Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [16]
And the need, he saw, was right in front of him. With the increasingly large number of comic books hitting the newsstands every month, publishers were bound to discover a shortage of material to reprint. There would be an urgent call for new comics to fill the books, and this was something Eisner could provide. What would happen if he wrote and illustrated camera-ready stories for the publishers? He would be his own company, beholden to no individual publisher, and if he could drum up enough accounts, he could make a serious go of it in the field. As a packager, he wouldn’t have to worry about how to get his material printed or distributed; that would be up to his customers.
The problem, he realized, was in his business connections: he had none. He needed an aggressive salesman to contact companies and push his art, somebody with connections and experience in the business, somebody who could do the legwork and leave him with the time to create comics. That person would have to be available immediately, and he would have to be willing to work with a young, relatively inexperienced artist. Eisner knew of only one such person: Jerry Iger.
Eisner gave it some more thought, conducted additional research and developed his plan, talked it over with his parents, and finally, despite reservations about working with a man who on even his best days could be difficult to deal with, he gave Iger a call.
Since the demise of Wow, Iger had been doing nothing but watch his money disappear. He had appreciated Eisner’s enthusiasm when they’d worked together, but he’d knocked around enough to know that he was in a really bad spot. With a pending divorce, he was looking at losing a sizable chunk of his money and possessions, and losing both a wife and a job in short order had left his motivation at a low ebb. When Eisner called and suggested that they get together for lunch, he wasn’t optimistic about anything productive coming out of the meeting.
The two met at a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant on Forty-third Street, across the street from the New York Daily News press shop. Eisner would eventually depict the meeting in The Dreamer, his roman à clef graphic novella about his early days in comics, as well as in numerous interviews. As he recalled, both of them were unbelievably broke, yet even after listening to Eisner’s plans, Iger was hesitant about entering into a business partnership. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be involved in the kind of company Eisner was proposing, but even if he was interested, he had nothing to contribute in seed money. That was no problem, Eisner countered: he had $15 he’d earned from a freelance advertising job he’d done for Gre-Solvent, a grease-cutting soap, and he could borrow an equal amount from his father. The thirty bucks would get him a couple months’ rent in a small room in an old office building on Madison Avenue and Forty-third Street. The place was a popular spot for bookies needing only enough room for a desk, chair, and telephone; and the room Eisner was looking at, about ten by ten, wasn’t going to give its two occupants more than enough space to shoehorn in a desk, drawing board, and maybe a filing cabinet and coatrack. Still, it was a place to start.
The firm, Eisner & Iger, Ltd.—“my name was first because I was the big money man,” Eisner quipped later—was born. It would be a fifty-fifty partnership, with no outside owners or stockholders—not that anyone at that point would have been crazy enough to invest in the company.
Feeling every bit the hotshot, Eisner insisted on paying for lunch. The bill came to $1.90, a nickel less than what Eisner had in his pocket, leaving him with just enough to catch a subway back to the Bronx, but not enough to avoid admonishment from his new business partner.
“Y’know, Billy, that wasn’t nice,” Iger said as the two were leaving the restaurant. “You didn’t leave a tip.”
Eisner shrugged him off, claiming he’d forgotten. He had other things holding his attention. For one, before formal business papers