Jerry Iger
Encyclopedia
Samuel Maxwell "Jerry" Iger (August 22, 1903 – September 5, 1990) was 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
.
Iger is not related to comic book publisher Fred Iger
. Iger was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2009.
, Oklahoma
, near the Choctaw
Indian
reservation
. The youngest of four children of an Australia
n peddler who'd settled in what was then the pre-statehood Indian Territory
, Iger contracted polio as a child and was cared for by his mother, Rosa. Iger had two sisters, and a brother, Joe, whose son Arthur Iger (b. 1926) would become the father of Walt Disney Pictures
president and CEO Robert Iger
. Arthur by the mid-1970s was vice president and publisher of the educational division of Macmillan Publishing in New York City
.
In 1925, Iger, by then living in New York, and despite no formal art training, became a news cartoonist for the New York American. He entered the fledgling comic-book field 10 years later, contributing such one-page humor strips as "Bobby" (whose eponymous character was based on nephew Arthur), "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".
, Quality Comics
, and others. Turning a profit of $1.50 a page, Eisner claimed that he "got very rich before I was 22", later detailing that in Depression-era
1939 alone, he and Iger "had split $25,000 between us", 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
.
for the comic-book publisher Farrell 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. By this time, he made his home in the Sunnyside
neighborhood in the borough of Queens
, New York City
.
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).
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
cartoonist
Cartoonist
A cartoonist is a person who specializes in drawing cartoons. This work is usually humorous, mainly created for entertainment, political commentary or advertising...
. With business partner Will Eisner
Will Eisner
William Erwin "Will" Eisner was an American comics writer, artist and entrepreneur. He is considered one of the most important contributors to the development of the medium and is known for the cartooning studio he founded; for his highly influential series The Spirit; for his use of comics as an...
he co-founder of Eisner & Iger
Eisner & Iger
Eisner & Iger was a comic book "packager" that produced comics on demand for publishers entering the new medium during the late-1930s and 1940s period fans and historians call the Golden Age of Comic Books...
, a comic book
Comic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...
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
Golden Age of Comic Books
The Golden Age of Comic Books was a period in the history of American comic books, generally thought of as lasting from the late 1930s until the late 1940s or early 1950s...
.
Iger is not related to comic book publisher Fred Iger
Fred Iger
Frederick H. Iger was an American comic book publisher, associated for many years with the media figure Harry Donenfeld. Iger was an owner of American Comics Group from 1943 to 1967, and co-owner of National Periodical Publications...
. Iger was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2009.
Early life and career
Jerry Iger was born in IdabelIdabel, Oklahoma
Idabel is a city in McCurtain County, Oklahoma, United States. The population was 7,658 at the 2000 census. It is the county seat of McCurtain County. The town is located in the tourist area Kiamichi Country.-History:...
, Oklahoma
Oklahoma
Oklahoma is a state located in the South Central region of the United States of America. With an estimated 3,751,351 residents as of the 2010 census and a land area of 68,667 square miles , Oklahoma is the 28th most populous and 20th-largest state...
, near the Choctaw
Choctaw
The Choctaw are a Native American people originally from the Southeastern United States...
Indian
Native Americans in the United States
Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...
reservation
Indian reservation
An American Indian reservation is an area of land managed by a Native American tribe under the United States Department of the Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs...
. The youngest of four children of an Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
n peddler who'd settled in what was then the pre-statehood Indian Territory
Indian Territory
The Indian Territory, also known as the Indian Territories and the Indian Country, was land set aside within the United States for the settlement of American Indians...
, Iger contracted polio as a child and was cared for by his mother, Rosa. Iger had two sisters, and a brother, Joe, whose son Arthur Iger (b. 1926) would become the father of Walt Disney Pictures
Walt Disney Pictures
Walt Disney Pictures is an American film studio owned by The Walt Disney Company. Walt Disney Pictures and Television, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Studios and the main production company for live-action feature films within the Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group, based at the Walt Disney...
president and CEO Robert Iger
Robert Iger
Robert A. "Bob" Iger is the president and chief executive officer of The Walt Disney Company. He was named president of Disney in 2000, and later succeeded Michael Eisner as chief executive in 2005, after a successful effort by Roy E. Disney to shake-up the management of the company...
. Arthur by the mid-1970s was vice president and publisher of the educational division of Macmillan Publishing in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
.
In 1925, Iger, by then living in New York, and despite no formal art training, became a news cartoonist for the New York American. He entered the fledgling comic-book field 10 years later, contributing such one-page humor strips as "Bobby" (whose eponymous character was based on nephew Arthur), "Peewee" and "Happy Daze" to Famous Funnies
Famous Funnies
Famous Funnies is an American publication of the 1930s that represents what popular culture historians consider the first true American comic book, following seminal precursors.-Immediate precursors:...
