• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 433 0

Printing Company. He relocated to Connecticut, where one of his biggest clients, Eastern Color Printing, had its offices and where his interest in comics began. He’d always loved the color comics section in the Sunday newspapers, and the nearby Greater Buffalo Press printed these sections for most of the major newspapers east of the Mississippi. Arnold wound up taking a job with the company, rising to the position of vice president. He’d hoped that he and company president Walter Koessler, another comics fan, might partner on a comic book venture similar to Famous Funnies, published by Eastern Color, but Arnold and Koessler had a falling-out and it never happened. Arnold quit the Greater Buffalo Press and created his own comic book, Feature Funnies, in New York, debuting in 1937. Like Famous Funnies, Arnold’s comic relied mainly on reprints of newspaper strips.

Busy Arnold connected with Eisner & Iger a year later. He was aiming to fit original material into Feature Funnies and, if possible, create new titles. Eisner liked working for Quality Comics Group, as Arnold called his company. He admired Arnold’s business panache and his insistence on high-quality work, even if he wasn’t an artist and could only judge art instinctively.

Eisner also appreciated the fact that Arnold was willing to pay for good work. “Busy Arnold was an astute buyer of comic features,” he pointed out. “When all the other publishers believed in buying on the cheap, Arnold’s theory was to pay well. He knew he could get better talent by paying well.”

When Arnold contacted Eisner about a private meeting, he’d hatched a plan that even Eisner, a master of creative thinking, had to stand back and admire—a plan combining the current interest in original comic books—Eisner’s forte—with the traditional popularity of the Sunday newspaper strips. Eisner’s career was about to take a dramatic turn.

Comics sold newspapers, regardless of what their critics had to say about their cultural value. Newspapers nationwide, from large circulation to small, used their colorful wraparound comic sections to entice newsstand buyers, and by 1940, families all across America shared a common ritual of spreading the Sunday funnies section across kitchen tables or on living room floors, where kids would wander from panel to panel as they saw their favorite characters in full color for the only time that week.

The significant uptick in comic books’ popularity worried newspaper publishers. Comic books offered benefits that newspapers couldn’t touch. They had a shelf life, unlike the disposable daily papers; they could be collected and passed around. Their bigger format allowed them to present longer, more detailed stories. Newspapers couldn’t compete with their eye-popping covers. If comic book sales continued on the upswing, newspaper sales figures were bound to suffer. Publishers felt certain of that.

Busy Arnold had been pondering this, and when he met with Eisner for lunch, he had a powerful newspaperman named Henry Martin with him. Arnold had been introduced to Martin back in his days at the Greater Buffalo Press, when the press was printing the Sunday comic sections for newspapers and Martin was an up-and-coming sales representative for the Des Moines Register & Tribune Syndicate. Martin had come up with the idea of creating a weekly comic book supplement—a sixteen-page comic book featuring all new material—to be inserted into Sunday newspapers, much the way weekly magazines and television supplements would be inserted in papers in years to come. He’d discussed the prospects with Busy Arnold, who had experience with both comics and printing, whereas Martin had all kinds of connections on the distribution end. Eisner, the two offered, could be the one producing this weekly comic.

Eisner liked the idea. With the right contract provisions, he’d have complete editorial and artistic control over his work—within reason, of course—and if Martin was capable at all, the comic book would be reaching millions of readers of all ages. The big challenge would be the weekly deadline: