Hy Eisman, an award-winning cartoonist, veteran, and contributor to the Sanford Herald, passed away Mar. 27, 2025, aged 98.
Eisman, a legend among Florida’s cartoonist crowd, has left behind decades of inspiration, having lived a life that stretched from being a cartoonist to a WWII veteran, a teacher, and even an artist at the Sanford Herald for many years in the 1980s and 90s.
According to some accounts, Eisman knew he wanted to go into cartoons from the age of five, inspired by newspaper comics during the Great Depression. He drew his way through high school, where he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1945, at the tail end of WWII; as a cadet, he underwent training at Camp Blanding in Starke, FL.
After leaving the army, Eisman graduated from art school and started designing art throughout the 1950s and 60s, where he worked on “Nancy and Sluggo”, “Blondie”, “Little Iodine”, “The Munsters”, and “Tom and Jerry”, among many other familiar comics titles.
In 1976, Joe Kubert, a colleague of Eisman’s, founded the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art in Madison, N.J. He invited Eisman to be one of the school’s first instructors, where he would go on to spend 43 years teaching generations of cartoonists to come, forever linking his name to the Ivy League-equivalent of cartoon schools and winning an Outstanding Instructor Award in the process.
Rob Smith Jr., a Sanford historian and cartoonist, was one of Eisman’s students at the Joe Kubert School, and he fondly remembered his teacher’s loud, Jersey-accented personality when telling the story of how he and Eisman first met.
“As a teenager, I was used to drawing with a B6 [pen],” Smith recalled. “I did that for years, and then I go to the Kubert School - my first class with Hy Eisman, and he’s asking us to letter [words and comic text] with a B6. Easy for me, I’ve been drawing with it for years. So I start drawing with it, and his reaction is, ‘what the hell are you doing with a ten[B10 pen]?! You only letter with that thing you know? Don’t draw with it!’”
The story, told with a passable imitation of Eisman’s New Jersey accent, paints a picture of a man who Smith says had “a great way of being very expressive and loud.”
During the years he spent learning from Eisman at the Joe Kubert School, Smith remembers his teacher-turned-friend as being effortlessly able to navigate the collection of skills that come with being a veteran cartoonist during the golden age of cartoons, pointing out that, in an age before computers and digital art, Hy Eisman had to draw and ink every single comic - and sometimes entire comic books - by hand.
When asked to describe Eisman in a single sentence, Smith said he was “an accomplished illustrator-slash-cartoonist who was also an exemplary teacher.”
Even during his time teaching at the Joe Kubert School, Eisman was still dedicating a good amount of time to comics. During the 1980s and 90s, he worked on several “Archie” comics and even contributed to the Sanford Herald’s Sunday comics with “The Katzenjammer Kids” and “Popeye”, one of the most famous cartoons to ever feature in the Sunday paper.
Sarah Hardy, a Lakeland, Fla. native and another student of Eisman’s during the late 1980s, remembers the experience of visiting family in Daytona Beach, where she would always stop at a convenience store on I-4 and SR 46 to pick Sunday’s copy of the Herald and mail it back to Eisman with his comics inside.
Eisman won the National Cartoonists Society Award for Best Comic Book Cartoonist twice, in 1975 and 1984, followed by the Milton Caniff Award for lifetime achievement in cartooning in 2019. He would continue to write for “Popeye” for 28 years until finally putting down his pen in 2022.
Hy Eisman passed away on Mar. 27, 2025 - his 98th birthday - and will be greatly missed.