, 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
The Spirit
The Spirit is a crime-fighting fictional character created by writer-artist Will Eisner. He first appeared June 2, 1940 in "The Spirit Section", the colloquial name given to a 16-page Sunday supplement, distributed to 20 newspapers by the Register and Tribune Syndicate and reaching five million...
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
Secret Agent
Secret Agent is a British film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, loosely based on two stories in Ashenden: Or the British Agent by W. Somerset Maugham. The film starred John Gielgud, Peter Lorre, Madeleine Carroll, and Robert Young...
strip "Harry Karry".
Comics packager
After Wow folded, Eisner and Iger, anticipating that the well of available reprints would soon run dry, in late 1936 formed Eisner & Iger, one of the first comics "packagers" that produced outsourced comic-book material for publishers entering the new medium. Eisner & Iger was an immediate success, and the two soon had a stable of creators supplying work to Fox Comics, Fiction HouseFiction House
Fiction House is an American publisher of pulp magazines and comic books that existed from the 1920s to the 1950s. Its comics division was best known for its pinup-style good girl art, as epitomized by the company's most popular character, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.-History:-Jumbo and Jack...
, Quality Comics
Quality Comics
Quality Comics was an American comic book publishing company that operated from 1939 to 1956 and was an influential creative force in what historians and fans call the Golden Age of comic books....
, and others. Turning a profit of $1.50 a page, Eisner claimed that he "got very rich before I was 22", later detailing that in Depression-era
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
1939 alone, he and Iger "had split $25,000 between us", 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
Mike Hammer
Michael "Mike" Hammer is a fictional detective created by the American author Mickey Spillane in the 1947 book I, the Jury .-Description:...
.
Later career
Iger closed the comics studio in 1955 and served as an art directorArt director
The art director is a person who supervise the creative process of a design.The term 'art director' is a blanket title for a variety of similar job functions in advertising, publishing, film and television, the Internet, and video games....
for the comic-book publisher Farrell Publications
Farrell Publications
Farrell Publications is the name of a series of American comic book publishing companies founded and operated by Robert W. Farrell in the 1940s and 1950s, including Elliot Publishing Company, Farrell Comic Group, and Excellent Publications. Farrell is particularly known for its pre-Comics Code...
, 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
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
Comic Art Convention
Comic Art Convention
The Comic Art Convention was an American comic-book fan convention held annually New York City, New York, over Independence Day weekend from 1968 through 1983, except for 1977, when it was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and 1978 to 1979, when it was held concurrently in New York and Philadelphia...
, where he told a panel audience of his plans for an art show to raise money for cancer
Cancer
Cancer , known medically as a malignant neoplasm, is a large group of different diseases, all involving unregulated cell growth. In cancer, cells divide and grow uncontrollably, forming malignant tumors, and invade nearby parts of the body. The cancer may also spread to more distant parts of the...
research, saying his mother had died of the disease. By this time, he made his home in the Sunnyside
Sunnyside, Queens
Sunnyside is a neighborhood in the western portion of the New York City borough of Queens, in New York state, in the United States. It shares borders with Hunters Point and Long Island City to the west, Astoria to the north, Woodside to the east and Maspeth to the south...
neighborhood in the borough of Queens
Queens
Queens is the easternmost of the five boroughs of New York City. The largest borough in area and the second-largest in population, it is coextensive with Queens County, an administrative division of New York state, in the United States....
, New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
.
Blackthorne Publishing
Blackthorne Publishing
Blackthorne Publishing, Inc. was a comic book publisher that flourished from 1986-1989. They were notable for the Blackthorne 3-D Series, their reprint titles of classic comic strips like Dick Tracy, and their licensed products...
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).
Awards
Iger was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2009.External links
- Wildwood Cemetery: The Spirit Database. WebCitation archive.
- Archive of Will Eisner interview (excerpts from print magazine), The Comics JournalThe Comics JournalThe Comics Journal, often abbreviated TCJ, is an American magazine of news and criticism pertaining to comic books, comic strips and graphic novels...
#249. Original page - Jack Kirby Collector #16 (June 1997): Will Eisner interview
- Holloway, Clark J. "Sheena, Queen of the Jungle", The Holloway Pages (fan site), 2000. WebCitation archive.
- "Interview with Jerry Iger", Cubic Zirconia Reader, 1985. WebCitation archive.