Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [19]
Nick Cardy, who aspired to be an illustrator before earning his reputation in comics, recalled a conversation he had with fellow artist Jim Mooney about how comics was a dirty word. “He said, ‘You know, if my mother had ever found out I was doing comics, I don’t know what would have happened. I would have gotten along if I said I was a pimp.’”
In his 1947 landmark study, The Comics, British cartoonist Coulton Waugh sneered at comic books as an important but appalling descendant of the newspaper strip. “It doesn’t seem possible that anything so raw, so purely ugly, should be important,” he wrote. “Comic books are ugly; it is hard to find anything to admire about their appearance.” Waugh, who spent a decade to working on the comic strip Dickie Dare after the departure of Milton Caniff, reflected the elitist attitudes of the newspaper artists of the time when he critiqued comic books. He was totally put off by the paper used in comic books, the colorization, by the “soulless emptiness” and “outrageous vulgarity” that he saw in the little newsstand magazines. “It is quite clear that you can laugh at the comic books but you can’t laugh them off,” he said. “They are a startling addition to both children’s and grownups’ reading matter with which we all might become better acquainted—if only to understand what our children are looking at.”
Eisner confessed to being embarrassed about being a comics artist when he first started out, not because he felt that his work was inferior, but because of the reputation attached to anyone working in the medium, the low self-esteem he witnessed around him, the “comic book ghetto” in which comic book artists felt trapped. It was especially galling to Eisner that the syndicated daily newspaper strip artists disregarded the comic book artists as inferior. “We were living in an environment that led us to believe that we were subhuman,” he said.
One of his favorite anecdotes from those early days, repeated frequently over the years, involved a cocktail party he attended on Madison Avenue. He had established his reputation as one of the best in the business, and he felt honored to be invited to such a highbrow affair.
“There were a lot of artists there,” he recalled. “I was standing against a wall, holding a drink, and a lady came by with long black hair, bangs, a long cigarette, and holding a drink, and she said to me, ‘What do you do?’
“And I said, ‘I’m a comic book artist.’
“And with a very large balloon with very tiny letters, she said, ‘Oh, how nice.’”
Over the passing years, Eisner learned to joke about the incident. It wasn’t funny at the time.
Eisner’s business instincts were on the money. Iger looked up his old contacts, and Eisner & Iger’s client list took off, netting Eisner as much work as he could handle. He’d go into work early and leave late in the evening, usually long after Jerry Iger had gone home. Eisner’s social life, not much to begin with, ceased to exist. He had work and he had sleep, with an occasional time-out for a hurried meal. One publisher, needing a lot of material produced on strict deadlines, asked Iger about his staff. Was it big enough to handle the workload? Eisner instructed Iger to tell the publisher that Eisner & Iger employed a staff of five artists; they certainly could handle the publisher’s needs. Iger landed the account, and Eisner would maintain the ruse by writing five different features in five different styles, signing each with a different name—his own and four pseudonyms.
“One was Willis R. Rensie—that’s ‘Eisner’ backward,” he explained. “Another was W. Morgan Thomas, another Spencer Steele. That’s a marvelous name, isn’t it. I always wanted to be named Spencer Steele.” The fifth name, William Erwin, was simply Eisner’s first and middle name.
Eisner & Iger established a reputation of producing high-quality work on deadline