Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [17]
The fifteen dollars earned from this ad, Eisner’s first paying job, along with a small loan from his father, financed the opening of the Eisner & Iger Studio. (Will Eisner Collection, the Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum)
Eisner’s idea of starting a comics packaging company was not original, nor was the Eisner & Iger shop the first of its kind. Harry “A” Chesler Jr., a short, stocky, transplanted Chicago advertising salesman, already ran a shop at 276 Fifth Avenue. Called “the Chiseler” by some of the artists working for him, Chesler was one of the more colorful characters populating a business known for its colorful characters. No one knew what the “A” stood for—he said it meant “anything”—or why he chose to bracket his middle initial in quotation marks, but, like the “Jr.” tacked on at the end of his name (he wasn’t one), these were suitably quirky ornaments, as inextricable from the man as the cheap cigars he was constantly smoking or the derby that he perched on the back of his head and refused to remove, even indoors. He stationed his desk at the front of the studio, near the elevator and stairway, so no one could enter or leave without walking past him.
Chesler had tried his luck at comic book publishing with very little success. Under the name Chesler Publications, Inc., he had published Star Comics and, in a new twist in the business, Star Ranger, a book devoted entirely to westerns. Both fizzled at the newsstands. Part of his problem could have been format—the entries were very brief, only a page or two, more in the style of newspaper strips than the fully developed stories that Eisner would favor—but whatever the reason, Chesler dumped the titles and concentrated on his shop. As comics historian Ron Goulart would note, “Chesler never did manage to produce a really successful comic book of his own, [but] his various shops developed and trained a great many artists who became successful after they left the field.”
Depending upon the person you were talking to, Chesler was either a no-nonsense taskmaster demanding maximum effort for minimum pay or a tough but reasonable patrician who, on occasion, could display a heart of gold.
Joe Kubert would remember Chesler—and Will Eisner, for that matter—as being open to letting a young kid hang around the shop and learn the craft by watching the other artists at work.
“Harry was extremely kind to me,” Kubert said. “When I first started out as a kid, I learned all the addresses of the publishers in New York. I attended the High School of Music and Art, which was up on 135th Street and Compton Avenue in Manhattan. And Norman Maurer, a buddy attending school with me, who was later my partner, and I would make the rounds from place to place. One of the places we stopped off at was Harry Chesler’s. I went up there with my work, not knowing what the hell was happening or what was being done there, with the hope that I might get something to do.
“Harry allowed me to come into his place after school, on my way home to Brooklyn. I would stop off there and stay until maybe five, five thirty, and I would do an old script or something that he would put me on. He would tell the other guys, ‘Keep an eye on the kid and help him along.’ It was terrific. It was one of the first situations I found myself in where I was actually sitting next to professional people. This was a nonpaying job, but eventually he gave me five dollars a week for doing nothing. He’d say, ‘Here, kid, buy yourself a couple of hotdogs or something.’ Five dollars a week was a lot of money at that time.”
Carmine Infantino, another artist who would rise to the top of the comics business, had similarly positive memories of dealing with Chesler when he was learning the ropes.
“I loved Harry,” he said. “He had this broken-down