Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [21]
“But Hawks was my first attempt to run the mile. It was the first chance I had to go full out. There was no precedent and there were no restrictions. It was an ideal setup for me. I probably did it at the rate of a page a day, doing everything but the lettering.”
The Eisner & Iger company had been around only a few months when the two partners, buoyed by the early response to the company, decided to create their own comics syndicate. Universal Phoenix Features Syndicate, initially designed to handle foreign clients, rose from a Joshua Powers split with his English partner, which left Eisner & Iger with the potential loss of Wags. The syndicate quickly found a market in the United States as well, largely due to the knowledge that Eisner & Iger had acquired from dealing with Joshua Powers. Small newspapers, they learned, wanted to publish comic strips, but their options were sharply limited because of territorial restrictions imposed by the big syndicates. Popular features could appear in only one newspaper in any given region, which left a shortage of comics available to the smaller papers. Eisner & Iger filled that need in an ingenious way that worked beautifully for a while but eventually became an accounting nightmare. The setup was simple. Eisner & Iger hired two salesmen to travel all over the East Coast and sell comics to newspapers. Each of the five-panel comics, written and illustrated by Eisner, included a blank panel at the end of the strip, which would be filled by a local advertiser—in theory giving the newspaper the strip for free. The salesmen would initially sell the ads and collect the money on a onetime basis; after that, the newspapers were on their own.
All kinds of confusion followed. The salesmen pocketed the money, wires were crossed between the newspapers and advertisers about whom the advertisers had to pay, and Eisner & Iger was caught in the middle, producing weekly strips but not knowing when—or if—the company would be paid. Frustrated newspapers canceled their subscriptions.
Fortunately for Eisner and Iger, their workload at the comic book end of their company had increased to such a degree that their attention was focused elsewhere. Other large clients were entering the picture. There was plenty of reason to train their eyes on the future.
chapter three
S U P E R M E N I N A
W O R L D O F M O R T A L S
Basic business acumen comes from hunger. That also goes for ideas, I suspect. Many years ago, when I was giving a talk, somebody asked me what prompted my ideas, and all I could tell them … it was malnutrition.
Over the years, Will Eisner would point out that success in the comic book business in general, and at Eisner & Iger in particular, was difficult to gauge when it was actually happening. By the late 1930s, comic books were sprouting everywhere. Some lasted only a few issues and went under, only to reappear later under different titles but using the same characters and, in some instances, essentially the same stories. Strips could be cut up and rearranged, given new dialogue and plots, and recycled in different markets. The industry’s growth was steady enough to convince entrepreneurs that there was probably a future in the business, but when that future might arrive, and what form it would take, was anyone’s guess.
Two teenagers in Cleveland would be answering these questions in very short order.
But in the meantime, producing comics was a scattershot enterprise, dependent upon the whims and moods of very fickle readers. For his part, Eisner found himself working overtime to produce every type of comic imaginable, from continuing multipanel adventure strips to single-panel sports features; from westerns to science fiction and fantasy. He’d vary his styles to meet a publisher’s demands, hit his deadline, and head to the next