Toni Blum

Audrey Anthony Blum – 1972 or 1973) the daughter of Jewish artists Alexander Anthony "Alex" Blum Together with her younger brother, the family lived in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. During the Great Depression, Alex Blum's career as a portrait painter evaporated, leading the family to move to New York City, New York, seeking work. one of the era's comics packagers that would supply comic-book content on demand to publishers testing the emerging medium. She lived at the time with her family on 91st or 92nd Street near Park Avenue in Manhattan.

Her father also worked at Eisner & Iger, joining the studio either before or after her. There, sometimes in collaboration with him, she wrote stories under a variety of pseudonyms, among them Tony Boone, Anthony Bloom, and Tony Blum, She became best known, however, as Toni Blum, and was called that by her co-workers. Her future husband, Eisner & Iger artist Bill Bossert, recalled of her working method, She'd write an outline, and she'd help [the artist] break it down page-by-page. Then she would get the pages back, and she would pencil in the actual dialogue on the page. Then the lettering man would letter the dialogue. ... ou'd be amazed at some of the guys who didn't have a clue what the storyline was supposed to be, even though she gave them a couple of paragraphs, and would give names of the good guy and the bad guy, and the police and the undercover agent, or whatever the story was. ... They would start out, and then she'd have to keep rewriting the whole thing because they made such a mess. She'd say, 'This is supposed to be on the fifth page and you have it on the second page. You're giving away the whole story in the beginning.' So she had to re-do the whole story as it went along. Through 1943, she scripted a large number of Quality Comics features at various times, including "Black Condor", "Dollman", "Kid Patrol", "Lion Boy", "The Ray", "The Red Bee", "Stormy Foster", and "Uncle Sam" She was treated respectfully in the otherwise all-male studio, save for one encounter involving artist George Tuska punching fellow artist Bob Powell over a remark the latter made regarding Blum. As publisher and historian Denis Kitchen wrote, "Tuska, like Eisner, had a crush on office mate Toni Blum but was too shy to make his move. The actual provocation that inflamed Tuska, Eisner privately said, was Powell's loud assertion that he 'could fuck [Toni Blum] anytime' he wanted. After decking Powell, Tuska stood over his prostrate coworker and in a voice Eisner described as Lon Chaney Jr. in Of Mice and Men said, 'You shouldn't ought to have said that, Bob.'" marrying him sometime during World War II, and together eventually having three children.

Following Eisner's departure from Eisner & Iger to launch his Sunday-newspaper comic-book insert, "The Spirit Section", in 1940, Blum became ghost writer of its title feature "The Spirit" for a time in 1942, while Eisner did World War II U.S. military service. One source also lists her as a writer for a companion feature, "Lady Luck", in 1940.

Later life After Bill Bossert's July 1945 return from the U.S. Army, where he had been a captain and a paratrooper during World War II, Bossert and Blum had a son, Tom, and a daughter, Jill, and moved to Pleasantville, New York, where Blum became a housewife and Bossert a graphic designer. They later had a second son, Robin. Blum developed breast cancer, surviving for five years and undergoing chemotherapy, and died in 1973, according to Bossert in an interview conducted in the late 2000s, and writer-artist Tarpé Mills.

Awards Toni Blum was a posthumous recipient of the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing in 2021.