Will Eisner (9 page)

chapter four

A   S P I R I T   F O R   A L L   A G E S

I guess I’m like a guy with a mission who believes that what he’s doing is right. I felt, not immortal, but I felt like a guy who is going into combat, believing the bullets won’t hit him.

I
n late fall 1939, shortly before Christmas, Eisner heard from Everett “Busy” Arnold, publisher and editor of Quality Comics, one of the leading comics producers in the business. Arnold, who couldn’t stand Jerry Iger and wanted no part of him, wanted to meet Eisner alone.

Eisner and Arnold had known each other for more than a year. Arnold had been tossing the Eisner & Iger shop a fair amount of work, even though he had his own staff of artists. Eisner liked Arnold, who was a genial presence in a business of loudmouths and posers, and Quality Comics was an enterprise that lived up to its name. Arnold cared about the material he published.

Born in Rhode Island in 1899, Arnold took an interesting path to his position in the comic book business. According to Dick Arnold, Busy’s son, the family lineage could be traced back to Benedict Arnold. Accounts of how Everett M. Arnold earned his moniker vary: perhaps he was tagged “Busy” because he was always on the go as a child, or perhaps he was such a chatterbox that he was called a busybody. In any event, the nickname fit a boy who was active, intelligent, and very athletic.

After graduating from Brown University with a history degree in 1921, Arnold moved to New York and took a job with the press manufacturer R. Hoe and Company; a short time later, he became a sales representative for the Goss 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: in the newspaper world, there was no margin of error, no acceptable excuse. You had to bring in the comic book’s camera-ready pages by a very specific time, week after week, month after month. Henry Martin had seen
Hawks of the Seas
and needed no further convincing of Eisner’s talent. What he needed was absolute assurance that this talented artist (who at twenty-two was barely more than a kid) was up to the grind ahead. Busy Arnold assured Martin that Eisner was as reliable as they got.

Negotiations—Eisner’s favorite part of business, then and always—commenced. The agreement would be an equal two-way partnership between Arnold and Eisner. Besides producing the weekly newspaper supplement, Arnold required Eisner to contribute the entire contents for two new, as yet to be determined comic books for newsstand sales. For the weekly comic, Arnold and Martin wanted costumed heroes, the type that had come into favor with Superman and Bat-Man. These serial characters would provide continuity in pulling readers from issue to issue. Eisner would have to find a way to accomplish all this without the services of the Eisner & Iger shop—or at least without it as it was currently structured. Arnold and Martin both loathed Jerry Iger, so he was out. Eisner would have to either buy Iger out or sever ties with his company.

Eisner agreed to these provisions, although, ever his practical mother’s son, he winced at the thought of totally abandoning the security of an established, successful company for the uncertainty of a project that had never been attempted.

The negotiations hit a snag when Eisner insisted on keeping the copyrights to the characters and content of his work in his name—a demand that the other two flatly rejected. By industry standards, the publisher or syndicate held the copyrights. The practice had been established to protect publishers from greedy or temperamental artists who might be inclined to pack up and leave if, say, they wanted more pay or had other serious issues with an editor or publisher or if they proved to be unreliable and publishers wanted to replace them.

Eisner refused to budge. The practice may have been the industry standard, but he couldn’t abide them, as an artist or businessman. Many of the artists working in comics didn’t mind the work-for-hire method of operations; they were content to turn in their work and pick up their payment. Every time they endorsed a paycheck, they were reminded, by agreements stamped on the back of their checks, that their signatures constituted a contractual agreement granting all rights to the publisher. To artists who viewed comics as hackwork, signing away rights was no big deal. But to Eisner and other artists who took pride in their work in comics, it was a very big deal indeed.

“That kind of rubbed me the wrong way,” said Al Jaffee, who worked for Eisner before eventually moving on to make his name at
Mad
magazine. “Bill Gaines had a contract on the back of every check. I wouldn’t have minded if he came to me and said, ‘Well, you have to sign a contract if you want to work for me, and I got all the rights.’ I would think about it and then I’d say, ‘Okay, I’ll sign the contract because I want to work.’ But I’ve already done the job and I’ve got a check in my hand, and the check says I have to sell all my rights. What am I going to do, tear the check up? I’ve done the work. So, you know, you’re caught between a rock and a hard place.”

