• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 529 0

—a high recommendation in a business not known for its artists’ sense of responsibility. Freelancers could be quirky or temperamental, many were known to drink too much, and most missed deadlines. Eisner, perhaps because of his youthful experience of supporting his family, quickly established a professional standard that he would follow throughout his life. He was creative enough to move easily from genre to genre, from fantasy to detective stories to westerns to jungle stories. Just as important, he worked quickly. After spending decades in the business, he’d boast that he never missed a deadline—a claim that may or may not have been true; in any event, a blown Eisner deadline was so rare that neither he nor his clients nor fellow artists could remember one.

The key, Eisner would respond whenever asked about the secret to his success, was in the story. His voracious youthful reading, from pulps to the classics to newspaper comic strips, along with all the movies he’d seen, had taught him well. He knew the components of a good story, including characterization, point of view, plot, and action; he knew how to frame and construct a story in just a few pages. If he had a weakness early in his career, it was in writing dialogue: he had a strong feeling for vernacular and the rhythms of speech, but he could be too wordy, resulting in the disruption of a story’s pacing.

But comics, despite his protestations to the contrary, were not a literary medium—not in the early days, at least. In their advent, comic books were read by all ages, but an overwhelmingly high percentage of readers were adolescent, particularly boys, who expected a lot of action, in as exotic a setting as the writer could drum up, in very few pages. Eisner ground his teeth but followed industry dictates, but even that wasn’t enough for Jerry Iger, who’d impatiently chide Eisner for working too carefully on his art rather than churning out more pages. “The trouble with you is that you want to win an art director’s award,” he’d complain, “but we’re turning out frankfurters here.”

Iger had reason to push. Through hard work and hustle, the shop had connected with some impressive clients, including Editors Press Service, which gave Eisner & Iger its first international exposure. Iger knew Editors Press Service founder Joshua B. Powers from his Wow, What a Magazine! days, when Powers was trying to sell some of Wow’s material to magazines in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. Powers, supposedly a former undercover agent in South America, possibly with the CIA, had concocted a moneymaking scheme that he hoped would see him through his retirement. He bought comics from the United States for foreign clients, who paid him in advertising space in their publications. Powers would then sell the space at a hefty profit to U.S. companies looking for an inexpensive way to advertise overseas. Some of the comics that Powers purchased were reprints, like the Dick Tracy and Mutt & Jeff dailies, but he was also interested in the kind of original work that Eisner & Iger could provide.

One of the Editors Press clients, a magazine called Wags, a weekly tabloid distributed in England and Australia, became one of Eisner & Iger’s top publishers, leading to two of Eisner’s more sophisticated features: a reprise of his Flame cartoon, renamed The Hawk and, after several appearances under that title, renamed again as Hawks of the Sea; and Yarko the Great, a detective series featuring a magician crime solver. These entries—Hawks of the Sea in particular—gave Eisner room to develop characters and plot, which he relished. There was still plenty of action in the swashbuckling Hawks of the Sea to keep young readers glued to the pages, yet each installment found Eisner, writing as Willis R. Rensie, sneaking in more mature approaches to subject matter and dialogue and even experimenting with the “camera angles” in some of the frames.

“There was a great deal of freedom for development,” he said of those early days of working on Hawks, speaking in 1986 to his longtime editor, Dave Schreiner.