Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [29]
Eisner tolerated Fox, but he had little use for him. “Fox was like an Edward G. Robinson kind of guy,” he’d recall. “He ran around the shop and he had delusions of grandeur. He went bankrupt four times. He once said to me, ‘Kid, if you go bankrupt, go big!’ And he did! He went bankrupt once for $400,000, most of it owed to the paper house. It was so much money that the paper house financed him to get him back in business so they could recover the $400,000 he owed!”
Golden Age comics legend Joe Simon served as Fox’s editor in chief in one of his very first jobs. As he described him, Fox was “a Wall Street hustler” who “didn’t have the slightest idea of how to put a comic book together, but that didn’t prohibit [him] from setting up a palatial office and announcing to anyone within earshot, ‘I’m the king of the comics.’” The way Simon remembered it, Fox might have been the king of marketing schemes, a guy who would use his comic books as a means of promoting the questionable products he concocted.
“Kooba Cola was the most bizarre,” Simon wrote in his memoirs, The Comic Book Makers.
In 1940, inspired by the popularity of Coca-Cola, the inside covers of his comics heralded the arrival of “the world’s newest and best-tasting soft drink, delightfully refreshing and fortified with 35 USP units of vitamin B1 (for the sake of health and nutrition).” The slogan, “Each bottle has enough for two,” was accompanied by a picture of a pretty girl or a couple of typical young Americans sipping contentedly on a bottle of giant sized Kooba Cola.
Later the ads featured coupons offering a bottle of Kooba Cola free of charge. Coupon redemption as well as distribution of the soft drink was to be handled by newsstand and magazine distributors. In addition, there were the premium refund offers. The reader could save and redeem Kooba Cola bottle caps for toys such as baseball bats—and for 250 bottle caps, a Buck Rogers pop-pop pistol. A kid would have rotted every tooth in his head before he could ever earn enough points to win these prizes. Luckily, no evidence of any Kooba Cola has ever come to light. Certainly, we who worked for the company never saw one single bottle.
Fox always owed Eisner & Iger a healthy sum for their work, but never enough to be cut off. The shop was now charging $10 a page, which translated into a handsome profit if someone like Fox came around and needed enough material to fill a sixty-four-page comic book. Eisner had heard the rumors about Fox, and despite his reservations about a man he would describe as “a thief in the real, true sense,” he could do business with the man as long as he played aboveboard and sent some money Eisner & Iger’s way.
Then Fox came in with a demand that Eisner found hard to digest: He wanted Eisner to create a character that was more than just a Superman knockoff; he wanted a character that was virtually identical to the Siegel and Shuster creation, a man of unparalleled strength, clad in tights and a skintight shirt emblazoned with a large “W”—for Wonder Man. This character would be big enough to merit his own book—Wonder Comics—and the sooner Eisner & Iger could put it together the better.
This knockoff of the new, immensely popular Superman, created to order for Victor Fox, nearly cost Eisner his studio. (Courtesy of Will Eisner Studios, Inc.)
Eisner struggled with the order from the moment Fox delivered it. He wasn’t experienced enough to know much about copyright laws and their enforcement, but he suspected that the similarities might be enough to land the shop in some trouble. Action Comics had touched off a slew of Superman-like characters in the business, but so far they had been different enough from the Man of Steel to avoid legal problems. Victor Fox’s history with Donenfeld wasn’t going to help matters, either.
Eisner consulted with Jerry Iger, who, not surprisingly, looked at it from a business angle. Eisner & Iger, although reaching the peak of the company’s success, had huge bills