I don't know if this will make me something of a pariah around here, but I must confess that I have never heard of The Spirit or Will Eisner.
I suppose it's because I was brought up on Brit comics for the most part. But oddly enough, the American stuff I enjoyed most was Frank Miller's tenure in charge of "Daredevil" in the early 80s. I absolutely loved all that Bullseye/Elektra stuff. It was like nothing I had ever read before. All those panels with no dialogue, but which told the story perfectly. So different to what we had at home. In British comics if the characters had nothing to say, they still spoke, spewing out pointless expository dialogue that was really unconvincing or that merely described what you could see in the panel. Daredevil just blew me away. It was a comic epiphany for me, which made it hard to go back to the old style.
Pity they made it into such a crappy film.
The Spirit is an influential comic strip/book created by Will Eisner (and an ever-changing galaxy of assistants) from the late 1930s to the early 1950s (the strip
was handled soley by assistants during Eisner's service in World War II).
The Spirit tells the story of Denny Colt, a masked vigilante who inhabits a mythical American anytown called Central City. He has a working relationship with Commissioner Dolan, the city's irrascible balding pot-bellied Police Commissioner and a romantic relationship with Dolan's daughter Ellen. The Spirit lives in a secret hideout beneath Wildwood Cemetery with a his wisecracking African-American kid sidekick Ebony White and he battles crime with his wits and his fists, eschewing the use of a gun. He has a colorful rogue's gallery of villains and a bevy of sultry female secondary characters vying for his attention.
(By the way, The Spirit is called The Spirit because on his first case, he battles a mad scientist named Dr. Cobra, who has a plan to ransom the city by threatening to contaminate the water supply with a fluid that causes supended animation. Denny Colt is exposed to the fluid in the process of foiling Dr. Cobra and believed to be dead, and he is interred in Wildwood Cemetery. He later revives and resolves to battle crime outside the law as The Spirit).
So far, so good.
What sets The Spirit apart from it's rather commonplace description is first of all it's strong visual/graphic sense (as noted, Eisner has quoted influence from German Expressionist silent films, etc.). The Spirit was far more experimental in the way it told a story than any other comic strip or comic book of the time (or even of today). It has perhaps rightfully been called the Citizen Kane of the comics books.
Secondly, Eisner exerted a far greater degree of creator control over The Spirit than many other artists & writers (many of whom went uncredited back in the day). This let Eisner deal with social themes and topics that would have been unheard-of in other strips (the warping effects of poverty and its influence on crime, war profiteering, the plight of war orphans, the exploitation of returning servicemen, etc.).
Thirdly, although Ebony White has many characteristics that are shamefully charicatured/stereotyped by the standards of today, he often transcends his secondary role, with entire multi-part storylines being dedicated to his adventures or stories told solely from his point of view. While he is sometimes a figure of fun, he is never a figure without dignity, and his relationship to the other characters is always a relationship of equals.
Finally, Eisners' abilty to tell a good story with an interesting mix of humor, adventure, pathos, slapstick, drama and human interest has never been equalled anywhere else in comics. Many other writers of comics do one thing very well, but Eisner was able to balance many things within a single story in a way that's unrivaled.
My personal favorites are the postwar/later 1940s stories when Eisner returns to the helm and the stories become more elaborate and he plays with the visual & storytelling forms.
P.S. I agree about Frank Miller's work on Daredevil- He took a second-string character on the verge of cancellation and revitalized it into a fantastic read. I particularly like the "Born Again" storyline, where he completely rebuilds the character from the ground up. No question that Miller is a talented and important author of comic books.
If only he weren't such a lousy film maker...:freak:
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