Free Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher Page A

backgrounds. In addition, names like Powell and Kirby were easier to sign on artwork than Pawlowski or Kurtzberg. Eli Katz became Gil Kane, Bob Kahn became Bob Kane, and Alfred Caplin became Al Capp.
    Stan Lee, born Stanley Lieber, said he changed his name because he wanted to reserve his given name for the novels he hoped to write. “I was kind of embarrassed to be writing comics,” he admitted, “so I didn’t want to use my real name. I was saving that for the good stuff I would someday write.”
    Nicholas Viscardi changed his name to Nick Cardy after becoming fed up with the ribbing he took about the Mob, his Italian heritage, and, during World War II, the idea that Italians were the enemy. When he was doing freelance work, he even heard from a boss who, thinking he was being funny, signed Viscardi’s check with a “P” rather than a “V.” The next month, his last name began with a “B.”
    Viscardi was rightfully offended. He’d been raised in a lower-class, ethnically diverse neighborhood, where this type of xenophobia was foreign. As a boy, he’d come home from school and, while waiting for his mother to return home from work, sit on the front stoop of his apartment building and talk to a rabbi from the same building. He hated the anti-Italian jokes he heard, but he needed the job. “I was upset,” he remembered, “but I was young at the time and I was trying to make a living. So I changed it. I just put in the last part of the name.”
    Cardy didn’t abandon his name entirely—at least not right away. When working on Lady Luck for Eisner, he used the house name “Ford Davis” when he signed the feature, but he always found a way to disguise his initials, “NV,” in the artwork.
    In the early comic book days, artists were fortunate to find any permutation of their names attached to their work. Publishers and shops, including Eisner & Iger, preferred to use house names. They’d assign a generic name to a feature, which would always be used regardless of the artist doing it. Using a house name was insurance for publishers, protection from lawsuits that might arise if an artist walked away from a firm but still wanted to use a character he’d created. Artists didn’t own their creations in any event, but to a a publisher, owning a feature and using a house name was failsafe protection.
    Eisner had written under so many names that he would have been forgiven if he lost count. He could shrug it off as part of the business, and he expected the others working for him to see it the same way. “We had a whole bunch of phony names,” he explained, adding with a laugh, “We just handed them out with the salary.”
    Sometime in early 1938, the Eisner & Iger studio received an unsolicited package in the mail, postmarked Cleveland and containing a cover letter and two complete comic stories, one a spy thriller, the other an adventure about a costumed hero with superhuman strength and an unexplained need to rectify the injustice he saw in the world around him. Eisner rejected both as substandard. Iger didn’t like them, either. The two men were accustomed to hearing from young artists looking for a way to enter into comics, and as far as Eisner (then only twenty-one himself) could tell, this was another one of those cases. The writer and artist, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, respectively, needed more time in art school to hone their craft if they expected to meet market and audience demands.
    “I wrote them a long letter and told them they weren’t ready to come to New York,” Eisner recalled. “It was a tough town and their style wasn’t professional yet.”
    Eisner had a personal aversion to superhero stories—to costumed heroes, as they called them in those days. Each passing month in the business left him all the more convinced that he was destined to do more mature material. He loved to write and he loved to draw, but he had concluded back in his Clinton High days that he wasn’t gifted enough