Nowadays, Will Eisner (1917-2005) is still one of the most famous comic book creators in the history of the medium–the highly respected Eisner Awards were named after him for a good reason. He did a lot from his beginnings in 1933 doing illustrations and comic strips in his high school newspaper to his famous graphic novels. But his most famous creation is clearly “The Spirit.”
Eisner broke into the comic book industry next to his school friend, Bob Kane, creator of Batman, but their career didn’t follow the same path. Quite the entrepreneur, Eisner formed a partnership with Samuel “Jerry” Iger. They opened their own studio that soon started to work like a factory, putting out comics. This was a financial success, but when Everett Arnold of Quality Comics offered him the possibility to produce a 16-page newspaper supplement for the Des Moines Register-Tribune Syndicate, the offer was too good to say “no.” Eisner loved comics and this was for him a new avenue to prove that this sequential art was not just for kids.
Eisner left Iger, took with him a few employees, and started to work on what is, on paper, the creation of another mystery man. The Weekly Comic Book supplement was composed of three stories per issue–two of them were the backups “Lady Luck” and “Mr. Mystic.” The main feature was of course “The Spirit.”
Reading “The Spirit Section”
In the fictional Central City, Denny Colt is a private investigator who was left for dead while attempting to stop the mad scientist Dr. Cobra. After being buried in Wildwood Cemetery and officially declared dead, he dug his way out and put on a mask to fight criminals. He operates from his “laboratory” in the graveyard and works as a vigilante with the help of police Commissioner Eustace Dolan, but also his girlfriend Ellen Dolan, the commissioner’s daughter, and his sidekick, the young cab driver Ebony White–a tragically typically racist representation of an African-American who’ll slowly disappeared from the strip after almost a decade to be replaced by a young white boy called Sammy.
Appearing in twenty newspapers, this comic book supplement gave The Spirit an audience of five million readers. Conscious of the impact that his comics could have, Eisner insisted on making The Spirit appealing to more than children. He reached a more mature readership by crafting crime stories that make sense. Even if some of the tropes of the genre were used, the characters spoke and acted as much as possible like real people. It was adventure comics made believable. There also was some humor, multiple genre elements were tried, and the storytelling was not rigid. In fact, to tell more dramatic stories, Denny Colt sometimes had to take a step back, just making a cameo to justify his name on the front page.
“The Spirit Section” premiered June 2, 1940, and continued through 1952. During that time, The Spirit fought multiple Femmes Fatales, con men, crazy scientists, spies, and other criminals. He traveled the World and even went to the Moon.
Eisner was the creative force behind the series, but he was not the only one to write and draw the strips. He had a lot of assistants and collaborators. One of the most famous today is none other than Pulitzer Prize winner and overall comics legend Jules Feiffer who started doing cleanups and gradually became a writer. At some point, he started doing the stories on his own based on the first page Eisner gave him.
Other future big names also worked on The Spirit like Plastic Man creator Jack Cole, artists like Joe Kubert, Lou Fine, Wally Wood, Samm Schwartz, Ben Oda, Jerry Grandenetti, Fred Kida, and a lot more.
The Spirit, Alive Again
After a twelve-year run full of crime-fighting, innovative layouts, good humor, and colorful adventures, “The Spirit Section” ended with the October 5, 1952, edition. It was not the end of Eisner’s creation.
An artist and a businessman, Will Eisner had negotiated that the rights to the character would come back to him once the Section would end. And so, when Harvey Comics reprinted some Spirit stories in the 1960s, Eisner produced new cover material and even wrote new stories. Through the years, more reprints of the old Spirit stories were published–by Kitchen Sink Press and Warren Publishing mostly.
In 2005, while DC Comics was reprinting The Spirit in new hardcover editions, Will Eisner wrote his final Spirit story, published posthumously in the sixth issue of The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist (Dark Horse Comics). It was a short 6-page story.
Two years later, after a one-shot Batman/The Spirit, DC Comics launched the first ongoing series The Spirit–written and penciled by Darwyn Cook. It kept a lot of the original concept but updated the characters. Another series followed at DC Comics before IDW took over the license in 2013 and offered a crossover with The Rocketeer. In 2015, it was Dynamite Entertainment picked up the rights with writer-artist Matt Wagner (Grendel) in charge of the first new story.
Certainly, The Spirit will come back one day. It is an iconic character in the comics world and a highly influential creation.
The Spirit: Collected Editions
As I was saying, The Spirit has been reprinted multiple times. Obviously, most of the previous editions are not available anymore, but there still are more recent collections:
- The Spirit: An 80th Anniversary Celebration
Collects 10 stories, five of them with all-new coloring by Eisner Award-winning colorist, Laura Martin. - Will Eisner’s The Spirit Artisan Edition
Collects reproduction from the original art of 17 Spirit stories all from Eisner, originally published between 1946 – 1950. - The Best of the Spirit
Collects twenty-two Spirit stories from 1940-1950.