Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [26]
“I wrote them a long letter and told them they weren’t ready to come to New York,” Eisner recalled. “It was a tough town and their style wasn’t professional yet.”
Eisner had a personal aversion to superhero stories—to costumed heroes, as they called them in those days. Each passing month in the business left him all the more convinced that he was destined to do more mature material. He loved to write and he loved to draw, but he had concluded back in his Clinton High days that he wasn’t gifted enough as either to make an impact in the adult world of serious literature or gallery art. He could, however, thrive in comics, and if he worked hard and long enough at it, he might be able to move his material into avenues geared toward adult readers. In Eisner’s mind, this Superman idea, featuring a character who switched from a business suit to tights and a cape, was strictly kid stuff. It required a suspension of belief that dipped into the realm of bad science fiction or fantasy, as well as a format that demanded more action, less story. Eisner was spoiled by the quality of art and writing coming out of his shop, including the work aimed at younger readers. These Siegel and Shuster kids had a long way to go before they matched the work he was seeing on a daily basis.
So in one of the few giant missteps in a career characterized by strong instincts and judgment, Bill Eisner shot down Superman.
Not that he was alone. Superman had visited the surface of nearly every comics editor’s desk in New York and elsewhere, always with the same results. In reflecting back on it, Eisner thought that the reluctance to accept Superman might have risen out of the ugliness of the times and the strong feelings generated by Hitler’s rise to power.
“We were all concerned with the Nazi shtick, the Nazi concepts,” he explained. “Mein Kampf was published here around 1935, and there was a lot of talk on the subject of supermen. The psychological impact of these ideas on the imaginative fantasy creators was immense.”
In his book Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero, comics historian, editor, and former comics writer Danny Fingeroth, while not disagreeing with Eisner’s assessment, wrote that Superman and other superheroes to follow had deep roots in the response to Hitler and Nazism. The predominance of Jews in comics, he felt, was a huge contributing factor:
The creation of a legion of special beings, self-appointed to protect the weak, innocent, and victimized at a time when fascism was dominating the European continent from which the creators of the heroes hailed, seems like a task that Jews were uniquely positioned to take on. One might say they were cornered into it. The fantasy of godlike beings who could solve our problems was a cry of hope as well as of despair, as the Jews were the canaries in the coal mine of hate that was Nazism, sounding a simultaneous cry for help and a warning that you could be next.
Only a strange, unpredictable turn of events saved Superman from the trash bin. At the beginning of 1938, Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson was reaching the end of the line in his involvement with National Comics. He had managed to stay in the business through IOUs, the goodwill and generosity of some of his creditors, and low payment (sometimes nonpayment) to his contributors. Detective Comics, a new title that he’d hoped would pull him out of the doldrums, slogged along unimpressively. Drowning in debt, Wheeler-Nicholson began work on