3: TAKING A CHANCE

by
Tom Heintjes

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 his business partner, Jerry Iger, had created a profitable business as packagers of original comic book material purchased by story-starved publishers. 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. And yet...

And yet, indeed. 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. It is noteworthy that even as he worked on The Spirit for 12 years, he was continually using it to devise new creative challenges, such as stories told in song, in nonsense language and in poetry, to name only a very few.

"I could have been very comfortable for many more years at Eisner and Iger, I'm sure," Eisner said recently. "And it was very tempting to do just that, because it was the Depression after all, and you don't turn your back on a sure thing. It just wasn't done." But it was this time.

Of the comics publishers of the late '30s, Quality Comics was one of the most important. The line was published by Everett M. Arnold (though he was always referred to by his very apt nickname, "Busy"). Prior to publishing comic books, Arnold had sold printing presses to the Greater Buffalo Press in Buffalo, N.Y., eventually being employed by them and working his way up to vice president of the company. Greater Buffalo occupies a significant niche in comics history — it was the firm that printed many of the nation's Sunday comics sections, for during those years most newspapers didn't own color press equipment. Greater Buffalo was a competitor to the Eastern Color Printing Company in Waterbury, Connecticut, which had, in May, 1934, given birth to comic books by producing the landmark Famous Funnies #1.

Whether it was this constant exposure to comics or business acumen that led Arnold to form his own comic company is infinitely debatable; for whatever reason, Arnold decided his future lay in the nascent field of comic books, and he tapped George Brenner to edit his line, which would eventually include Smash Comics, Police Comics, National Comics, Plastic Man and Uncle Sam, among others.

"Publishing comic books was a natural progression for Busy. He knew a lot about color printing, and he could get the printing done fairly inexpensively. He also had a lot of friends at SM Distributing, which at the time was a competitor to American News.

"In the early fall of 1939, Arnold called me and asked me to have lunch with him," Eisner said. "Although we weren't doing any packaging for Quality, he knew of us and we knew of him. It was over lunch that he proposed to me the idea of the newspaper section."

Eisner said Arnold was a classic case of the guy who didn't know art, but knew what he liked. As we shall learn, Arnold was nothing if demanding — he knew what he wanted (even if he himself could not supply it), and he was not shy about haranguing Eisner to achieve the level of quality and commercialism he deemed necessary. His technique for cajoling the best work out of his freelancers bordered on a crude attempt at mind control; he had the money necessary to lure any talented person to work for him, and his flattery alternated with his trademark searing criticisms. A strong argument could be mounted that his methods worked; many of the artists working on Quality material — men such as Eisner, Bob Powell, Jack Cole and Lou Fine were men without peer.

Through his long association with Greater Buffalo, Arnold built up an enviable list of associates, one of whom was Henry Martin, an executive vice president and top salesman at the Register & Tribune Syndicate, an offshoot of the Des Moines Register & Tribune, which was owned by the Cowles brothers. Attempting to respond to the syndicate's desire to circulate a feature that would meld comic books and newspapers, Arnold had George Brenner, his editor at Quality, try and develop one. "The syndicate rejected it," Eisner said. "That's when Arnold came to me. By then, I had developed a pretty good reputation, and Henry Martin liked my work. He specifically mentioned that he liked Hawks of the Seas. What he really liked was my reputation of being able to deliver on time.

"As a salesman, Henry Martin was in tune with what was going on among newspapers all over the country," Eisner added. "It was Martin who told Busy about the need and demand for a color Sunday comic book insert. Newspapers perceived comic books as a threat at the time, and they wanted to counteract their popularity. It was a time when comic books were very popular; they were carrying no ads and were making money off sales. It was one of the few publishing ventures that didn't depend on advertising. This popularity was making newspapers nervous; they were afraid of losing their younger readers."

So Arnold proposed that Eisner package a weekly, 16-page comic book section for Quality Comics. There was one catch: It would be a full-time project. Eisner would have to quit Eisner & Iger. Arnold was not interested in dealing with a production shop; he needed to deal with a single creator. By this time, Eisner and Iger employed about a dozen writers and artists, including Jack Kirby, Bob Powell, Chuck Mazoujian, George Tuska, Bill Bossert, Toni Blum, and Dick Briefer; overall, the shop was producing more than 200 pages of comic book material each month. "Leaving Eisner and Iger wasn't easy," Eisner said. "I was making good money, but I've never been able to resist the opportunity to climb new creative mountains.

"I could now break out of the 'ghetto' of comic books and move into the world of mainstream comic strips, which was the Mecca of all cartoonists. Today, adults read comic books, but back then the assumption was that we were writing for children, and all the material I was producing was based on formula, which ceased to be interesting. There was nowhere to go in comic books, and yet I realized that I would be spending the rest of my life in comics. I really believed in the validity of this medium."

