R.C. HARVEY: I suspect that the Eisner-Iger Shop was arguably the first comic-art shop, but if not the first, then probably the second, Harry "A" Chesler having started a shop in the summer of 1936.

WILL EISNER: I believe we were the first. There may have been another, but I don't know who started the first one. It's very hard for me to remember all this in any kind of strict chronological order. I've often described that period as like being in a war: you're in the trench, and someone says to you, "How's the war going?" You don't know how the war's going! I know there's a war out there, but my war is here in the trench.

HARVEY: You and Jerry Iger got together initially to produce the magazine Wow! What A Magazine.

EISNER: Let me tell you the story. I was out of work [spring 1936], and I ran into Bob Kane on the street, and I said, "What are you doing?" After high school, Bob started selling panel cartoons. It was a going business then: There was Life and Liberty and College Humor and a couple of other magazines like that [Judge and Ballyhoo, for instance -- RCH]. And he said, "There's a magazine called Wow! that I've been selling panel cartoons to, so you might go look for work there." So I went up. It was in an office in the front end of a factory on Fourth Avenue that was making shirts, run by a guy named John Henle. Those factory offices were next to the front windows on the street-side, and the factory took up the rest of the floor. I walked in and there was Iger sitting at a desk on the telephone, little guy, and I asked to show him my work, but he was on the phone and it was a moment of crisis. "Gee," he said, "I don't have time to talk to you now. I've got a serious problem here."

Well, candidly, I was hungry. I was real hungry, and I wasn't going to allow him to put me off. He said, "Come back another day. Come back tomorrow or the next day." And he's putting on his jacket and heading for the elevator, and I was going towards it with him. He's about 5 feet 1 inch tall, and here I am, 5-11, so I was towering over him. I was following him down in the elevator, and I had my black portfolio with me, and I said, "Let me show you my stuff." And he said, "Well, you can show me." We were now walking up the street, up Fourth Avenue (now it's Park Avenue South), and I was showing him my artwork as we were walking up the street. Then we got to his engraver's shop, and there was a meeting going on there. In engraver's shops in those days -- it was letterpress before offset -- they had a big stone table in the center of the room where they would look at the metal plates as they came out of the acid bath. They were standing around this thing and talking about a serious problem. The problem was that the plates were digging holes in the mattes, a papier-maché-like product like egg crates, and I cleared my throat, and I said, "Excuse me." And they looked at me, and I said, "Does anyone have a burnishing tool?" I had been working for years in a print shop downtown on Varick Street, and I'd seen this before. What happens is that when the etching is complete, it frequently left burrs along the indentations, and these burrs were what was making holes in the mattes. They handed me a burnishing tool, and I rubbed the burrs off the edges of the plate. And these guys turned to Iger and said, "Who is this kid?" Iger said, "He's my new production man." [Laughs.]

We went back out onto the street and went back to his office, and Iger let me do a story. I did a thing called "Scott Dalton," a hero-type character. I was very enamored of the works of H. Rider Haggard, who wrote She. I was fascinated by his stories. And this Dalton character was a Haggard-type hero who would go to the Gobi Desert and find rare artifacts. The magazine Wow! lasted another issue or two and then went broke. Henle was no longer willing to continue the publication.

So I'm up in the Bronx chewing my nails because this was a lost opportunity. I picked up the phone, and I called Jerry Iger and said, "I'd like to meet with you: I've got an idea." And he said, "All right, I'll have lunch with you."

We met on 43rd Street opposite the printing plant of the New York Daily News, just off Third Avenue. What had struck me as I sat at home thinking about it was that the only comic books being started were all reprinting daily newspaper comic strips, adventure strips, and it suddenly hit me, out of the blue, that they would run out of a supply of these strips very soon, and then there'll be an opportunity to sell original material, drawn especially for these comic books. So we had lunch at this little beanery, and I told Jerry Iger about this idea and said I'd like to form a company with him and we'd produce the original art for these comic books. He was 13 years older than me, and I figured he was mature, and so he could handle the sales. I was 18 or 19, and at that age, you're not a salesman. You're lucky you can draw, but selling took other talents. You see, you can't handle rejection at that age. [They laugh.]

Iger said, "Frankly, it's going to take money, and I don't have any money. My second wife is divorcing me and is taking me for everything I've got: she's taking half of what I've got." He was quite the ladies man.

