Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [23]
In terms of comics history, the artists and writers passing through the Eisner & Iger shop between 1937 and 1939 is a staggering list of some of the most respected names in early comics history. Lou Fine, Bob Powell, Bernard Baily, Mort Meskin, Bob Kane, George Tuska, Klaus Nordling, Gill Fox, Reed Crandall, Nick Cardy, Vern Henkel, Chuck Mazoujian, and Jack Kirby—all logged time at the shop as employees or freelancers. With the arrival of new help, Eisner & Iger moved to a bigger place on Madison Avenue and Fortieth Street, with a large room to accommodate the bullpen and a small room, located in the front, for Jerry Iger’s office. Eisner sat at a desk at the head of the big room, facing the artists like a teacher in front of his students.
The star of the group, beyond question, was Lou Fine, a thin, redheaded twenty-three-year-old former student at the Grand Central Art School and Pratt Institute. A childhood bout of polio had left Fine with a badly weakened left leg and noticeable limp, and from the long recovery period away from school, he developed a quiet, almost withdrawn personality. He’d begun drawing during his long hours alone. As good as, if not better than, Eisner as a draftsman, Fine was a point-and-direct kind of artist with no inclination to write his own material. Fine preferred to go off on his own, in a private office if possible, and work in his slow, tediously methodical fashion, treating each panel as if, upon delivery, it was going to be shipped to an art museum and viewed in perpetuity. He liked to work with a mechanical pencil, though he was gifted enough to ink directly onto the page with no pencils acting as a guide. When he submitted one of his completed pages, the other artists gathered around to admire the kind of exquisite work they could only dream of accomplishing.
Joe Kubert was one of those artists. “When his work came out every month,” Kubert said, “every artist I knew wanted to get his hands on the stuff he was doing, just to look at it. It was like magic. I don’t think it was so much that they wanted to work like him, but he was a kind of beacon: that’s where you could go, the direction you could take, if you pushed yourself. You could accomplish what this guy was accomplishing—the way you wanted to do it.”
According to several of the Eisner & Iger shop artists, Eisner envied Lou Fine’s abilities, though he was frustrated by his unwillingness to handle other chores.
“Lou had never had any interest in the writing end of the business,” Eisner recalled. “He had a brilliant technique, the best of anyone working then, and when I did the writing he was free to spend his time rendering a magnificent piece of art. There are writers who are capable of inspiring an artist, bringing things out of him that he might not have known were there. There has to be a kind of emotional welding between the two where trust takes place. That’s why we worked so well together.”
Bob Powell was Eisner’s kind of man, at least in terms of what he did around the shop. Loud, abrasive, opinionated, and aggressive, with a streak of open anti-Semitism that irked Eisner no end, Powell could do anything that needed doing at Eisner & Iger. Powell worked quickly in any genre and required no supervision—the kind of pro’s pro Eisner could appreciate. Born Stanislav (Stanley) Pawlowski in 1916 in Buffalo, New York, Powell moved to Manhattan and studied at the Pratt Institute before latching on to Eisner & Iger. Eisner appreciated his leadership skills enough to make him shop foreman, but his style, the polar opposite of Eisner’s laid-back but hands-on way of treating employees, grated on those working under him.
Bob Fujitani, who worked with Eisner later, after Eisner and Iger had parted ways, remembered Powell as the kind of guy who let the power of his position go to his head. “When Eisner would leave, Powell would take over. He was the boss then. And immediately, as soon as Eisner was out the door, it would be,