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Hy Eisman: Ghost Artist Extraordinaire
Over the last 50 years, Mr. Eisman has spent a lifetime working at his craft. Since 1976, he has been a teacher at the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art in New Jersey. Today, he is still doing regular strip work. He is the current artist and writer on the Sundays for Popeye and The Katzenjammer Kids. With over 50 years in comics, he has an incredible number of stories to tell. From working on an Army newspaper with Hugh Hefner, to the effect that the 1950s Senate hearings on comics had on his career, to trying to sell an original strip to the syndicate; his experiences show a side of the comics industry that many of us don't ever see or even think about. When Scoop was able to sit down with Mr. Eisman for several two-hour conversations, the only problem we had was trying to decide what to leave out. How did you end up working on an Army newspaper with Hugh Hefner? The War ended while I was in basic training. So, they had to do something with all these trained killers. I ended up being sent to Camp Pickett in Virginia and being assigned to a hospital unit. I started drawing for the Camp Pickett News. This was the paper that had been started by Bill Maudlin when the 45th Infantry came in. They went overseas and the paper hung on. When I got there, the staff was two WACS and an Editor. There was another cartoonist. His name was Hugh Hefner. When you are 18, you have a tendency to sound off a lot and I didn't think he was any good! He loved cartooning though. When he was being discharged, (He got out before me) we were doing caricatures and I said to him: "I hope you have a candy store going for you when you get to Chicago!" Have the two of you seen each other since the Army? When we had the 50th anniversary of our discharge form the Army, I sent him a note and said we should get together sometime for a reunion ourselves. He couldn't make it, but he did respond that he was glad one of us had made it as a cartoonist! Here is what he said, "I am glad it was you rather than me because I wouldn't have had the life I had lived if it had been me!" When did art become a career choice for you? When I first saw comic strips in the newspaper, I was hooked. I read Dick Tracy when I was five. I would make up my own words because Gould was such a good storyteller. Early on, I was in love with the work of Alex Raymond and Hal Foster. When I got out of the service, there was never any choice about what I was going to do, I went to school for art. Specifically, I was going for comics, but no one taught comic art at the time. So I had to go to a regular art school. There was a good school named "The Art Career School" in the Flatiron Building, so I commuted from Jersey to New York every day. There were three of us in the class who loved comics: Frank Thorne, who went on to do Red Sonja, Al Kilgore, who ended up on Rocky and Bullwinkle, and me. We tried to do assignments in a comic strip fashion so we could learn what is now called "sequential art." I just wanted to do comics. It became a sickness. That's how it was for a lot of artists that I have talked to over the years. There was nothing else that I could really do. I had no other real plans. That is what I tell my students, you must have a fire in your belly. When did you get out of school? Looking back, it was at the worst possible time in the industry. The Senate Investigations were going on and shops were closing down overnight. The very summer that I was walking around Manhattan with my portfolio, they were showing the hearings on television. Now TV was different in those days, they had nothing to put on so everybody was watching those hearings. I would love it because I would come home after pounding the pavement all day and they were showing comic book covers on TV! I didn't realize it at the time, but the Kefauver Committee was shredding my job prospects. At one point I thought that I really had a job. Hillman Publications had seen my portfolio and told me to come back in one week, there would be some work. One week later, I showed up bright and early to their offices and they weren't there. They had literally gone out of business and packed up and closed in one week! The number of publishers that went out of business during that time is astounding. It certainly was. If I remember there were over 40 publishers and by the time the hearings were over, there were maybe four or five. Were you able to get in to see anyone who was left? It was a lot easier to walk into the publishers' offices at that time. Nowadays, that just isn't going to happen. But they still would put you off. There was one time that I went up to DC. I waited patiently with my portfolio and work and finally someone came out to see me. We spent a good amount of time together. He looked at my work; he evaluated it and made some suggestions. Eventually, he said they would call if they could use me. Years later, I find out that this was the guy who was operating the elevator! They would send anyone out to the lobby to deal with people! Now, the kids I am teaching today don't know how lucky they are. One of the things that the Joe Kubert School is able to do is take their third year students and get them real time with reps from DC and Marvel who look at their work. This is an incredible privilege and most of the kids couldn't honestly care less! Funny how things work out! How did you finally get published? In