Jerry Iger

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jerry Iger in 1972.
Jerry Iger in 1972.

Samuel Maxwell "Jerry" Iger (August 22, 1903 – September 5, 1990) is an American cartoonist. With business partner Will Eisner he co-founder of Eisner & Iger, a comic book packager that produced comics on demand for new publishers during the late-1930s and 1940s period known to fans and historians as the Golden Age of Comic Books.

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life and career

Despite no formal art training, Iger became a news cartoonist for the New York American in 1925. Iger entered the fledgling comic-book field ten years later, contributing such one-page humor strips as "Bobby", "Peewee" and "Happy Daze" to Famous Funnies, one of those seminal American comic books that reprinted black-and-white newspaper strips in color. Iger became founding editor of another such early comic book, Wow, What a Magazine!, which also included some new material. Wow lasted four issues (cover-dated July-Sept. & Nov. 1936) but brought Iger together with a 19-year-old Eisner — the legendary future creator of The Spirit and some of the earliest and most influential graphic novels — who wrote and drew the Wow adventure strip "Scott Dalton", the pirate strip "The Flame" and the secret agent strip "Harry Karry".

[edit] Comics packager

After Wow folded, Eisner and Iger worked together producing and selling original comics material, anticipating that the well of available reprints would soon run dry. Their accounts of how their partnership was founded differ. (See the main entry: Eisner & Iger) One of the first such comic-book "packagers", Eisner & Iger was an immediate success, and the two soon had a stable of comics creators supplying work to Fox Comics, Fiction House, Quality Comics, and others. Turning a profit of $1.50 a page, Eisner claimed that he "got very rich before I was 22",[1] later detailing that in Depression-era 1939 alone, he and Iger "had split $25,000 between us",[2] a considerable amount for the time.

After Eisner left the firm in 1940, Iger would continue to package comics as the S. M. Iger Studio. He also started the small Phoenix Features newspaper syndicate, which in the early 1950s distributed a comic strip of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer.

[edit] Later career

Iger closed the comics studio in 1955 and served as an art director for the comic-book publisher Ajax Publications, a.k.a. Ajax-Farrell Publications, until 1957, whereupon he moved to commercial advertising artwork. He was a guest of honor at the 1974 New York Comic Art Convention, where he told a panel audience of his plans for an art show to raise money for cancer research, saying his mother had died of the disease.[3]

Blackthorne Publishing has released three compilations of Iger-related comics: The Iger Comics Kingdom (1985); Jerry Iger's Classic Jumbo Comics; and Jerry Iger's Classic National Comics; as well as the six-issue series Jerry Iger's Golden Features (1986).

[edit] Trivia

 Trivia sections are discouraged under Wikipedia guidelines.
The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones.

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Mercer, Marilyn, "The Only Real Middle-Class Crimefighter", New York (Sunday supplement, New York Herald Tribune), Jan. 9, 1966; reprinted Alter Ego #48, May 2005
  2. ^ Heintjes, Tom, The Spirit: The Origin Years #3 (Kitchen Sink Press, Sept. 1992)
  3. ^ Lovece, Frank. "Cons: New York 1974!", The Journal Summer Special, 1974 (fanzine published by Paul Kowtiuk, Maple Leaf Publications; editorial office then at Box 1286, Essex, Ontario, Canada N0R 1E0). 
  4. ^ Dark Horse Books catalog description: Will Eisner: A Spirited Life

[edit] References