Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [25]
The thug left without further incident.
“He comes back again, call me,” Kirby instructed Eisner. “I’ll take care of him.”
Years later, Eisner could see the humor in the incident and in the way Kirby had taken on the thug in his own David and Goliath scenario. “Jack was a little fellow,” Eisner said. “He thought he was John Garfield the actor! Very, very tough.”
In changing his name, Jack Kirby was in no way unusual in the comic book business. Like Hollywood actors, comic book artists changed their names to mask their ethnic or Jewish backgrounds. If comics were a ghetto, as Eisner repeatedly suggested throughout his career, its artists were perfect inhabitants. Many, like Eisner, had come from European stock, lived impoverished childhoods in tough neighborhoods, barely survived the Depression, and studiously worked on their art, only to discover that the better-paying jobs were closed to people with their backgrounds. In addition, names like Powell and Kirby were easier to sign on artwork than Pawlowski or Kurtzberg. Eli Katz became Gil Kane, Bob Kahn became Bob Kane, and Alfred Caplin became Al Capp.
Stan Lee, born Stanley Lieber, said he changed his name because he wanted to reserve his given name for the novels he hoped to write. “I was kind of embarrassed to be writing comics,” he admitted, “so I didn’t want to use my real name. I was saving that for the good stuff I would someday write.”
Nicholas Viscardi changed his name to Nick Cardy after becoming fed up with the ribbing he took about the Mob, his Italian heritage, and, during World War II, the idea that Italians were the enemy. When he was doing freelance work, he even heard from a boss who, thinking he was being funny, signed Viscardi’s check with a “P” rather than a “V.” The next month, his last name began with a “B.”
Viscardi was rightfully offended. He’d been raised in a lower-class, ethnically diverse neighborhood, where this type of xenophobia was foreign. As a boy, he’d come home from school and, while waiting for his mother to return home from work, sit on the front stoop of his apartment building and talk to a rabbi from the same building. He hated the anti-Italian jokes he heard, but he needed the job. “I was upset,” he remembered, “but I was young at the time and I was trying to make a living. So I changed it. I just put in the last part of the name.”
Cardy didn’t abandon his name entirely—at least not right away. When working on Lady Luck for Eisner, he used the house name “Ford Davis” when he signed the feature, but he always found a way to disguise his initials, “NV,” in the artwork.
In the early comic book days, artists were fortunate to find any permutation of their names attached to their work. Publishers and shops, including Eisner & Iger, preferred to use house names. They’d assign a generic name to a feature, which would always be used regardless of the artist doing it. Using a house name was insurance for publishers, protection from lawsuits that might arise if an artist walked away from a firm but still wanted to use a character he’d created. Artists didn’t own their creations in any event, but to a a publisher, owning a feature and using a house name was failsafe protection.
Eisner had written under so many names that he would have been forgiven if he lost count. He could shrug it off as part of the business, and he expected the others working for him to see it the same way. “We had a whole bunch of phony names,” he explained, adding with a laugh, “We just handed them out with the salary.”
Sometime in early 1938, the Eisner & Iger studio received an unsolicited package in the mail, postmarked Cleveland and containing a cover letter and two complete comic stories, one a spy thriller, the other an