Graphic Novel Collection: The Spirit, Volume 3, by Will Eisner

Will Eisner's The Spirit Archives, Volume 3
July 6 - December 28, 1941
Published by DC Comics
ISBN: 1563896761
Read April 10, 2015

Three down, twenty-four to go!  Well, twenty-two, because I'm not sure I care that much about the dailies, or about the various more modern reboots.

Still not seeing many signs of inventive formatting yet, and the stories for this half-year didn't seem as interesting and punchy as the ones from the first part of the year.  Fewer highlights, but the overall collection is still pretty solid.

There were quite a few uncomfortable characterizations and scenes this time around for me.  I was a little disconcerted by the shooting "death" and near-immediate miraculous revival of The Spirit in "Women!" (September 28, 1941), but I'm chalking the annoyingly supernatural recovery up to an unreliable narrator, as this one is given to us by an opinionated barkeep.  The mangled English given to Ebony was really distracting in "The Spirit Am Unfair to His Assistant" (August 17, 1941).  There was an even more uncomfortable scene in "Ellen Dolan, Fullback" (November 23, 1941) where a mob of women football players sexually assault a bound and helpless Spirit, who initially resists and cries out, but subsequently "decides he likes it" and therefore gets further physically assaulted by a jealous Ellen, which scene in total actually made my toes curl under.  Finally, there were two separate stories where an effeminate man impersonates The Spirit, and is the butt of many jokes thereby; "Pink Perkins" (July 27, 1941) and "Dorothy Heartbern" (September 7, 1941).

On the interesting story side, not so much this time around.  I enjoyed the Halloween story, which sees the one-night jailbreak of the mad Dusk and his even madder wife Twilight in "Hallowe'en Dusk" (October 26, 1941).  I also liked the totally-expected-but-still-fun bloody twist at the end of "The Oldest Man in the World" (October 19, 1941) which also was the only oddly-formatted story in the bunch, being framed by a team of archaeologists from 1,000 years in the future finding a preserved printing of the weekly insert of The Spirit out in the desert.  Finally, I enjoyed the odd little tale in "The Element of Time" (August 10, 1941) that has a mad scientist make the less-than-optimal decision to test his elemental form of Time itself on a gangster bent on murder (although if it wasn't for the stinger in the last panel, I don't think I'd be as keen on it, if I'm totally honest).  On the totally opposite side, I really thought I would love "The Last of the Minstrels" (December 7, 1941), but it felt choppy and rushed, and was not entirely coherent.  A sad letdown.

Recurring characters get thrown around fairly liberally in this volume.  We have the previously-mentioned mad hatters Dusk and Twilight, we have a few stories with Silk Satin (still a spy for England, and thus able to be both ally and antagonist depending on the story) and Ebony's personal sidekick Pierpont makes more regular appearances.  Our supporting cast of Ellen, Commissioner Dolan, Ebony, random unnamed foreign dictators, and the unending stream of gangsters and mob bosses are of course everpresent.

I've got some other modern comics to catch up on, and of course all my other reading, but I'm planning to keep on trucking through these regularly - they're a fun and informative bit of comics history, and so far, they're actually fun little stories overall.