Will Eisner (8 page)

The attraction was mutual, though nothing serious ever developed. Eisner was too busy, too devoted to advancing his career and the fortunes of Eisner & Iger, to commit to a relationship. They dated briefly, but Eisner broke it off before things advanced. He would depict the fling in
The Dreamer
. “I’ve got dreams,” he tells Toni, renamed Andrea in the book. “Do they include romance?” she asks. “I guess that will come with success,” he answers. Hurt by the response, she asks him, “Oh? … Is that all?” “What else is there?” he wonders, oblivious to the notion that as an aspiring playwright biding time at Eisner & Iger until one of her scripts was discovered, Toni Blum might have been offended by the comment.

Eisner’s obsession with work—at the cost of close friendships or relationships with women—became legendary at the shop, so much so that Jerry Iger himself tried to intervene by setting him up for an evening with one of his acquaintances. Eisner wined and dined her, then took her to bed, and the next time he saw Iger, he thanked him for arranging the date. Iger, thunderstruck by Eisner’s naïveté, informed him that his date had been a prostitute. Eisner, he pointed out, should have paid her, not fallen in love with her.

Comic books’ accelerating sales figures attracted a strange gallery of wacky characters, lowlifes, talent-free wannabes, rogues, and shifty businessmen, all eager to pick up a fast buck before the fad died out. Art, to those educated enough to know how to spell, was a three-letter word attached in some vague way to the colors in these skinny, pulpy magazines; fine work was a bonus, not a requirement. To those creating the comics, from the individual artists to shops like Eisner & Iger, the line of demarcation dividing the good guys from the bad guys could be thin, almost indefinable. But in the aftermath of the Depression and a global conflict darkening the future, nothing much mattered as long as the product was being served and the bills paid.

Fox Publications was a case in point. The company’s founder, Victor Fox, a short, stout, balding, cigar-chomping, fast-talking former accountant, could come across as a real low-rent operator, but in his brief history in comics, he’d held on to just enough credibility to keep the worst suspicions at bay. He’d been counting beans for Harry Donenfeld at National when
Action Comics
and Superman broke through, and he knew enough about Donenfeld and his cronies to recognize that these people, while not stupid by any means, had essentially backed into a fortune. Reasoning that he had enough business sense to put together his own company and wait for luck to traipse through his doorway, Fox quit National and formed Fox Publications. Eisner & Iger supplied him with the bulk of his material.

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 B
1
(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 to pay, from payroll for their large bullpen to general overhead. Bill Eisner and Jerry Iger were compensating themselves well for their efforts, further eroding the shop’s profit margin. If Eisner refused to create the
Wonder Man
comic and Victor Fox moved his business elsewhere, Eisner & Iger stood to take a tremendous loss. “It’s his magazine and he’s asking for this,” Iger concluded, “[so] we’ll do it for him.”

Fox had given Eisner a written memo with directions for what he expected for
Wonder Man
, and Eisner followed it to the letter. The result was a comic book that, from cover to content, resembled
Superman
to a shocking degree. Eisner had worked in some differences to disguise the similarities—Wonder Man, for instance was blond, whereas Superman had dark hair; Wonder Man’s costume was red and yellow, and Superman’s was red, blue, and yellow; Wonder Man received his superhero powers from a magic ring rather than from the sun of an alien planet—but the characters were essentially the same. Even the covers were strikingly similar: in
Action Comics #1
, Superman is seen holding an automobile aloft while the bad guys scatter; on the cover of
Wonder Comics #1
, Wonder Man is taking on an airplane.

Wonder Comics
hit the streets, and Harry Donenfeld reacted as Eisner feared he would, suing Fox Publications for copyright infringement. As Wonder Man’s writer and artist, Eisner was subpoenaed to testify in court as a material witness. Shortly before the case finally went before a judge, Fox met with Eisner and attempted to coach him on the proper way to testify.

“I want you to tell them there was no intent to copy,” Fox said.

“As far as I’m personally concerned, I had no intent to copy,” Eisner averred. “I was following your instructions.”

