Graphic Novel Collection: The Spirit, Volume 1, by Will Eisner

Will Eisner's The Spirit Archives, Volume 1
June 2 - December 29, 1940
Published by DC Comics
ISBN: 1563896737
Read February 8, 2015

These are part of our library's promotion for Will Eisner week coming up in March, and while I've read a few scattered stories of The Spirit, I haven't ever sat down from the beginning.  And what a beginning it is.  This represents just six months of work, and the stories are crazy pulpy ridiculous fun from beginning to end.  This volume also has some really good articles in the start from Will Eisner, Alan Moore, and RC Harvey, talking about the state of comics at that time, and the implications of a serialized, regular, dependable comic hero as a newspaper staple.  Some really good stuff in there, and very interesting to hear about the challenges and worries that these comic greats had way back when they were unknown and just starting out.

I have to say, other than the character of Ebony, who is just horribly visibly caricatured (along with the other black characters) and the sexist attitudes towards poor Ellen, the stories hold up amazingly well.  When I read the stories as a younger person, they had a very strong Dick Tracy vibe for me, and that was very pronounced in the larger collection.  Unlike Tracy, there wasn't as much of a focus on gagetry, and the death toll that was such a large part of Tracy's noir feeling wasn't present here.  In fact, other than gangsters (who got mowed down in droves) and the occasional necessary-to-the-dramatic-moment side characters, not many people died at all.

The only thing I missed in this particular collection was the more visually-inventive strips that came later, as Eisner got really solidly into his stride and started innovating.  My experiences with The Spirit are scattershot, and I didn't realize that what I thought of as a "signature" Eisner layout was something that he developed over time - this first year of The Spirit is amazingly straightlaced and conventional.  You catch glimpses of characters starting to slide out of their boxes, or title-pages nad headline blocks starting to morph into splash pages, but really, it's all quite boxy and straightforward.  Very odd to see.

I'm hoping that the later volumes are available, but I shudder to thing at how many there will be if this thick book (nearly 250 pages) only represents six months of a feature that ran for twelve years solid until 1952.