order to make ends meet, I had taken a job with a company that made Valentine and greeting cards for the big retailers, like Sears. They were one of the first companies to use a clear window in their packaging. During this time I developed a strip about things that happened in New Jersey. The original plan was to take it around to all the little newspapers in New Jersey. I could charge them all ten dollars each for the strip. So, my first stop is naturally the largest paper in Jersey. They love the strip and decide to publish it. I am ecstatic! When I tell them that I will be taking the strip to other papers, they reminded me that they are the largest paper in the state and that they cannot allow me to sell it to their competition. So, while I suddenly had a regular job and a large readership, I had accidentally screwed myself out of a couple of hundred bucks by succeeding so well! I didn't mind. For the next three years, I did the Valentine job, which paid the bills, and the newspaper strip taught me how to meet deadlines and deal with the business. Did you ever start to think about how hard of a career choice comics had been? No. The Fuld Company, the ones who were making the Valentines and cards, were very happy with me. At one point, they offered me a job. It would have meant benefits, a salary and everything that goes along with that. I couldn't take this great job because I loved comics that much! If I couldn't do comics, I didn't want to do anything else! That's why I say it was an illness. Were you still pounding the pavement, talking to publishers during this time? I kept trying to get into comics. One of my earliest experiences was a direct result of the book, Comics and Their Creators by Martin Sheridan. It was my first summer trying to get work. I had read that book cover to cover. It was the first book I ever ran across that had histories and short biographies of the cartoonists themselves. One of the guys he wrote about was Alfred Andriola who did Kerry Drake. The book had said that he never turned down an interview. I got the phone book and found him. He was kind enough to see me. He gave me six Bristol boards and asked me to do a week of dailies. I celebrated for two days before it dawned on me that I had gotten what I wanted. I also knew I wasn't going to get the job. I went back to him and he was nice, but he told me couldn't use me at the time. He did pay me for the effort, which really made my day. I knew he was going to have to do a lot of work to clean my boards up, so I thought that was very generous of him. Five years later, after I had gotten some work, I had joined National Cartoonists Society and they met at the Lamb's Club in NY. Frank Thorne had helped me get in This is where the National Cartoonists Society meets, right? Yes, I had started doing Smokey Stover by then. One day, at the club, I ran into Andriola, and he asked me what I was doing. I didn't want to show him the work on Smokey Stover, because I didn't think that would show him anything for his strip. He needed somebody to help on the pencils for Kerry Drake while he was trying to sell and work another strip, It's Me, Dilly, and so he gives me six boards again. This time, I spent a week doing the pencils properly. He liked what he saw and hired me on. How did you get that first job on Smokey Stover? Frank Thorne, who I knew from school, was doing something for Dell. I think it was Turok with Paul S. Newman writing, I am not to sure, but it was a Jungle book. Anyway, Frank calls me and tells me that Matt Murphy is looking for someone to ghost on the Smokey Stover book. I went to see Matt and he takes a look at my portfolio. By now it had my greeting card work and the Jersey strip. He handed me a script for Stover. Now, people forget how popular Stover was, but at this time, he is really big. This was a great chance. I did everything from cover to cover. The next step after that was the American Comic Group. ACG seems to get forgotten by the collectors. Some of those books were really nice. They had a lot of artists who worked under pen names so that the other publishers wouldn't find out. It was Kurt Schaffenberger who helped me get that job. I had met him through the National Cartoonists Society. He had all that work at DC. Eventually, he was able to sign some of his covers, but you're right, a lot of folks would work there to pick up extra cash. It was an odd place to work, but I didn't know it at the time. Richard Hughes was the guy I worked with. He would give me these tremendously overwritten scripts signed by some Japanese writer. Being young, I was quick to voice my opinions about how this guy would overwrite. Hughes was merciless; he would cut the pieces without question. The whole time I was there, I kept complaining about how bad this writer was. Years later, I find out that Hughes was the one writing everything! Some months, he was doing seven or eight books and signing pen names to all of them! How long did you end up doing Kerry Drake? That lasted until about 1959. The strip that Andriola had been working so hard on just didn't fly, so he came back to Drake and resumed the pencils. This had been like a graduate school for me. It taught me what I needed to do to get six dailies and a Sunday out every week. There is no replacement for experience. It was just amazing. After the time on Kerry Drake, I was ready for anything. When did you start to develop the strip you were trying to sell, Joe Panther? Right after I had lost