Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [10]
Fisher was nowhere to be found. The cartoonist, one of his assistants informed Eisner, was in an apartment on another floor. Eisner took down the number and headed up. His knock was answered not by Fisher, but by James Montgomery Flagg, the renowned artist famous for his World War I Uncle Sam “I Want YOU for U.S. Army” poster. Flagg was the spitting image of Uncle Sam.
“I almost fainted,” Eisner recalled. “I was speechless with awe.”
Flagg invited him in, but Eisner stood frozen in the hall, fumbling for something to say to the artist. He avoided the “I admire your work” cliché but could think of nothing else to say. Finally, in desperation, he managed, “What kind of pen do you use?”
“After a few minutes,” Eisner remembered, “out comes Ham Fisher, a pudgy, balding little man, and he was in a blind rage about something. He looked at me and said, ‘Oh yeah, you’re Lou’s cousin’s kid,’ and I said I was. Then he told me I was a day late to get a job and that he had just fired this young cartoonist who had betrayed him and stolen his ideas, and the more he talked, the more neurotic I could see he was.”
The fired cartoonist, it turned out, was Al Caplin, who as Al Capp would go on to create Li’l Abner and become one of the business’s most highly regarded daily cartoon strip artists. Eisner didn’t know it at the time, but he had just witnessed the beginning of one of the most infamous feuds in comics history.
Eisner’s high school social life was a mixed bag. He was popular around the Clinton campus because of his gregarious nature and the attention he received for his art, but his duties to his family and his job, along with his devotion to art, kept him from having more than a handful of close friends. He tended to be shy around girls, at least when it came to dating. He enjoyed double dating, where he could be loose and entertaining without the pressure of having to hold up 50 percent of the conversation.
One of his favorite double-dating partners was a tall, thin, good-looking classmate named Bob Kahn, who always knew an attractive young girl looking to go out dancing. Kahn also liked to draw, and though he wasn’t nearly as skilled Eisner, he was adept at self-promotion. His chatter drove Eisner to distraction, but Eisner tolerated it, mainly because Kahn was constantly fixing him up with dates. Kahn would eventually change his name to Kane, and he would go on to create Batman and, as far as Eisner was concerned, earn more money than his talents warranted.
For all that he learned at DeWitt Clinton, Eisner walked away from the school without a diploma—a secret he managed to keep until late in his life. He had failed geometry, a required course, and he didn’t bother to take a makeup class. He was getting a practical education elsewhere, on his job and in the art classes he attended in the evenings. Long after he’d achieved his acclaim as a cartoonist, he would admit that he might have been an entirely different artist and person if he’d graduated from high school and had a college education. At age eighteen, however, it didn’t matter. He was itching to apply his artistic talents to some kind of work, and with all that DeWitt Clinton had given him, Eisner was ready to move ahead.
The nation’s slow recovery from the Depression spelled trouble for Bill Eisner and his efforts to find a job. Good commercial art and magazine illustration work, extremely competitive to begin with, was closed to someone with Eisner’s lack of experience. The fact that he was Jewish didn’t help, either. As Eisner would discover, many Jewish artists wound up going into comics because of anti-Semitism in the ad agencies. Eisner lugged his portfolio from place to place, he sat around in the waiting rooms with other hopefuls, he showed his work to