Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [2]
William Erwin Eisner, the first of his parents’ three children, was born in New York City on March 6, 1917, the same month and day as his father. As time would show, he was an almost perfect combination of his parents’ strongest traits: artistic dreamer and steely realist. A brother, Julian, followed four years later, on February 3, 1921, and a sister, Rhoda, was born on November 2, 1929.
Called Billy or Willie by his parents, Eisner claimed that, as a boy, he never fully realized how impoverished his family was. His father was always working at some type of job, normally a low-paying one, and his family lived in modest but not run-down apartments. If his parents were ill suited for each other, at least it wasn’t open warfare all the time. Fannie Eisner would berate her husband, often in front of the children, for his failure to earn a decent living and for the way he always seemed to be borrowing money or relying on other assistance from his older brother Simon, but Sam seemed willing to shrug off the barbs rather than allow them to escalate into serious altercations.
Billy Eisner, at age one. (Will Eisner Collection, the Ohio State University
Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum)
Billy saw enough hardship in his friends’ families to lead him to believe that tensions over money were normal. When the sniping began, Billy would turn his attention to a book, close himself off in his room, or head outside, to a cacophony of noise that obliterated the angry sounds within his apartment, unaware that someday his graphic novels would bear the fruits of this distraction.
Fannie Eisner suffered from debilitating headaches, which she attributed to her difficult life. Sam, she claimed, was killing her with his job problems. She would have preferred that he just take a job painting houses, a practical enough solution to their money woes. But he would hear none of it. He was smarter than the common laborer, and he would find a way of using his talents to succeed.
Unfortunately, even though his labor wasn’t common, it was sporadic, and success eluded Sam Eisner. Opportunities for scene painting dried up as time went on, with vaudeville slowing down and movies picking up in popularity. At Fannie’s urging, Sam left that work for a more promising—and far less interesting—job painting finish on metal beds, making the beds look as if they had been constructed of mahogany or walnut. But the benzine and turpentine used in the process made him ill, and after consulting with a doctor, he had to quit. Then he tried his hand at opening a secondhand furniture store, but it lasted barely a year. Sam reasoned that new furniture was being produced and sold so cheaply that he couldn’t compete. After the furniture store debacle, Sam, bankrolled by his brother Simon, opened a fur-coat-manufacturing factory. This, too, spiraled to disaster, and after four years of lousy sales, largely because Sam couldn’t spot the trends in the business, Simon and a couple of other investors pulled the plug on the venture.
For the Eisner family, these different jobs meant a lot of moving around—or at least that’s the story Sam preferred to tell them. More likely it was a matter of moving before the family faced eviction. It was getting tougher and tougher to make rent, and the moves were to cheaper places. The bed-painting job found the Eisners relocating to New Jersey, only to head to Brooklyn for the furniture store. Then it was off to the Bronx. Staying hopeful wasn’t easy for the normally upbeat Sam Eisner, not when he was being badgered