Eisner the artist bristled at the idea of anyone claiming ownership of his creative work—as far as he was concerned, publishers were paying him for permission to print it—but Eisner the businessman hated the arrangement even more. He’d watched how National Comics, now calling itself DC Comics, had raked in a fortune on Superman, with no end in sight. The way it was set up, the publisher could—and, in the case of DC, eventually did—cut creators such as Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster out of the action. As owners of the characters, the publisher could assign them to other artists or, in the case of a character as popular as Superman, use the character for other lucrative marketing adventures, from movies to toys, without having to give the creators a fair cut of the profits.

Young as he was, Eisner never deluded himself about the nature of the business he was conducting with Busy Arnold and Henry Martin. He later joked in interviews that he would have loved to believe, as he sat across the table from Arnold and Martin, that they were interested in him because he was the best artist in the comic book business; in fact, he knew that they sought his services because he was a dependable commodity. “To the syndicate, [the supplement] was merchandise, and I was always conscious of that,” he said. “I wasn’t flattering myself into thinking that they saw it as anything but something their salesmen could use to sell more newspapers, and that didn’t bother me.”

The men argued at length, and for a while it looked as if they’d be breaking off the meeting without reaching an agreement. Then Eisner came up with a creative solution. The partnership contract would stipulate that the supplement would be copyrighted in Busy Arnold’s name, with the written agreement that all rights to character and content would revert to Eisner if the partnership dissolved. As Eisner recalled, Arnold was particularly concerned about what would happen to the character if Eisner was drafted—a likely enough scenario given the escalation of the war in Europe—and if something happened to him while he was in the service.

“We agreed that the stories would carry his copyright,” Eisner said, “and that at any time I returned, I would get the copyright back.” Arnold proved to be good to his word. “When I got back I went to him and told him I wanted to disassociate him from
The Spirit
, and he signed an agreement in which he gave the rights back to me.”

Arnold and Martin could live with this. The three men shook on the deal, and when Eisner got up to leave, he was convinced that he was now involved in something important, something career changing. Arnold and Martin hoped to launch the comic as soon as Eisner could put it all together—a tall order, considering they hadn’t discussed any specifics about the characters that Eisner would be presenting. In fact, Eisner himself had no idea what he’d be doing. His future, like a blank page on his drawing board, was all potential.

Jerry Iger thought his partner had lost his mind when Eisner explained the new project to him. He was undoubtedly hurt and angered by the prospect of his main creative force leaving him on his own, but beyond that, for all of Eisner’s explaining, Iger could see no good reason for his leaving the company at the height of its success. A war, he told Eisner, was on the horizon, already being waged in Europe, and there was no telling what would happen to Eisner’s comic strip if the United States became involved and Eisner was called into the service. There was a tremendous risk in leaving a proven success like Eisner & Iger for something that had never been attempted before. “Your dream could go up in smoke,” Iger cautioned his partner.

At Fiction House, Eisner & Iger’s biggest client, publisher Thurman T. Scott was also upset, but for a different reason. His business with the shop was based largely on his cordial relationship with Eisner, and he didn’t want to deal with Jerry Iger. A southerner, with all the traditional gentility that implied, Scott found Iger’s aggressive personality intolerable—to such an extent that he offered to lend Eisner any money he might need to buy Iger out if that meant Eisner would continue to supply Fiction House with comics. Eisner politely declined.

What neither man understood was the extent of Eisner’s need to break away. Both understood that newspaper comic strip artists were highly regarded and well compensated for their work—much more so than the comic book artists—but for Eisner this was only part of the attraction. He was already well compensated for his efforts at Eisner & Iger; he lived well, and he felt secure enough to move his parents, brother, and sister to an apartment on Manhattan’s Morningside Drive. At twenty-two he was already able, in essence, to support a family of five. Money wasn’t an issue.

What working for newspapers offered Eisner was an opportunity he would never have as long as he continued to work in the Eisner & Iger vein of producing comics. With newspapers, he could write and illustrate stories for adults as well as young readers. He might not have known, while he explained the deal to Iger, exactly what kind of character he would be creating for the newspaper supplement, but he was certain that despite Arnold and Martin’s desires, it wouldn’t be a guy from another planet, somebody wearing a costume like a strongman in the circus, someone who could fly, or someone who’d battle weird mutants from outer space. Whatever he decided to do, it would be entertaining but story driven and would stay as far from gimmicks as possible.