Superman is Jewish? by Harry Brod

Author:Harry Brod
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

William Erwin Eisner was born in Brooklyn in 1917. His mother, Fanny (Ingber), was born on the boat bringing her family to the U.S. from Romania. His father, Samuel, came from Vienna, where he’d painted murals. In New York he painted stage sets for the Yiddish theater, then worked as a grainer (someone furniture companies hired to paint brass beds to make them look like the then more popular wooden beds), then became a house painter before eventually getting into the fur manufacturing business, where he went broke. Eisner described his family as “lapsed Orthodox” and spoke of his mother as the practical one and his father as the artistic dreamer. 4 It was a common division of labor in European Jewish families—remember the description of “the mama” from the opening song “Tradition” in Fiddler on the Roof : “Who must raise the family and run the home so Papa’s free to read the Holy Book?” 5

During and after high school, where he drew for the DeWitt-Clinton school newspaper, Eisner found various ways to use his drawing skills to help support the family during the Depression, doing posters for local merchants and small ads for newspapers. 6 Eisner’s first significant entry into the world of comics came when his high school friend Bob Kane suggested he might find work with Jerry Iger, who was editing a boys’ magazine called Wow, What a Magazine! Eisner went to the offices in a Fourth Avenue loft but couldn’t get Iger’s attention. Determined, he followed Iger to the magazine’s printer, where they were having a problem getting clean reproductions. To their great surprise the young Eisner solved the problem the experienced hands couldn’t by the simple means of using a burnishing tool to brush down the burrs on the edges of the plate that accumulate over time and blur the image, It was a trick he’d learned working on his high school magazine and after hours in a print shop. Bob Andelman tells the rest of the story in his authorized biography of Eisner:

The engravers turned to Iger and said, “Who is this guy?”

Not missing a beat, Iger said, “My new production man.”

Eisner smiled. . . .

They went back to the Wow! office and Iger grabbed Eisner’s portfolio for a second, more sincere look. In earnest, he said, “What do you have to sell?” He bought Eisner’s first adventure story. 7

The two soon formed a partnership, the Eisner & Iger Studio, where they both created material for the new comic books that were being published, and also packaged the work of other creative teams. The growing popularity of the comics increased the publishers’ need for new material, and the studio would save them from having to separately hire and coordinate writers, pencilers, and inkers by offering them a finished product instead. Figuring out this assembly-line technique for profitable in-house production was the beginning of Eisner’s long-standing reputation as one of the best businessmen in the field. That reputation was strengthened as later creators were amazed that he retained the rights to his characters in an era when that was unheard of.

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