Will Eisner (7 page)

Jack Kirby, sitting at his drawing table and listening in on the dispute, had heard enough. He stormed up to the front of the room and confronted the thug, even though he was a foot shorter than the other guy.

“Look, we don’t want any crap from you,” he shouted. “We don’t like your goddamned towel service. Now get the hell out of here.”

For Kirby, this wasn’t a show. The short, stocky artist was a wrecking ball with attitude. He’d been raised in a rugged neighborhood on New York’s Lower East Side, where aggression was the preemptive strike you took against the guy capable of beating the hell out of you and discretion was a word used by kids attending the private schools. Kirby loved movies, especially action pictures, and even his first cartoon job, working as an animator on the
Popeye
cartoons produced by Max Fleischer, was all about the little guy gaining justice by standing up to the big brute. Kirby might not have been big, but he was legitimately tough. He wasn’t about to sit by and watch his bosses be intimidated by some Mafia muscle.

The thug left without further incident.

“He comes back again, call me,” Kirby instructed Eisner. “I’ll take care of him.”

Years later, Eisner could see the humor in the incident and in the way Kirby had taken on the thug in his own David and Goliath scenario. “Jack was a little fellow,” Eisner said. “He thought he was John Garfield the actor! Very, very tough.”

In changing his name, Jack Kirby was in no way unusual in the comic book business. Like Hollywood actors, comic book artists changed their names to mask their ethnic or Jewish backgrounds. If comics were a ghetto, as Eisner repeatedly suggested throughout his career, its artists were perfect inhabitants. Many, like Eisner, had come from European stock, lived impoverished childhoods in tough neighborhoods, barely survived the Depression, and studiously worked on their art, only to discover that the better-paying jobs were closed to people with their backgrounds. In addition, names like Powell and Kirby were easier to sign on artwork than Pawlowski or Kurtzberg. Eli Katz became Gil Kane, Bob Kahn became Bob Kane, and Alfred Caplin became Al Capp.

Stan Lee, born Stanley Lieber, said he changed his name because he wanted to reserve his given name for the novels he hoped to write. “I was kind of embarrassed to be writing comics,” he admitted, “so I didn’t want to use my real name. I was saving that for the
good
stuff I would someday write.”

Nicholas Viscardi changed his name to Nick Cardy after becoming fed up with the ribbing he took about the Mob, his Italian heritage, and, during World War II, the idea that Italians were the enemy. When he was doing freelance work, he even heard from a boss who, thinking he was being funny, signed Viscardi’s check with a “P” rather than a “V.” The next month, his last name began with a “B.”

Viscardi was rightfully offended. He’d been raised in a lower-class, ethnically diverse neighborhood, where this type of xenophobia was foreign. As a boy, he’d come home from school and, while waiting for his mother to return home from work, sit on the front stoop of his apartment building and talk to a rabbi from the same building. He hated the anti-Italian jokes he heard, but he needed the job. “I was upset,” he remembered, “but I was young at the time and I was trying to make a living. So I changed it. I just put in the last part of the name.”

Cardy didn’t abandon his name entirely—at least not right away. When working on
Lady Luck
for Eisner, he used the house name “Ford Davis” when he signed the feature, but he always found a way to disguise his initials, “NV,” in the artwork.

In the early comic book days, artists were fortunate to find any permutation of their names attached to their work. Publishers and shops, including Eisner & Iger, preferred to use house names. They’d assign a generic name to a feature, which would always be used regardless of the artist doing it. Using a house name was insurance for publishers, protection from lawsuits that might arise if an artist walked away from a firm but still wanted to use a character he’d created. Artists didn’t own their creations in any event, but to a a publisher, owning a feature
and
using a house name was failsafe protection.

Eisner had written under so many names that he would have been forgiven if he lost count. He could shrug it off as part of the business, and he expected the others working for him to see it the same way. “We had a whole bunch of phony names,” he explained, adding with a laugh, “We just handed them out with the salary.”

