Eisner & Iger - Will Eisner Account

Will Eisner Account

According to Eisner, the demise of Wow prompted him to suggest that he and the out-of-work Iger form a partnership to produce new comics, anticipating that the well of available reprints would soon run dry. In late 1936, he said, the two formed Eisner & Iger, one of the first comics packagers. Iger was 32; Eisner claimed to be 25 so as not to scare Iger off.

As Eisner recounted,

We met on 43rd Street opposite the printing plant of the New York Daily News, just off Third Avenue. ...he 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. ... Iger said, 'Frankly, it's going to take money, and I don't have any money. ... 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 ... 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. (laughs)

Renting a one-room office on East 41st Street in Manhattan for $5 a month (the first three months' rent fronted by Eisner, who'd just been paid for a one-time commercial art job. for a product called Gre-Solvent), Eisner & Iger began with the former as the sole writing and art staff and the latter handling sales and also lettering the comics. Through Eisner's use of pseudonyms, including "Willis Rensie" ("Eisner" spelled backward) and "Erwin" (his middle name), the company gave the impression of being larger than it was.

A fictionalized account of Eisner's time with the company is depicted in Eisner's largely autobiographical graphic novel, The Dreamer.