Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [22]
Fiction House was one such pulp publisher looking to change direction. With such titles as Wings, Planet Stories, Fight Stories, and Jungle Stories, Fiction House had seen its popularity slipping. After consulting with Eisner & Iger, publisher Thurman T. Scott decided to try to alter his fortunes with a comic book, and his first effort, Jumbo Comics, was a formidable entry into the field. With its oversize tabloid format, sixty-four pages of content, black-and-white entries printed on pastel-colored pages, and a cover that screamed, BIG PAGES—BIG PICTURES—BIG TYPE—EASY TO READ, Jumbo offered plenty of promise.
Eisner & Iger supplied the entire content for the book’s first issue. Eisner had no trouble scaring up ideas for Jumbo’s contents, but he could no longer consider shouldering the shop’s workload by himself. He’d already been using the work of Dick Briefer, an older artist who was more of a painter than inker and colorist, and Jacob Kurtzberg, a diminutive, scrappy young artist now calling himself Jack Curtiss, on other endeavors, and for Jumbo #1 he assigned Curtiss the task of adapting The Count of Monte Cristo to sequential art form, while Briefer did the same with The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Eisner contributions included a recycled Hawks of the Seas and, to assure an issue packed with action and adventure, a new feature called Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, a Tarzan knockoff written under the nom de plume W. Morgan Thomas and illustrated by new staff artist Mort Meskin.
Sheena would last long after Eisner had abandoned the feature and left Eisner & Iger. Will Eisner and Jerry Iger would both stake claims to having created Sheena, though the feature’s development and continuity were clearly Eisner’s and Meskin’s. In the shop environment, the creation of a comic could be a group effort, with ideas being bandied about at a dizzying pace and work on a project being rendered by several people. Eisner would become known for generating an idea, providing sketches of the principal characters, and even coming up with plots for the stories. He would then assign the feature to another artist (or artists), who would do the breakdowns, pencils, inking, lettering, and (if the comic was in color) coloring. Eisner usually handled the cover art. Each artist’s contribution was vital to the success of the feature, though usually only one name—Eisner’s or one of his pseudonyms—was placed under the title.
Sheena came about as the result of the enormous popularity of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan books and as a natural extension of the type of material published in Fiction House’s Jungle Stories. As scantily clad as her male counterpart, Sheena took on man and beast in a series of entertaining but preposterous adventures. This was the stuff of dreams for teenage boys, a combination of adolescent pinup and action story, and it didn’t seem to matter that this young woman, born in deepest Africa, always had perfectly cut and brushed blond hair, spoke textbook English, and wore outfits, albeit leopardskin ones, that seemed to be designed by a Hollywood tailor. Sheena was a creation on demand and definitely not the type of character Eisner would have preferred to deal with, but he wasn’t about to turn down work, either.
By 1938, Eisner & Iger had developed into a full-blown comics studio, employing an expanding roster of writers and artists and supplying material to nearly every comic book company in the business. Eisner recruited his staff by placing an ad in the New York Times and carefully reviewing each respondent’s portfolio, his final decisions based on both talent and the way an applicant might fulfill the stylistic needs of Eisner & Iger’s clients. Eisner was no older than most of the people he hired, yet his ability and accumulated experience in the business gave him an authority that belied his years.
Working on The Spirit with Nick Cardy (with pipe)