Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [18]
Irwin Hasen, who created single-page sports cartoons for Chesler, experienced one of those terrible stories. “Just don’t work for him,” Hasen said, laughing, when asked about Chesler. Hasen worked in the bullpen with such notables as Mort Meskin, Jack Cole, and Charlie Biro, and while he admitted that Chesler was a “nice guy and a worker,” he bristled when the topic of payment was raised.
“At the end of the week, you’d go up to him and he was like a teacher at a desk,” Hasen recalled. “He would say, ‘How little do you need to live on?’ I swear to God.”
Rather than pay his artists by the page, as was the custom of the day, Chesler paid a flat rate, usually $20 a week, in exchange for all the rights and original artwork produced by his staff. The studio consisted of a large, wide room, with the artists’ and writers’ desks lined up in rows, not unlike a classroom. Pages would be roughed out, penciled, and inked by different workers, assembly-line style, with the pages passed around under Chesler’s watchful eye. Workers were expected to report to work on time and could be docked a day’s pay if they showed up even a few minutes late. For all his reservations about Chesler’s methods of payment, Irwin Hasen conceded that Chesler’s English schoolmaster approach to running a shop was probably necessary. “You needed a guy like that around,” he said, “because he had all these guys working with him and for him.”
Eisner adopted a similar approach to running a shop when Eisner & Iger had expanded to such an extent that he could no longer produce the artwork by himself. He initially brought in his high school buddy Bob Kahn, now going by Bob Kane, to work as freelance on an animal feature called Peter Pupp, a Disney cartoon knockoff he’d been developing in his days of freelancing for Wow. He brought in writer/artists Gill Fox and Dick Briefer as well. Others, most notably a young artist named Jacob Kurtzberg, came later. Eisner would state, half-seriously, that he ran his shop “pretty much the way a Roman galley operates. I sat at the end of a row of sweating artists.”
Eisner treated his work very seriously, as if comics were a sacred vocation, but he never fooled himself into believing that those working under him felt the same passion for their work. A good number of them, like those toiling for Chesler, aspired to move into commercial art, and for these men, comics represented a steady paycheck, a means of treading water until the effects of the Depression passed and better opportunities opened up. In fact, many of the artists were ashamed of their jobs. You could have studied with the most respected teachers in New York’s finest art schools and be producing work that stood up against the best being rendered by gallery or commercial artists, but when the sun went down and you pulled off your shoes for the night, you still had to live with the knowledge that you were creating something designed, as the disparaging saying went, for “ten-year-old cretins from Kansas City.”
“It was the bottom of the barrel,” remembered Bob Fujitani, who spent time at the Eisner & Iger shop. “All of the comics artists wanted to be an illustrator, another Norman Rockwell or [J. C.] Leyendecker—the top illustrators of that time. That’s what we all wanted to be, but very few guys made it.”
Stan Lee agreed. “Comic book writing was considered the lowest thing you could do in the creative field. Nobody had any respect for comics—even the person I worked for. My publisher felt they were only read by very little children