator
for Eisner, who espoused it unequivocally. He saw becoming a successfully
syndicated newspaper cartoonist as a one-way ticket out of the ghetto,
a way to escape the grim circumstances that relentlessly gripped
many others around him. "Comic strips were moneymakers, and more
than anything else, they represented a — quote — steady
income," he said. "In times when a steady income was a radical concept,
that meant something. I remember my mother saying to me that I should
become an art teacher because I would have a steady income. And
I knew what she meant by that. It was the Depression. I was determined
to pursue comic art so I could provide a steady income for myself
and my family, and also so I could move up a little bit."
Eisner thought he had moved up a couple of rungs on the ladder when he was hired
as art director on Eve, a magazine whose target audience
was affluent Jewish women. It' s easy to imagine Eisner, who loves
a bawdy joke, thinking he was putting on a good one when he would
strew his drawings of pugilists and other such inappropriately violent
offerings among the otherwise dainty contents of an issue. He was
shown the door. "I guess I was feeling my oats, what can I say?"
he chuckled.
 Eisner never perceived any of his stumbles as setbacks — they were
all learning experiences, and much of what he learned was about
to play a crucial role when he had his first meeting with the late
Samuel Maxwell "Jerry" Iger, the man who would later become
Eisner's first business partner, and with whom Eisner would begin
his career as a creator of formidable versatility, talent and savvy.
"I remember my first meeting with Iger," Eisner said.
"I had heard about a magazine called Wow! Now, Wow!
was not really a comic book, it was a magazine that published some
comics material. And it was published by a guy named John Henle,
whose main business was manufacturing shirts, but his real ambition
was to be a publisher, so he had started Wow! I went to the
offices of the magazine, portfolio in hand, and I met with Iger,
who was the editor. He was having a bad day. I recall he was on
the phone with his engraver, who was having problems. So Iger didn't
have time to look at the material I'd brought to show him, but he
invited me to walk over to the engraver to check out the problem.
Fortunately, I was able to solve his problem on the spot, and Iger
offered me a job as his assistant. I turned down the offer, explaining
to him that I really wanted to do comics, not work as an assistant
editor."
But it was the beginning of a working relationship. "I sold Iger a few features.
The page rate, which I forget, was nothing I was going to get rich
on, but I felt like I was sitting on top of the world; I thought
it was a huge conquest. A few months later, Wow! folded.
And even though I was getting a small page rate, I ended up being
owed money I never collected. Iger was let go, of course. There's
no need for an editor at a shirt-manufacturing business."
But Wow! (the full title was Wow! What A
Magazine, as distinguished from the Wow comic book published
by Fawcett from 1941–948) served as an important touchstone
for Eisner. While working for the magazine, he saw several of his
strips hit print, including a recasting of one he had done while
at DeWitt Clinton, Harry Karry, as well as a strip called
The Flame, which he would later reprise as his remarkable
Hawks of the Sea. In the four issues published, Eisner had
art in every issue and did the cover of the third.
(Iger himself is an individual who warrants more than
a footnote in the history of comics, as it was his salesmanship
that opened the door for Eisner and him to set up a shop that produced
material expressly created for comic books; theirs was one of the
earliest shops to do so, and in the process they helped shape the
fledgling field. Thirteen-and-ahalf years Eisner's senior, Iger
worked as a cartoonist for the New York American, the very
paper that would ten years later employ Will Eisner. While editor
at the short-lived Wow!, Iger published early work by Eisner
and Bob Kane, which surely merits him with a discerning eye,
as well as for open-minded editing.)
Eisner, who respected Iger's abilities as a salesman and believed he shared
Eisner's own belief that comic books were a medium laden with creative
and commercial possibilities, approached Iger with the proposal
that the two enter into a partnership to produce material for the
burgeoning field.
In doing so, the groundwork was laid for the creation
of The Spirit.
•
Author's note: I would like to thank Cat
Yronwode, who has done more than any other individual to
educate readers about Will Eisner's life and I am grateful for her
research. TH
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