Kerry Drake. Joe Panther was actually a series of books that was being written by a guy named Zachary Ball. Now this is where it gets a little weird. Zachary Ball was the pen name for Kelly Masters. With only a fourth grade education, he had built a career writing hunting and adventure stories for Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post. When he came up with the series of books for Joe Panther, he didn't want the magazines to know that he was writing teenage adventure stories. Remember now, magazines were really big and they provided a lot of short story work. Nowadays, there is no real place for fiction in magazines. Anyway, he had contacted another cartoonist to see about developing Joe Panther as a comic strip. That guy, Lank Leonard, who was doing Mickey Finn, couldn't take it on, but he knew that I had just lost Kerry Drake, so he puts the guy onto me. Masters and I start to talk and we begin working on the strip by phone and through the mail. This is when, 1960? Yes, we spent a lot of time on it. The original stories were about a 17-year-old Seminole Indian boy who lived on a reservation in Florida. Masters had taken that basic concept and turned it around. He took the character of Joe Panther and added ten years to him. He now became much more urban. He drove a Corvette and was a Private Detective in Miami. I swear that when Miami Vice came on in the eighties, I thought it was Joe Panther! What did you need to submit to a syndicate? We put together two weeks of dailies and two Sundays. In addition, we put together an outline of the strips development over the first few months. This is a lot harder than it seems, especially when the writer is in Florida and the artist is in Jersey! We sure could have used e-mail back then! Eventually, we think we are ready to begin taking the strip around, so Masters comes up to see me. At the time, he was about sixty, so he had quite a few years on me. I had gotten married to a wonderful woman named Adri. She was a book jacket designer, and we had just had our first child! She passed on in 1997, and I never regretted a day I spent with her. She was always supportive of my freelance income and together, she and I invited Masters to stay with us. We moved the baby into our room and gave him the extra room for himself. How long did it take before someone showed some interest? We went everywhere, and it seemed to take forever. We couldn't figure out what was wrong, we had a good script and the art was tight. Finally, we got in to see United Features. They took the strip and said they would get back to us with their decision. What did they come back with? They said they thought the strip could sell, but they felt some changes were needed. They were really concerned that the idea of a Seminole Indian moving through White society wouldn't be able to sell to Southern newspapers. This was something that Masters and I hadn't even begun to think of on that level. They suggested that we make Joe Panther ten years younger and put him on a reservation in Florida. That way, his interaction with white people would be as tourists. What was ironic was that their suggestions were a lot closer to what Masters had been writing in the books. The original Panther was a kid. So we brought back his original supporting cast, Jennie Rainbow and the uncle who served as a sidekick. We quickly put together an outline and did a new set of dailies. We turned that into the syndicate. They were pleased with the changes. Did they come to you with a contract? Well, let's just say that it was their version of a contract! The standard contract was this: fifty-fifty split, after expenses. That meant my share was 25 percent, and I still had to pay for all my own brushes and pens and boards. Since they were the only syndicate that had shown any interest, we had to listen to what they offered. At first, we thought that such a rate was an opening gambit in negotiation, and that they would give us something a little more fair. Turns out they were inflexible! This was their standard contract, and we were given the impression that we should be thankful we were being offered that! In addition, it can take over a year for a strip to begin to earn money, so we had to support ourselves while this whole year was going on. In essence, we were being asked to do the strip on spec! So, after all the changes to accommodate the prospective Southern newspaper market, they still wanted you to wait a year or so before you saw any money? Yes. I asked one of them how we were supposed to make a living while we were working on the first year. He told me to take out a loan. I asked him if the syndicate would do this for us, and he told us that they weren't in the loan business! I asked him what we were supposed to do. He told us that Peanuts was starting to get big and that if Charles Schulz could get through that early period, any artist should be able to. Now, Charles Schulz is a great guy and Peanuts certainly turned out to be one of the great strips, but drawing an action daily like Joe Panther and drawing Peanuts are two entirely different things. This is not meant as a knock towards Schulz, either. I knew that Schulz had been doing filler pages for other publishers during that time because I had been doing the Nancy book and he had a few pages in there as well as a few other titles, so he was able to do other work to keep himself afloat. We ended up turning them down because they were effectively putting absolutely nothing