Will Eisner's The Spirit Archives, Volume 2
January 5 - June 29, 1941
Published by DC Comics
ISBN: 1563896753
Read March 30, 2015
We're still slogging through the weeds - I just got Volume 3 in the delivery at work, so my timing is working out well so far! My goal is to be finished with at least a few years worth by May when the free graphic novel class taught by Stan Lee begins. I want to have at least some footing under me besides my random Marvel interactions.
Volume 2 has some really nice stories, and we're starting to see a few breaks from the traditional panels and good-guy vs bad-guy stories. I'll give my shout-outs below, but despite individual stories being interesting, the collection is still very visually traditional with old-school designs and lay-outs.
March 16, 1941: Introducing Silk Satin
A clever, hard-ass lady villainess (literally her first scene is to extract a bullet from her own arm) is introduced, and given a convenient "death" offstage with no corpse. Hmmm....
April 6, 1941: Introducing Scarlett Brown
Our intrepid (and still visually stereotyped) Ebony gets a girlfriend!
These next two were interesting back-to-back, as neither of them really involved The Spirit except tangentially. They were both visceral stories, and to have them so close together made me wonder if this was a first minor bout of getting sick of Spirit's normal shtick.
April 13, 1941: Croaky Andrews' Perfect Crime
A criminal commits the perfect crime with his girlfriend, escaping the clutches of The Spirit to a private island he's secured with traps and guns. His own conscience makes him believe The Spirit is on his tail until the last, when he realizes his error just before death. Quite grim.
April 20, 1941: The S.S. Raven
Another grim tangent. A "killer ship" that murders sailors and captains and thirsts for blood, and plots revenge against those who have injured or slighted her. Frankly, a little on the weird side.
May 25, 1941: Thomas Hawkins
Our "moralizing" story for this half-year zeroes in on ex-convicts, blaming re-offenses on a society that marginalizes and penalizes them even after they've done their time. Spirit offers a young man his own small business to help keep him on the straight and narrow, and the Commish helps out after a jilted mobster takes offense to young Hawkins going straight. (This episode, more than any other, makes me really wonder how a dead guy makes so much money?)
June 1, 1941: Killer McNobby
A bizarre illustrated jingle, mostly resembling a barroom musical round (it probably was based on one) focusing on McNobby, who killed at least one person per day until The Spirit had enough and challenged him to a... MMA match ?!?! Lots of punching. Very masculine, I guess.
June 8, 1941: Five Passengers in Search of an Author
(Spoilers!) We see the return of Silk Satin, this time in drag as an English gentleman spy, working against the Third Reich (unnamed, but obvious) and outsmarting our own intrepid hero at every turn! Hmm, I sense that Miss Ellen (the Commish's daughter, still popping up at random to incite plots or be threatened) has some serious competition here!
June 22, 1941: The Tale of The Dictator's Reform
An obviously wish-fulfilling sequence shows a certain unnamed short, balding, German dictator visiting America incognito, offering military support to any disaffected segments of the population, but discovering to his dismay that not only are even the disaffected still insanely patriotic, they're actually ready to lynch him! A short moralizing lesson from The Spirit alters the Dictator's heart, but sadly, when he returns home, he realizes that one man cannot stop the engines of war, and he's killed in cold blood and replaced with a body-double who thirsts for war and conquest.
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