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One of One of 32 FROM KRAKOW TO KRYPTON: JEWS AND COMIC BOOKS the few Jewish comic-book creators who didn’t change his name was Will Eisner. And from 1937 to 1940, while DC was steadily climbing the comic-book publishing ladder, the Eisner & Iger Studio created superheroes like Black Condor and Uncle Sam for publishers like Quality Comics and Fiction House. This sort of work was second nature for Will Eisner, who always knew that he wanted to draw pictures for a living. The son of an Austrian émigré who painted stage sets, Eisner was born on March 6, 1917, and attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, whose other graduates included Stan Lee, the Batman creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger, and the writers Paddy Chayefsky and James Baldwin. As a kid during the Great Depression, Eisner hawked newspapers on the street to help out his family, and it was then that he started to become obsessed with the great newspaper strips of the day, including Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates and Elzie Segar’s Thimble Theater. In 1933, he drew comic strips for his high school newspaper, The Clintonian, buoyed by the emotional support of his artist father, Sam. As soon as comic books started calling for original material, Eisner began to contribute. He created the pirate strip “The Flame” (later resuscitated as “Hawks of the Sea”) for the short-lived Wow, What a Magazine, which went belly-up with issue #4 in November 1936. It was then that Eisner & Iger Studio, aka the Art Syndication Company, came into being, after Eisner met with the Wow editor Jerry Iger and outlined a plan to farm camera-ready comic-book features to client publishers. Because he supplied the money for the first month’s rent on their studio, Eisner’s name went first on the company letterhead. From their offices in the Tudor City building in Manhattan, Eisner and Iger churned out such characters as Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. Sheena was the first major female comic-book character, created by Eisner in 1938 under the pen name “William Thomas” for the Fiction House title Jungle Comics. Like Stan Lee at Timely and Siegel and Shuster at DC, Eisner often did much of his work under pseudonyms to make his company seem bigger than it actually was. Aside from William Thomas, his other pen names included Willis Rensie (Eisner spelled backwards), W. Morgan Thomas, and The Spirit of the Times Chapter six Photograph of Will Eisner in 1942, when his comic strip, The Spirit, was at the height of its popularity. Copyright© Eisner Studios Inc. Courtesy of www.deniskitchen.com. THE GOLDEN AGE: THE SPIRIT OF THE TIMES 33 That’s so meta! A portrait of the Spirit drawing his creator, Will Eisner. Spencer Steel. But soon, he started employing assistants to help him take care of the heavy workload. Many of those assistants later became famous cartoonists in their own right. A young Eisner & Iger assistant named Jack Kirby made his professional comics debut in the Fiction House title Jumbo Comics #1 (not to be confused with Jungle Comics). Kirby was born Jacob Kurtzberg on August 28, 1917, on Essex Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Kurtzberg’s parents were (like Sam Eisner) Austrian immigrants, and his rough and tumble early life was the stuff of 1930s Warner Brothers gangster pictures. Kurtzberg’s parents, Rosemary and Benjamin, were among two million Jewish immigrants who fled Europe to escape persecution, and who were welcomed by an America that desired cheap labor. At the time, nearly a quarter million people were packed into every square mile of the Lower East Side, making the ethnic ghetto one of the most populous places in the world. Like Siegel and Shuster, young Jacob Kurtzberg was a child of the Depression. Kurtzberg’s family was very poor, and his father worked as a tailor in a garment factory. The desperation of the inner city took its toll on “Jakie,” who fell in with the Suffolk Street gang and became known as quite a scrapper. On one occasion, when a local politician sent a man to the Kurtzberg home to pay Benjamin money to vote as a Democrat, Jacob, who had been studying civics, threw the man down the stairs for corrupting his father. As the Lower East Side was the turf of the gangster Charles “Lucky” Luciano, many of Jacob’s friends became gangsters. But he quickly realized that his heart...

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