Sometime in early 1938, the Eisner & Iger studio received an unsolicited package in the mail, postmarked Cleveland and containing a cover letter and two complete comic stories, one a spy thriller, the other an adventure about a costumed hero with superhuman strength and an unexplained need to rectify the injustice he saw in the world around him. Eisner rejected both as substandard. Iger didn’t like them, either. The two men were accustomed to hearing from young artists looking for a way to enter into comics, and as far as Eisner (then only twenty-one himself) could tell, this was another one of those cases. The writer and artist, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, respectively, needed more time in art school to hone their craft if they expected to meet market and audience demands.

“I wrote them a long letter and told them they weren’t ready to come to New York,” Eisner recalled. “It was a tough town and their style wasn’t professional yet.”

Eisner had a personal aversion to superhero stories—to costumed heroes, as they called them in those days. Each passing month in the business left him all the more convinced that he was destined to do more mature material. He loved to write and he loved to draw, but he had concluded back in his Clinton High days that he wasn’t gifted enough as either to make an impact in the adult world of serious literature or gallery art. He could, however, thrive in comics, and if he worked hard and long enough at it, he might be able to move his material into avenues geared toward adult readers. In Eisner’s mind, this Superman idea, featuring a character who switched from a business suit to tights and a cape, was strictly kid stuff. It required a suspension of belief that dipped into the realm of bad science fiction or fantasy, as well as a format that demanded more action, less story. Eisner was spoiled by the quality of art and writing coming out of his shop, including the work aimed at younger readers. These Siegel and Shuster kids had a long way to go before they matched the work he was seeing on a daily basis.

So in one of the few giant missteps in a career characterized by strong instincts and judgment, Bill Eisner shot down
Superman
.

Not that he was alone.
Superman
had visited the surface of nearly every comics editor’s desk in New York and elsewhere, always with the same results. In reflecting back on it, Eisner thought that the reluctance to accept
Superman
might have risen out of the ugliness of the times and the strong feelings generated by Hitler’s rise to power.

“We were all concerned with the Nazi shtick, the Nazi concepts,” he explained. “
Mein Kampf
was published here around 1935, and there was a lot of talk on the subject of
supermen
. The psychological impact of these ideas on the imaginative fantasy creators was immense.”

In his book
Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero
, comics historian, editor, and former comics writer Danny Fingeroth, while not disagreeing with Eisner’s assessment, wrote that Superman and other superheroes to follow had deep roots in the response to Hitler and Nazism. The predominance of Jews in comics, he felt, was a huge contributing factor:

The creation of a legion of special beings, self-appointed to protect the weak, innocent, and victimized at a time when fascism was dominating the European continent from which the creators of the heroes hailed, seems like a task that Jews were uniquely positioned to take on. One might say they were cornered into it. The fantasy of godlike beings who could solve our problems was a cry of hope as well as of despair, as the Jews were the canaries in the coal mine of hate that was Nazism, sounding a simultaneous cry for help and a warning that
you could be next
.

Only a strange, unpredictable turn of events saved
Superman
from the trash bin. At the beginning of 1938, Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson was reaching the end of the line in his involvement with National Comics. He had managed to stay in the business through IOUs, the goodwill and generosity of some of his creditors, and low payment (sometimes nonpayment) to his contributors.
Detective Comics
, a new title that he’d hoped would pull him out of the doldrums, slogged along unimpressively. Drowning in debt, Wheeler-Nicholson began work on a new title, a comic book called
Action Comics
. If he could successfully launch the book, he might be able to buy a little more time.

Why he believed this is hard to figure.
Action Comics
, as concocted by Wheeler-Nicholson, was just another hodgepodge of the type of material he’d been foisting on the public from the get-go—forgettable stuff now rotting on newsstands. He might have been able to purchase mediocre work for less than premium prices, but the cover price for his books was the same as it was for some of the better titles on the market, and readers wanted more bang for their dimes.

