The Spirit Comics

Spirit volume 1 cover

The Spirit Volume 1 should be required reading for anyone who is interested in the art of innovative graphic storytelling. ‘The Spirit‘ newspaper strip hit its peak around 1948, the 31 stories from 1940 contain the seeds of greatness.

The Spirit Volume 1 is interesting for the glimpse into the evolution of master storyteller Will Eisner The glimmers of greatness that the Spirit strip will eventually display, the stories in this volume are remarkable because were 60 years ahead of their time.

The stories in this book run from serviceable to quite good, and Eisner’s art grows by leaps and bounds over the six months of comics presented. By the end of the book you can see that Eisner has figured out the formula for the Spirit quite well. Many of the stories deal with crime, corruption, murder, and suicide. The stories were always consistent, and while not everyone of them was brilliant, there were never any that were bad. These original Spirit comics seem more edgy, more dangerous like The Batman.

Will Eisner introduces new characters in nearly every strip and when these were first printed it was on a weekly basis. The comic strips are only 7 pages in length and it is impressive to see how much story Eisner was able to tell in such a short strip. There are so many unique stories without just bringing back the same old villains again and again (most of them are killed off)

The art is in a ‘classic’ style similar to that of other ‘Golden Age’ illustrators such as Bill Everett, Bob Kane or Alex Toth. Eisner uses a fairly rigid 9-panel page layout, each panel is brimming with new ideas, techniques and perspectives. Eisner is already a consummate storyteller, and although these stories are not as ‘dark’ as some of the post-war Spirits, he is already displaying his mastery of light and shade, both in terms of story and artwork. This blows the early Batman stuff away, in both story and especially artwork. The first few pages of the comic are attached in this PDF.

There are some harsh racial and sexist undertones in some of the characters which would be totally unacceptable today but the comics are uncensored from their original publishing when racial ignorance was more acceptable

Hopefully the efforts to bring the adventures of the Spirit to a new generation of readers, following in the footsteps of people like Jim Warren & Dennis Kitchen.

Will Eisner was a genius. The Spirit Archives are a great collectors series. If anyone wants to see where comic books came from, this is certainly the place to stop and see.