Fox had anticipated this answer from someone as young and idealistic as Eisner. Ideals—and the truth—were for dreamers; it was time to speak in terms that Eisner was more likely to understand. Fox reminded Eisner, as if it were necessary, that he owed Eisner & Iger $3,000—an enormous sum in those days and enough to jeopardize the shop’s future—and if Eisner failed to testify as directed, Fox would withhold the entire amount.

Once again, Eisner consulted with Jerry Iger, and as before, Iger took a business perspective: telling the truth presented too great a risk.

At least this was Eisner’s story. There are two versions of what happened in the courtroom hearings. Eisner claimed, in interviews and in his depiction of the legal proceedings in his graphic novel
The Dreamer
, that he stood his ground, told the truth, and faced the consequences for his youthful idealism. “I suppose when you’re young it is easier to adhere to principles,” he told an interviewer more than three decades after he testified.

A transcript of his testimony in a November 1939 appellate court hearing, published by comics journalist Ken Quattro in July 2010, tells an entirely different story. The transcript shows Eisner capitulating in every sense to the demands of Victor Fox and Jerry Iger. He denied reading
Action Comics
or knowing much of anything about Superman until after he created Wonder Man. Wonder Man, Eisner claimed, was based more on the Phantom than on any other character. He denied plagiarism, even though a comparison of a number of panels in
Action Comics
and
Wonder Man
showed incontestable similarities in the art and writing.

Despite a major (and, fortunately for Eisner, posthumous) hit on his carefully maintained public image, the later revelations about Eisner’s perjury didn’t affect history. Fox lost the case and delivered on his promise. He never paid Eisner & Iger a cent.

Although he never formally addressed the issue for the record, the Wonder Man episode must have truly frosted Bill Eisner. He never cared much for Jerry Iger—“Don’t pay any attention to him; he’s here because he’s a good businessman,” he’d instruct shop workers disgusted with Iger—and the Wonder Man affair effectively fractured what little was left of their mutual trust. To make matters worse, Wonder Man was precisely the type of costumed superhero that Eisner despised. To have been forced to create the character and then deal with it in court couldn’t have done much to improve his disposition about the types of comics that by 1939 were the rage of the industry.

To top this off, Bob Kane, Eisner’s old high school chum and former Eisner & Iger freelance contributor, had teamed up with a gifted writer/artist named Bill Finger to create a costumed character that was about to become the next big thing. As a character, Bat-Man, as he was initially called (the hyphen would later disappear), was more complex and fully realized than Superman. He was a human with no superpowers, reliant on his wits and gadgets he stored in a utility belt, and while Superman’s heroics were witnessed in broad daylight by throngs of adoring citizens, Bat-Man was more a creature of the night, a loner, part detective and part vigilante. Unlike Superman, he didn’t have to find ways to duck away from his day job to go out and save the world; under the dark cowl hiding his true identity, Bat-Man was a wealthy, mansion-dwelling socialite, totally self-sufficient and capable of heading out on a moment’s notice.

Bat-Man made his debut in
Detective Comics #27
, and readers responded favorably—not in the frenzy that built so quickly with Superman, but enough to salt away Bob Kane’s legacy in comics.

Will Eisner was nothing but gracious when discussing Kane’s success, but those closest to him knew Eisner to be extremely competitive and, on occasion, envious of others’ good fortune. He never hid his opinion that Kane, as an artist and creative individual, was vastly inferior to others working in comics; on a personal level, he could take Kane only in limited doses. In Eisner’s view, Kane was far too loud for his talent.

There was no debating that Bat-Man, coupled with the overwhelming popularity of Superman, had changed the direction of comics while making National the top comic book publisher in the business. Eisner & Iger continued to produce huge volumes of material for Fiction House and other publishers, but as 1939 drew to a close, Eisner was aching for a change of direction, for something that would advance him beyond the juvenile audience that restricted his talents and vision. He believed to his core that this could be accomplished in comics, but he was stumped by how that might happen.

The solution was nearby, and for one of the few times in his life, Eisner didn’t have to invent it himself.