Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [28]
Toni Blum, an aspiring playwright, turned heads—literally and figuratively—from her first day at the studio. She was young, attractive, intelligent, and, as the men around her learned, very good at her job. Jerry Iger’s earlier quip about the shop’s grinding out frankfurters was now a reality, with two new, influential companies—Quality Comics, run by Everett “Busy” Arnold, and Fox Publications, operated by Victor Fox—pushing hard for an increasing volume of material. Eisner worked closely with Toni Blum, coming up with new ideas every day and delivering them to his new writer, who would type out scripts for the pencilers to break down into comic panels. Eisner, so cloistered at work that he had no social life to speak of, took notice of Toni Blum.
The attraction was mutual, though nothing serious ever developed. Eisner was too busy, too devoted to advancing his career and the fortunes of Eisner & Iger, to commit to a relationship. They dated briefly, but Eisner broke it off before things advanced. He would depict the fling in The Dreamer. “I’ve got dreams,” he tells Toni, renamed Andrea in the book. “Do they include romance?” she asks. “I guess that will come with success,” he answers. Hurt by the response, she asks him, “Oh? … Is that all?” “What else is there?” he wonders, oblivious to the notion that as an aspiring playwright biding time at Eisner & Iger until one of her scripts was discovered, Toni Blum might have been offended by the comment.
Eisner’s obsession with work—at the cost of close friendships or relationships with women—became legendary at the shop, so much so that Jerry Iger himself tried to intervene by setting him up for an evening with one of his acquaintances. Eisner wined and dined her, then took her to bed, and the next time he saw Iger, he thanked him for arranging the date. Iger, thunderstruck by Eisner’s naïveté, informed him that his date had been a prostitute. Eisner, he pointed out, should have paid her, not fallen in love with her.
Comic books’ accelerating sales figures attracted a strange gallery of wacky characters, lowlifes, talent-free wannabes, rogues, and shifty businessmen, all eager to pick up a fast buck before the fad died out. Art, to those educated enough to know how to spell, was a three-letter word attached in some vague way to the colors in these skinny, pulpy magazines; fine work was a bonus, not a requirement. To those creating the comics, from the individual artists to shops like Eisner & Iger, the line of demarcation dividing the good guys from the bad guys could be thin, almost indefinable. But in the aftermath of the Depression and a global conflict darkening the future, nothing much mattered as long as the product was being served and the bills paid.
Fox Publications was a case in point. The company’s founder, Victor Fox, a short, stout, balding, cigar-chomping, fast-talking former accountant, could come across as a real low-rent operator, but in his brief history in comics, he’d held on to just enough credibility to keep the worst suspicions at bay. He’d been counting beans for Harry Donenfeld at National when Action Comics and Superman broke through, and he knew enough about Donenfeld and his cronies to recognize that these people, while not stupid by any means, had essentially backed into a fortune. Reasoning that he had enough business sense to put together his own company and wait for luck to traipse through his doorway, Fox quit National