As an avid reader I regularly encounter a problem: what
should I read next? You’d think that’s an easy question to answer but that’s
not always the case because there are often too many choices. When it comes to
comics specifically, I tend to read works by creators I like and whose work I’ve
regularly enjoyed in the past. I often make my way through their body of work
until I’ve either read all or most of what they’ve done or until I no longer
enjoy it. Back when I first started to collect comics in 2006, I felt a need to
explore classic comics and critically acclaimed writers and artists. The
problem is that I never really read a whole lot of comics that predated the
1980s. It’s not entirely by choice, newer comics tend to be more readily available,
but there is still plenty of older material which can easily be found in stores
or online. I consider myself a comic reader that doesn’t like to get pigeonholed
into reading and buying from a single publisher or from a single genre.
I
absolutely love the variety that comics can offer. It’s an incredibly flexible
and versatile form of storytelling. Sometimes I think that regular readers
rarely explore as many older works as they probably should. In the last few
years I’ve continued to explore different creators, genres and publishers but I
still don’t own many older comics and that’s a shame because comics is still a
young art form, having made a big splash in the first half of the 20th
century, there is a wealth of interesting material that predates the shared
universe superhero boom of the second half of the century.
That brings me to Will Eisner. He’s an immensely influential
creator in the field of comics and although not as many people are as familiar
with his work, everyone is familiar with at least a handful of creators Eisner
influenced. I’m one of those readers. I’ve known of Eisner and his body of work
for years but I’m never read one of his comics. It’s not that I didn’t want to,
much the opposite really. It’s just so easy to be distracted by new releases
and I’m just as likely to buy something from a creator I know I like than to
explore and try something by a writer or artist that is new to me. That all
ended this past weekend when I started to read The Best of the Spirit. It just so happens that it’s great timing
as it’s currently the sixth annual Will Eisner Week. It’s celebration of the
comics of Will Eisner, the promotion of literacy and free speech. It actually
last for more than a week but that’s alright by meYou can find more information
on the event here.
I chose to read The Best of the Spirit for a few reasons. It’s Eisner’s most famous work. It’s also known to be a highly experimental and innovative comic which was originally published from 1940 to 1952. The Spirit was a seven page comic book insert and it appeared in newspaper on a weekly basis during its initial run. Eisner was asked to write a superhero story, an increasingly and emergent genre at the time but he didn’t much feel like it and the result is a hero that’s essentially a detective but he has an origin story, wears a domino mask to go along with his trademark blue suit, tie, gloves and fedora hat. Detective Denny Colt confronts Dr. Cobra in his science lair and after a brief bout of fighting Colt “dies” after coming into contact with Dr. Cobra’s experiment. Later on he awakens in his grave, digs himself out and decides to continue pursuing a life of crime fighting as the Spirit. He wears a mask to keep his identity a secret but it doesn’t play into the series too much.
One of the things I like about The Spirit is its strict adherence to a seven page length. I find
that creators work best with restrictions or limitations. It forces them to be
more creative because there is a dual expectation. One is driving by the
restriction itself; you must produce a seven page comic strip. The other goal
is driving by the creator who wants to break from the format without breaking
the format proper. Yes, Eisner had a seven page limit to each and every story,
but if these 22 stories are representative of the whole series, that was the
only constant structural element to The
Spirit. Many of the stories treat the Spirit as a secondary
character. He regularly doesn’t appear on the first or even the second page.
That’s pretty surprising considering he’s the main character and that the comic
is named after him.
For starters, the stories are never the same. The first
one is a typical vigilante origin story but another can be a tense thriller, a suspenseful
action story or straight up action. A lot of the stories deal with crime in one
form or another and other stories still are romance or drama. A fair number of
the stories also have humorous elements which Eisner worked into several
different styles of stories. Some of the stories also contain racist or sexist
elements. The most obvious of these is the depiction of young Ebony White, a
black boy who acts as the Spirit’s sidekick in the earlier stories. Ebony is a
typical caricaturized portrayal of a black person complete with wide vacant
eyes and large lips. He also talks in a broken speech. I’m not sure how many
stories he appears in or for how long he was a part of the strip.
The Best of the Spirit only collects two
stories that were published before Eisner was drafted into the World War II.
The rest are collected from his more experimental era in the late forties.
Ebony only appears in about three stories out of the 22 collected in this
volume. In the later stories he’s replaced with a young white boy, Sammy, as
the Spirit’s sidekick. It’s interesting that Eisner replaced Ebony with Sammy.
It seems to indicate that while Eisner was clearly influenced by the portrayal of
black characters typical of the time in which he was working on this comic; he
didn’t entirely feel comfortable about it and so he replaced Ebony with another
character. I’m not well suited to discussing racist depictions of black
characters in fiction but there are plenty of interesting articles and essays
to read on the subject and many are available online.
Other than the seven page length of the weekly Spirit story, the other defining aspect
of the series was how many of the stories focused on Eisner presentation of the
human condition. Stories include the life of a man driven to murder told
through his point of view, literally allowing the reader to look at the world
through his eyes (Eisner places us in the head of the murderer). The life of Rice Wilder, aka Wild Rice, is
told in just seven pages. Having grown up in a wealthy family she desired
nothing more than to be allowed to escape and experience freedom first hand. She
willingly heads into a life of crime only to have it end in tragedy when she
gets what she wanted so desperately. One of Eisner’s most poignant stories in
this collection takes place on a getaway island in South America. A friend of
the Spirit asks him to clear the name of her husband who is clearly guilty but
he changes his mind after the man dies while heroically trying to save the life
of his step-daughter. Most of the stories in this collection present situations
specific to human life in all its varied forms. You often get to see the Spirit
punch someone, too but that’s more of a bonus. It’s very interesting how in his
very own series, the Spirit regularly doesn’t appear for the first two pages of
the strip. In many ways, he plays a secondary role to the true main character
of any given story.
Though it only presents a small look at the series, The Best of the Spirit clearly
demonstrates in many ways how Eisner was an innovator. He wasn’t the first to create many of the techniques he
uses (though he did create plenty) but he changed them and pushed them further
than they’ve ever been used before. He combined many different techniques
together to produce interesting stories. There are several visual styles and
storytelling tricks that continue to survive today that were first developed or
used effectively by Eisner during his run on The Spirit. Some examples include new ways to use of sound effects,
the further development of interesting and effective lettering techniques, “logotechture”,
and the technique that incorporates a story’s title or the title of the comic into
the background or buildings. These images were often one-page spreads. Later
comics would adopt this technique to incorporate the credits of a particular
comic into an introduction page. The idea of an introduction page is also something
Eisner innovated. Many of the later stories in The Spirit begin with a nearly full or a complete one-page spread. Some
of them didn’t even have text on them.
I would feel like my post was incomplete if I didn’t
mention the fact that Eisner received a considerable amount of help while
writing and drawing The Spirit. While
in Europe during World War II, the comic was ghost written and drawn to allow
for the regular publishing of the strip. During the end of its original
publication, many creators, some of them well known such as Julius Schwartz,
Wally Wood and others, were producing The
Spirit nearly on their own which Eisner reduced to the role of supervisor
and consultant. It’s pretty clear to me that The Spirit is as fascinating a comic as Will Eisner and they both
deserved to be explored further. It’s something I plan on doing so don’t be
surprised if either of them post up on Shared Universe Reviews again.
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