Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [13]
The men standing around the table couldn’t believe what they’d just seen.
“Who is this kid?” they asked Jerry Iger.
Iger responded without missing a beat.
“He’s my new production man.”
Eisner, of course, had no interest in the production end of the business. He and Iger talked all the way back to the Wow offices, where Iger took a closer look at Eisner’s portfolio. He liked what he saw and asked what Eisner might be able to do for his magazine. Eisner proposed doing an adventure series modeled after the kind of story that H. Rider Haggard wrote for the pulps. Iger gave him the go-ahead. The piece would appear in Wow’s August 1936 issue. More significant, Eisner would get a crack at illustrating that same issue’s cover.
Energized by this unexpected success, Eisner responded with a story about a heroic character named Scott Dalton, a sort of precursor to Indiana Jones. Eisner hoped the feature would be a regular installment in the magazine. His cover painting, also of Dalton, depicted a handsome, blond-haired hero, his shirt open to the waist and a holster at his side, waving a smoking pistol in the air. Eisner also revived a couple of characters he’d created while still at Clinton High—Harry Karry (then called Harry Carey), a detective strip that he’d originally hoped would work for the syndicate, and The Flame, a buccaneer adventure strip heavily influenced by Milton Caniff. Eisner would always be known as an artist with more ideas and energy than time, and as a nineteen-year-old looking at a future that had been a dream only a couple of years ago, he was ready to prove to the world that a new, formidable comics artist had arrived.
The euphoria was short-lived. After failing to make a dent in what was proving to be a rapidly growing and saturated market, Wow suspended publication following its fourth issue. A depressed Bill Eisner returned to the Bronx and considered his next move.
In the beginning, comics weren’t intended to be highbrow entertainment. They’d started in the late 1800s and early 1900s as strips or single-panel newspaper entries and, over the course of the next three decades, entertained newspaper readers while businessmen schemed over how to make them more profitable. The comic book itself was a happy accident, its appearance the result of a happenstance. In Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, Gerard Jones described the setting in which the comic book was born as “counter-cultural, lowbrow, idealistic, prurient, pretentious, mercenary, forward-looking, and ephemeral, all in the same instant.”
When Joseph Pulitzer began publishing Hogan’s Alley, generally regarded as America’s first comic strip, in the New York World in 1895, the strip was strictly populist fare, a circulation booster aimed at the masses at a time when the circulation wars among the New York newspapers were fought with no holds barred. The comic’s central character, an unnamed boy known by readers as “the Yellow Kid” (for the yellow nightshirt-type garb that he wore every day), was a kind of street urchin capable of getting into all kinds of mischief, with or without the help of his ragtag bunch of friends. Kids and adults could laugh at him, not so much because he was innately funny or clever, but because no matter where they hailed from, he was everything they were not. Heavy immigration had divided New York’s neighborhoods, and to readers, the Yellow Kid, although never identified as being from any particular European background, was the kid who lived two blocks away—backward, uneducated, from some other country, capable of only poor or broken English, a little dirty (and possibly smelly), always in some kind of trouble, and facing a future you wouldn’t wish on your own kids. Subtle social commentary ran like an undercurrent in his daily travails.
The Yellow