Eisner & Iger

Eisner & Iger

Eisner & Iger was a comic book "packager" that produced comics on demand for publishers entering the new medium during the late-1930s and 1940s period fans and historians call the Golden Age of Comic Books. Many of comic books' most significant creators, including Jack Kirby, entered the field through its doors.

The company, formally titled the Eisner and Iger Studio, was also known as Syndicated Features Corporation. Will Eisner, in a 1997 interviewed, referred to the company as both "Eisner & Iger" and the "Art Syndication Company". It existed from 1936–1939. In addition to comic books, the company also sold color comic strips, such as Adventures of the Red Mask and Pop's Night Out, to newspapers.

Its origin has been recounted by its namesakes, Will Eisner and Jerry Iger, in highly different ways, each given below, in alphabetical order.

Eisner & Iger was formed to service the emerging market for American comic books, which had originated in the early '30s as tabloid-sized magazines that reprinted newspaper comic strips, adding color to black-and-white daily comics. By 1935, sporadic new material was beginning to be created for them. One such seminal comic book, Wow, What a Magazine! was edited by Samuel Maxwell "Jerry" Iger, a former cartoonist. Wow, which folded after issue #4 (Nov. 1936), brought Iger together with a 19-year-old Will Eisner — the future creator of The Spirit and some of the earliest and most influential graphic novels — who wrote and drew the adventure feature "Scott Dalton", the pirate feature "The Flame", and the secret agent feature "Harry Karry" for Wow.