Eisner contrasted his ambitions with those of Lou Fine. "Lou had always dreamed of creating fine art for book illustrations, but the opportunities for book illustration were so rare that he got into comics to make money. That's all comics were to him — a way to have an income. And while that aspect was important to me, it was the attraction to the medium that made me want to stay.

"And then, along came this remarkable opportunity that would never come again — the chance to work for newspapers with a mature audience," he said. In his heart, Eisner knew that creating a comic section for the Sunday papers would be a successful venture, as reading the Sunday comics was a sacred ritual for him as well as millions of other youths. "The Sunday papers have always tried to maintain a family-oriented facade, with appeals to all different family members," Eisner said. "I remember when my father would bring the Sunday paper home — my brother Pete and I would spread the comics out on the floor, and we'd lie there for hours on our bellies reading them. My mother would be engrossed in the rotogravure section with all the news about fashions and celebrities, and my father would pore over the financial and sports sections. So the Sunday paper was very much a ritual; it was a kind of cement that held families together."

Once his decision was made, Eisner went about the task of separating from Eisner & Iger. "Iger and I had a corporation, and we had an agreement that if either partner wanted to leave at any time, he had to sell his half to the remaining partner, which protected the remaining partner from having to deal with someone he didn't want to deal with. Iger was always threatening to leave. He was a very mercurial man, very egotistical, and he often felt he was being relegated to the sidelines. And in a way, he was. He was not a creative man, yet he would get very upset because he wasn't included in creation of characters and stories. His orientation was 'Pat and Mike' joke strips. And selling them. He was not in touch with the expanding adventure story comic, but he was good at finding a market.

"He would sometimes put a strain on staff and management relations. He regarded my creative involvement as 'pandering to the artists' and disloyalty to him when clients requested me for editorial discussions. At least twice he offered to leave and then let me talk him into staying. But for the most part, we got along well; each respected the other's contribution to venture.

"As it turned out, I was the first to want to leave the company. I offered my shares to Iger, and he told me I was stupid for trying to get out. I kind of looked up to Iger as a seasoned man — he was 13 years older than me — and here he was telling me it was crazy. He said there was a war coming on, and I was only 21. I was red meat. He told me that if I got drafted, which seemed likely, my venture with Busy would fall apart, and when I got discharged I would have nothing. It was very sobering, but when you're 21 and ambitious and a bit cocksure, you're not easily dissuaded."

Occasionally, Eisner would discuss his career with his father, who harbored a lifelong affinity for the arts, and his father would support whatever Eisner wanted to do. "It was the kind of thing my father would do in a shot, because he was always pursuing a dream, and this had a certain dreamlike quality to it." Eisner's mother was included in these discussions less frequently, because she had always held grave reservations about the viability of Eisner's art career. She had been mollified by his partnership with Iger.

"My mother was a very simple woman who was born very poor, and her life was devoted to the concept of economic security," Eisner said. "We all still carry with us a fear of being economically deprived, but in those days it was even more intense, because there was no safety net. There was no unemployment, no welfare, nothing like that. There were religious organizations that ran soup kitchens, or a relative who might help out. So leaving Eisner & Iger was not the most sensible thing to do. But I wanted very badly to work in mainstream newspapers, so I had to sell to Iger."

When Iger realized that he couldn't change Eisner's mind, he offered him about $20,000 for his half of the company. "He later boasted that he robbed me blind by getting my half that cheaply. That year alone, we had split $25,000 between us, so $20,000 was a good deal for him. But I didn't really care about the money at that point. I was anxious to start The Spirit, he was anxious to get the company for himself, so it was a good deal for both of us."

It wasn't quite such a good deal for Eisner and Iger' s clients, who were going to experience the same shocks that the two men were. Eisner said Thurman T. Scott, the owner of Fiction House, for whom he had created and produced Sheena and Hawks of the Seas, offered to give Eisner the money to buy the company from Iger. "He had no idea what I was about to get involved with in The Spirit," he said.

No divorce is without trauma. In this one, the two men had to determine custody of the artists. "Some of the guys wanted to come with me to work on the Quality books, which caused some real tension between me and Jerry. We had assembled a crew of talented writers and artists, some of whom seemed irreplaceable. Losing them would be bad news for Jerry, and not having them with me would be uncomfortable," Eisner said. Their separation agreement stipulated that Eisner could not raid talent, and that any personnel changes that resulted would be due to voluntary moves on the part of staff members. From the shop, Mazoujian, Powell, Fine and Klaus Nordling volunteered to follow Eisner into his new frontier. Eisner would singlehandedly produce the seven-page Spirit stories, and the other staffers handling the chores on the Lady Luck and Mr. Mystic stories, each of which ran four pages in the weekly section. In January, 1941, the Spirit stories grew to eight pages a week, bringing Will's contribution to half of each section.

Eisner also needed the additional talent to help produce the other three jointly-owned Quality comic books that Eisner would have to edit: Police Comics, Hit Comics and Uncle Sam Comics.