into the strip, no money, no support. They just wanted to take our work and publish it. If it took off, they wanted fifty percent right off the top! It was a no-lose proposition on their part! What happened next? We took it around to a few other syndicates. We showed one editor the revised version, and she only looked at the very first daily. Her response? "Who wants to see alligators on a Monday morning?" She wouldn't even look at it any further than that first daily! Where does Joe Panther ultimately end up? Masters was a good guy, but we weren't great friends or anything. We did stay in touch. He went to Hollywood and began to try and sell scripts. He finally had some success with Disney. He had written a script about a boy and a really ugly dog called Bristle Face. It was made into a TV movie, and you can still find it on video. As far as Joe Panther, that is a whole other story. It was eventually made into a feature film starring Brian Keith and Ricardo Montalban! Masters was nice enough to send us some tickets to the premiere, but we couldn't go. A few years later, I finally saw it and it looked like they had taken the dailies I did and used that as a storyboard for the opening scene! Which concept did they use, the urban Joe Panther or the one who lived on the reservation? They went with the younger version. After all that effort, you end up in a movie theater watching your own work? Yep, that's show biz! Right after all this had gone on, I started to get a lot of work in comic books. So, I wasn't really preoccupied with what went on. I had a family to support, and I always liked to work. It was during this period that I started to get some great work. I did the Munsters books. I also started to get some daily work on Bringing up Father. Vernon Greene had started to become ill and he didn't want King Features to know. This is the same Vernon Greene who did the Shadow strip that ran in the forties? Yes, he was a great guy and did wonderful work. He was really worried that the syndicate would take the strip away form him if they found out how sick he was. At first I would take the strips down to the Veteran's hospital for him to sign. After a while, his wife asked me to just do his signature. After that, I got regular work with Harvey doing Bunny. For the first couple of issues, I did everything for the covers, pencils, inks, colors, everything. I even did the lettering because by that time, I wanted to control how my work looked. How did Bunny come about? Harvey and some toy company had decided they were going to do a Barbie-type doll together. The gimmick was that the doll was ultimately tied into the comic book. The doll was going to be a fashion model and have everything that went along with that, a house, a car, a boyfriend. Well, the toy company falls through, and Harvey decides to go along with the comic book anyway. It was written by Warren Harvey. If I recall, he was one of the sons of the owner. The book had a good run. It lasted until 1976. Yes, it was actually really popular for a while. Harvey did good business on that title. It still has a following today. I really did a lot of work on the first issues. I liked doing that title. Right after Bunny started, I got a call from King Features. They wanted to know if I was interested in doing Little Iodine. Hatlo had been gone for a few years and Bob Dunn and Al Scaduto were doing both of his features, They'll Do it Every Time and Little Iodine. They asked me to pick up the Iodine Sunday page. By now you must have acquired a reputation as a dependable ghost artist. Somehow, over the years, I had become known as the poor man's Tex Blaisdell. He always joked that he was known as the rich man's Hy Eisman! Blasidell was incredible. He really stepped in on Annie when Gray passed away. He had been doing it for a while, but his work was great. After all those years of ghosting comics and drawing books, Iodine provided me with my first byline. I worked on Iodine for almost twenty years. That must have felt good after, what, almost 20 years in the business? Actually, it was 17. I got Iodine in 1967. I had been working since 1950. That turned out to be a good period. I did books like Tom and Jerry and also drew Iodine. A few years later, Joe Kubert opened his school and asked me to teach. How did that happen? Joe had found a mansion in his hometown in Jersey. He invited my wife and I to see the place. He showed me what he was going to do and out of the blue asked me if I would want to teach there. I was going to turn it down. What do I know about teaching? My wife told me to take the job. Her reasoning was that it would get me out of the house and give me a reason to bathe and shave more regularly! So, what is on your agenda for the future? Right now, I am doing the Sundays for both Popeye and The Katzenjammer Kids. I have never left comics. I made a decision that I loved them a long time ago. I absolutely had to draw. There is nothing else I could have done. For fifty years, I have made a living drawing them. My wife passed away a few years ago. Recently, I met a wonderful woman named Florenz, and we are to be married shortly. She honestly gave me my life back, and I am eternally grateful. Other than that, I intend to go on teaching at the Kubert School and drawing my Sunday pages. The coloring is being done by the syndicate. I can't seem to get away from them! Scoop thanks Mr. Eisman for his time and his insights.
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