Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [39]
They came from all over New York, from all backgrounds. They’d arrive in answer to a newspaper ad or when they were recommended by other Eisner employees. Dick French, brought in to beef up the writing staff, particularly on Lady Luck, was Tex Blaisdell’s brother-in-law. Klaus Nordling, who had worked briefly at Eisner & Iger, wrote plays for New York’s Finnish theater. Nick Cardy took a circuitous route, working for Jerry Iger at Eisner’s recommendation before catching on later with Eisner, after the departure of Chuck Mazoujian. Joe Kubert, just a teenage kid, turned up off the street, an aspiring artist looking for something to do. Eisner gave him a job sweeping and cleaning the place, but after seeing some of his sketches (and perhaps remembering his own days as a high school upstart), he had some of the staff, mainly Tex Blaisdell, coach him on his art.
Kubert would always look back fondly at the Tudor City bullpen and his on-the-job training.
“I was just starting out in high school,” he said. “I was just erasing the other artists’ work and sweeping out the place. Those guys were extremely kind to me. These were older people. I was just an obnoxious kid coming up there, trying to find out what the hell was going on, and these guys extended themselves in every way. They had the patience of several saints to correct my work, tell me about the materials, and help me along.
“The room was comparably small, maybe fifteen by twenty, and it was very quiet, as I recollect. The guys who did the work all sat in the same room. Will had a separate office. It was very, very businesslike. There was no nonsense going on. The guys had fun, but it was not a noisy place. I was a kid dealing with adults, and they dealt with me as an adult. I talked to them on an equal level. During lunchtime, Tex Blaisdell and I used to play handball downstairs, in the handball court across the street.”
Al Jaffee was just out of high school himself when he visited the Tudor City studio, looking for work. His sense of humor (which later became legendary through his work with Mad) won him a job.
“I had to create an idea,” he recalled, “and I didn’t have an idea except a silly drawing of a character called Inferior Man. He was bald and had a little mustache and looked like a pipsqueak. By day he was a little accountant, and then by night he would put on a cape and, for some reason, I had him flying. I don’t know where he got the power to fly, but he did. I took this up to Will and he said, ‘Great. Your drawings are funny. I have a drawing table here, right behind Dave Berg. I’ll pay you ten dollars a week and you can just draw this thing as a filler for Military Comics.’”
Inferior Man wasn’t long for the world, but Jaffee’s association with Dave Berg would be very fruitful in later years, when both contributed significantly to Mad.
To Eisner, shop chemistry and the ability to produce quickly weighed as heavily as artistic ability in his personnel decisions. Eisner’s ability to spot talent was almost unparalleled in the industry, but as he would joke long after he’d quit running a shop, the real key to running a successful studio involved his having one foot under the drawing table and one under the desk. Finding individual artists was relatively easy; assembling a team that worked well together, with a collective eye on churning out quality material on tight deadlines, required an instinctive understanding of human nature.
“I hired guys based