Once Eisner made the break with Iger, he formed a three-way partnership with Arnold and Martin; it wasn't long before negotiations hit their first snag. Prescient, Eisner insisted on owning the copyright to his new creation, a situation almost without parallel in comics at that time and almost without parallel on any popular basis for several decades to come.

"In those days, the newspapers insisted that the syndicate hold the copyright to the feature," he said. "They wouldn't buy from an individual artist because they wanted to be sure of a continuing delivery. Syndicate contracts stipulated that they could replace an artist at any given time if they felt that the artist wasn't delivering the product at an acceptable level, again reassuring the newspapers that they would get their features without any surprises.

"So Arnold and Martin didn't want to let me 'own' The Spirit. Arnold argued that if I got drafted, which seemed like a strong possibility in 1939, I might die, in which case Arnold would have to deal with this messy copyright situation. I'm not saying his and Martin's position didn't make sense. In many ways, it did. But I was stubborn, and I held my ground, because it was important to me that I own The Spirit. A creative control factor is implicit here, more important than financial considerations.

"At Eisner and Iger, we had certain contracts, like Sheena and Hawks of the Seas, where we owned several of the features we created. But in the field, there was in general a different attitude among comic book creators. Then, artists didn't think they were creating anything of lasting value, and the publishers believed they were buying property of potentially great value, and they wanted to capitalize on it and own it. They were unyielding in any negotiations — if they negotiated at all.

"The creators sort of felt like they didn't have a right to own the work. It was somewhat like a slave mentality. When you're a slave, the idea of owning property is preposterous. You can dream of sharecropping, maybe, but even that's pretentious and impertinent. Since I knew I would be in comics for life, I felt I had every right to own what I created. It was my future, my product and my property, and by God, I was going to fight to own it.

"I knew I was in a strong position with The Spirit. I knew that Arnold had tried to develop a Sunday section and had failed. So I knew they came to me because I was the only one who could deliver. I simply used my bargaining power. I was in the catbird seat. So I agreed to let Arnold copyright it in his name rather than mine, but with the stipulation my ownership was acknowledged in the contract, and that at any time the partnership terminated, all rights to The Spirit would revert to me." Eisner said that when The Spirit ceased publication in 1952, that is exactly what occurred. At the separation, Eisner paid Arnold a token $1,000 fee and the two parted company.

Eisner soon got his first taste of conducting business with Arnold, a brash man who considered getting his way something of a birthright. He was also what we might today call a "problem drinker," Eisner said.

"In addition to jointly publishing The Spirit, my agreement with Arnold and Martin included jointly publishing the three other comics: Smash, Hit and Uncle Sam. But when the wartime rationing laws came into effect, newsprint allocation became a factor for all publications, including comic books, of course.

"Now, he had four or five other magazines, and when it came time to allocate newsprint, he allocated it to his own magazines and shorted the magazines in which he held only a part interest. Martin didn't raise too much of a stink, because he was also a 50% partner in those other magazines, rather than a one-third partner in mine. There was no way I could combat them. In effect, I was screwed. He never violated the contract; he just didn't act in good faith. I finally let them buy me out of my share of the other three comic books."

Eisner added that Arnold created difficulties in management. He caused a rift between himself and Bob Powell when Arnold hired Powell to work on one of the books Arnold owned outright. "When Powell told me Arnold was offering him more money than I could pay, I didn't believe it," he said. "Arnold was my partner. But when I called Arnold, I found it was true. I was furious. I told him I was going to file suit against him for deliberately violating our partnership agreement. Then Powell got mad at me and told me I was ruining his career. It really had me on the horns of a dilemma. But Arnold knew I was right. He withdrew his offer to Powell, and Powell remained with me, although he wasn't too happy about it. But this is the type of problem that often happened in this business. I quickly became junglewise."

Eisner speculates that perhaps Arnold's manner of dealing with him, as well as all the other creators on the Quality books, stemmed from the fact that Arnold never before was involved in anything creative. "He thought of artists as athletes," Eisner said. "As a Brown University alumnus, he helped the football team recruit players. But he really was a salesman, not a coach. He was the sales side of the partnership, and the fact is, whoever represents the business side of any venture has a strong measure of control. The dominant partner is usually the one who brings the product to market, who brings the money in. You'll listen to what the salesman says, because he seems to be the barometer of the marketplace. The one who controls the sales controls the game.

"But I gave him no credibility as a critic," Eisner added. "He fancied himself very knowledgeable about art, and I would always find myself fighting with him about what was good art and what was bad art. He would send me notes that said things like, 'This is the worst damn art I have ever seen. Can't you get the guys to do better than this?' You know, very subtle stuff." Despite the blitz of criticism, Eisner persevered; no salesman was going to stop Eisner from exploring this new frontier and the creation of a feature called The Spirit.