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WILL EISNER’S THE SPIRIT ARCHIVES VOLUME 1
Reviewed by David Rolland
All right you trust fund babies, time to break open your piggy banks.
For the outrageous price of $49.95 you can bear witness to some of the greatest works in comic history. Today, THE SPIRIT might be a name that makes everyone but comic book aficionados and pop culture nerds scratch their heads, but back in the 1940s, The Spirit was one of the most popular heroes around. He didn’t have his own comic book, but instead his adventures were detailed in a syndicated supplement to the Sunday newspaper. Every Sunday throughout the 1940s, kids around the USA could eat their cereal while digesting a seven-page Spirit adventure between the classifieds and the horoscopes. These kids could expect drama, adventure, and a couple chuckles from Will Eisner, who was desperately trying to do something different with a genre that was generally very conformist.
With Will Eisner’s THE SPIRIT ARCHIVES VOLUME 1, released by DC comics, the reader has a chance to see Eisner’s early work. It collects all of THE SPIRIT’s strips from 1940, the comic’s first year of existence. Despite a dated moralistic tone that repeatedly reminds kids that "crime doesn’t pay," the stories and art are more entertaining than almost anything else produced then or now.
The Spirit was once Denny Colt, Central City’s star criminologist. One night while trying to halt Dr. Cobra’s sinister scheme, Denny Colt was seemingly shot and killed by Dr. Cobra’s henchman. Colt fell headfirst in one of Dr. Cobra’s elixirs and was pronounced dead by the city coroner. But Dr. Cobra’s elixir somehow revived Denny. Instead of letting the world know he miraculously survived death, Denny Colt chose to let the world believe he was dead so he could fight crime in peace as the Spirit. Consequently, the Spirit became a masked hero with a secret headquarters, a kid sidekick and a bond with the police commissioner
Many of these story elements sound similar to the Batman mythology. However, a pretext in THE SPIRIT ARCHIVES, written by Eisner himself, explains the Spirit’s familiar characteristics were sponsored by the men who paid Eisner. The men with the money demanded that the Spirit have something in common with a proven popular and monetary success like Batman. So, Eisner monkeyed around with the formula as much as possible.
When Eisner was told the Spirit had to have a costume, he dressed The Spirit in a blue trenchcoat and fedora. As a sidekick, the Spirit had Ebony, an orphaned, black cab driver. Unfortunately, Ebony was portrayed as a racist stereotype, more so than anything imaginable today. He spoke in a dialect that would make Amos and Andy proud, and was drawn with lips that I thought only collagen could provide. Ebony provides some laughs and shows great heroism at times, but he is such an off-base caricature that I could imagine his presence would really turn some people off of THE SPIRIT. This, of course, would be a misguided protest and a real shame, since The SPIRIT is a product of a less enlightened time, prior to the Civil Rights era, when the US Army was seen as a force of good.
THE SPIRIT doesn’t underestimate the intelligence of the strip’s target audience: children. It provides a well-balanced sense of humor and a grim reality of how sinister evil men and women can be. In modern, mainstream comics, characters can’t really kill or be killed. Back in the 40’s though criminals could kill, and as justice for their crimes, the criminals could be killed. This provides some endings that are genuine shockers.
Eisner’s art is considered by many to be textbook perfect for the comic book medium. And THE SPIRIT ARCHIVES really preserves his fantastic art. The colors reach out and grab the reader, and you’ll want to all but kiss the glorious details in his work. The only crime of THE SPIRIT ARCHIVES VOLUME 1 is the ridiculous price. At $50, not too many people are brave enough to try something new, even in this age of venture capitalism. It would be nice if they could reprint Eisner's THE SPIRIT in a cheaper format so new readers can be turned on to some great comic art.
Strongly Recommended  David Rolland is a regular contributor to PopImage..
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Writer and Artist: Will Eisner
