Jerry Iger

Samuel Maxwell "Jerry" Iger (/ˈaɪɡər/; August 22, 1903 – September 5, 1990) was an American cartoonist. With business partner Will Eisner he co-founded 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.

Biography

Early life and career

Jerry Iger was born in Idabel, Oklahoma, near the Choctaw Indian reservation. The youngest of four children of an Austrian 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 The Walt Disney Company Chairman 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 — future creator of The Spirit — who wrote and drew the Wow adventure strip "Scott Dalton", the pirate strip "The Flame" and the secret agent 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 House, 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.

Later career

Iger closed the comics studio in 1955 and served as an art director 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 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).

Awards

Iger was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2009.