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.
Showing posts with label Will Eisner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Will Eisner. Show all posts
Saturday, April 11, 2015
Thursday, April 2, 2015
Graphic Novel Collection: The Spirit, Volume 2, by Will Eisner
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.
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.
Thursday, February 12, 2015
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.
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.
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