Desperate for a new, first-rate feature to anchor his book, Wheeler-Nicholson called his business contacts and asked if they had anything lying around. Somehow, a much-handled copy of
Superman
, languishing on Maxwell C. Gaines’s slush pile at
All-American Comics
, found its way into his office. Wheeler-Nicholson knew Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster from past business dealings; they had been regular contributors to his comics for more than a year. This
Superman
idea, although designed originally as a newspaper strip, required work before it would be self-contained enough for a comic book, but it was better than the other material Wheeler-Nicholson had earmarked for
Action
.

His plans for
Action Comics
never reached fruition. Harry Donenfeld, partner in the firm that printed Wheeler-Nicholson’s comics and publisher of girlie pulp magazines with such imaginative titles as
Juicy Tales
and
Hot Tales
, pulled the plug on Wheeler-Nicholson’s company early in 1938. In the past, Donenfeld had been willing to accept a small percentage of Wheeler-Nicholson’s enterprises in exchange for debt; this time around, he wasn’t looking for a piece of the business. In what was designed to look like a generous gesture, Donenfeld sent Wheeler-Nicholson and his wife on a cruise to Cuba, supposedly to give the Major the chance to come up with fresh ideas. But when Wheeler-Nicholson returned, things had changed. The locks on his office had been changed and Doneneld had filed a suit against him for nonpayment of bills. Facing a disastrous court ruling, Wheeler-Nicholson accepted a mediocre buyout offer from Donenfeld and disappeared from comics.

Neither Donenfeld nor his right-hand man, Jack Liebowitz, had any concept of what they had on their hands, or that
Superman
would turn into the publishing and marketing phenomenon that it eventually became. The comic’s creators had no idea, either. They saw it as just another job and assigned no special significance to the character, even as they signed away the rights to
Superman
when they endorsed their $130 paycheck for the feature.

Action Comics
didn’t just do well at the newsstands; it exploded into existence, starting strong and, over the next few months, snowballing until it had become the industry standard for a burgeoning superhero comics market. Donenfeld’s company became very wealthy. Donenfeld would label
Superman
“a fluke,” and Liebowitz would call it “pure luck”—which, in fact, it was.

And Bill Eisner walked away with the anecdote of a lifetime.

Actually, the success of
Superman
had a much greater effect on Eisner than he ever could have anticipated. For starters,
Superman
’s popularity kicked the comics industry to a new level. Sales jumped for other books; every publisher clamored for a costumed hero with an exotic background, some kind of superpower, and a nose for truth and justice, if not the American way. Eisner & Iger, as suppliers to comic book publishers, followed the trend, producing work as fast as the studio artists could crank it out. Once again Eisner sent out a call for more writers and artists, and once again he was rewarded with employees capable of staying on pace.

Two of his more recent hires, an artist named Alex Blum and his writer/daughter, Audrey (nicknamed Toni), added not only badly needed help to the studio, but, in the case of Toni Blum, a touch of romance that Eisner, had he been thinking about it, might have anticipated. Aside from taking jobs as secretaries, women were extremely rare in the early days of comics. Studios, like baseball clubhouses, were men-only environments inhabited by adults working in a children’s game. The bad behavior, language, practical jokes, off-color humor, drinking after hours, and in some cases fooling around were all practiced freely, without concern for disapproving female perspectives. It was the same in the chain of command: Bill Eisner and Jerry Iger, like baseball managers and front office personnel, maintained a division between themselves and their employees, fraternizing with them only occasionally, which led some of their workers to think they were standoffish.

Toni Blum, an aspiring playwright, turned heads—literally and figuratively—from her first day at the studio. She was young, attractive, intelligent, and, as the men around her learned, very good at her job. Jerry Iger’s earlier quip about the shop’s grinding out frankfurters was now a reality, with two new, influential companies—Quality Comics, run by Everett “Busy” Arnold, and Fox Publications, operated by Victor Fox—pushing hard for an increasing volume of material. Eisner worked closely with Toni Blum, coming up with new ideas every day and delivering them to his new writer, who would type out scripts for the pencilers to break down into comic panels. Eisner, so cloistered at work that he had no social life to speak of, took notice of Toni Blum.