Jerry Iger

American cartoonist and art studio entrepreneur

Iger, no relation to comic book publisher Fred Iger, was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2009.

Jerry Iger was born in New York City, to Austrian Jewish parents Rosa and Jacob Iger. He was raised in Idabel, Oklahoma, near the Choctaw Indian reservation. The youngest of four children of a peddler who had settled in what was then the pre statehood Indian Territory, Iger contracted polio as a child and was cared for by his mother. 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 Bob 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),

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. In 1945, he took on comics artist/editor Ruth Roche as a partner in the studio, with some sources claiming it then became known as the Roche Iger Studio. According to Who's Who of American Comic Books, Iger was co owner of the Canadian comics publisher Superior from 1945 to 1956, and co owner of the American publisher Ajax Farrell from 1946 to 1958. From 1947 to 1954, the Iger Studio packaged comics for Superior, and from 1954 to 1958, it packaged material for Ajax Farrell's titles. The studio operated until 1961, By this time, he made his home in the Sunnyside neighborhood of Queens, New York City.