So I said, "Look -- I'll put up the money." [He laughs.]

HARVEY: Rich guy, eh?

EISNER: Yes -- I had $15 that I'd just gotten for a commercial job. And I knew about a little building on 41st Street just off Madison Avenue -- still there -- that rented rooms, offices, for something like $5 or $10 a month. No lease. They usually rented them to bookies, little one-room things. So I told Jerry, "I'll put up the dough. And I'll do all the art, and all you have to do is go out and sell it." We made a deal, shook hands. We agreed to form a corporation -- Eisner and Iger, my name first because I was the big money man. [He laughs.] And when we finished, I picked up the check -- I'm the big man now. Well, I had $1.95 in my pocket, and the check came to $1.90, so I had a nickel left to take the subway home to the Bronx.

I put the $1.90 down, and we walked out, and Iger says, as we walked down the street, "You know that wasn't very nice."

I said, "What's that?"

He said, "You didn't leave a tip." [Chuckles.]

I told him I forgot. "I'm sorry about that." And so we started the company, and I was the equivalent of a five-man art staff.

HARVEY: Let me interrupt with a couple stray questions. Before you met Iger, you said you worked at a printing shop. Was that during high school or after?

EISNER: During high school, in the afternoons. I was cleaning presses.

HARVEY: When you proposed the idea of doing original material for comics to Iger, were you aware of other shops like Chesler's shop?

EISNER: No, I didn't know of any.

HARVEY: If I recall, the first things you did there at Eisner-Iger were for an overseas syndicate operation --

EISNER: Iger had established connections while editor of Wow! with an outfit called Editors Press, which sold comics to foreign countries. It was an interesting company, and its story should be told. It was operated by Joshua B. Powers, who had originally been an American intelligence agent. He was probably secret service or something like that. South America was his beat. When he retired, he had an idea that he would sell comic strips to newspapers in Latin America -- comic strips and cooking features and stuff like that. But his idea was that he wouldn't get paid in money by those papers: instead, he would get space. Then he would sell the space up in the States to outfits that wanted to advertise in Latin America. There were a number of companies like toothpaste and soap manufacturers that were selling to Latin America, and they were looking for cheap advertising space. Powers would sell them space at less than the price they would pay if they went to the newspapers themselves. Before long, he had grown into a substantial syndicate in the foreign market. And he sold to other countries. He sold comics in England to a magazine called Wags. Iger got him as our first customer. The other magazines in town were mostly in the process of getting started at the time.

HARVEY: You also started Universal Phoenix Syndicate.

EISNER: Yes, that was later on. Not immediately. It was started as a way of selling comic strips to small local newspapers along the East Coast. A lot of small papers had no way of getting comic strips if they were in the same territory as a big metropolitan paper. When King Features sold a strip to, say, The Newark Star Ledger, the Star Ledger had regional rights, so none of the papers in that "region" -- those in all the small towns surrounding Newark with little newspapers -- could get any of the strips the Star Ledger was publishing. I said, "Let's see what we can do about that." And Iger said he'd go with that. So we hired two salesmen, two hotshot salesmen -- Rilley and Begg. I don't remember their first names, but they were fast-talking hotshots. The idea was that they would go into these small-town newspapers and sell them a page of our comic strips. The last panel of each strip was blank. They'd say they would go out and sell those blanks as advertising space. The advertising income would pay for the comic strips, so the paper would get a page of comic strips for nothing. But what the newspaper guy didn't realize is that these two hotshots would be leaving town the week after they'd sold a week's space, say, to the corner drugstore, so the next week, the newspaper guy would have to go back to the corner drugstore and sell the space again. At first, he didn't realize he'd bitten off a little more than he could chew. That was Universal Phoenix Syndicate.

HARVEY: And the material you produced for that eventually wound up in Quality's comic books. Hawks of the Seas, for example.

EISNER: It wasn't called Hawks of the Seas at first. It was called something else. [The Flame.] Hawks of the Seas was done originally for Wow! Again, I was enamored of Raphael Sabatini stories and N.C. Wyeth illustrations. Remember, we didn't have comic books in existence to build on in those days. Fellows today have a whole history of comic books to work with. Lots of examples. All I had were classical illustrators and the daily newspaper comics.

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #249.]

All site contents are © 2002