The Spirit

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For the film adaptation of the comic, see The Spirit (film).
For the religious or spiritual meaning of The Spirit, see Spirit.
The Spirit


The Spirit #10 (Fall, 1947), Quality Comics. Art by Reed Crandall. The Spirit and Ebony White
Publisher Eisner-Iger Studio
First appearance Spirit newspaper strip #1 (Register and Tribune Syndicate, June 2nd 1940)
Created by Will Eisner
Characteristics
Alter ego Denny Colt
Affiliations Ebony White, Commissioner Dolan., Central City's Police
Abilities athleticism, hand-to-hand combat, either no or extremely slow aging

The Spirit (real name Denny Colt) is a fictional American masked crime-fighter, created by Will Eisner in 1940, who starred in a Sunday-newspaper comic-book insert. His namesake, seven-page weekly series is considered one of the comic-art medium's most significant and classic works, with writer-artist Eisner creating or popularizing many of the styles, techniques, and storytelling conventions used by comics professionals decades later.

The Spirit chronicled the adventures of a masked vigilante who fought crime with the blessing of the city's police commissioner, an old friend. Despite the Spirit's origin as a detective named Denny Colt, his real identity was virtually unmentioned again and for all intents and purposes he was simply "The Spirit". The stories ranged through a wide variety of styles, from straightforward crime drama and film noir to lighthearted adventure, from mystery and horror to comedy and love stories, often with hybrid elements that twisted genre and expectations.

The feature was the lead item of a 16-page, tabloid-sized, newsprint comic book sold as part of eventually 20 Sunday newspapers with a combined circulation of as many as five million copies. "The Spirit Section", as it was colloquially called, premiered June 2, 1940, and continued through 1952. It generally included two other, four-page strips (initially Mr. Mystic and Lady Luck), plus filler material. Eisner worked as editor, but also wrote and drew most entries — generally, after the first few months, with such uncredited "ghost" collaborators as writer Jules Feiffer and artists Jack Cole and Wally Wood, though with Eisner's singular vision for the character as a unifying factor.

Contents

[edit] Publication history

In late 1939, Everett M. "Busy" Arnold, publisher of the Quality Comics comic-book line, began exploring an expansion into newspaper Sunday supplements, Aware that many newspapers felt they had to compete with the suddenly burgeoning new medium of American comic books. Arnold compiled a presentation piece with existing Quality Comics material. An editor of The Washington Star liked George Brenner's The Clock, but not Brenner's art, and was favorably disposed toward a Lou Fine strip. Arnold, concerned over the meticulous Fine's slowness and his ability to meet deadlines, claimed it was the work of Eisner, Fine's boss at the Eisner & Iger studio, from which Arnold bought his outsourced comics work.

In "late '39, just before Christmas time," Eisner recalled in 1979,[1] Arnold "came to me and said that the Sunday newspapers were looking for a way of getting into this comic book boom". In a 2004 interview, he elaborated on that meeting:

   
The Spirit

"Busy" invited me up for lunch one day and introduced me to Henry Martin[, sales manager of the Des Moines Register and Tribune Syndicate, who] said, "The newspapers in this country, particularly the Sunday papers, are looking to compete with comics books, and they would like to get a comic-book insert into the newspapers". ... Martin asked if I could do it. ... It meant that I'd have to leave Eisner & Iger [which] was making money; we were very profitable at that time and things were going very well. A hard decision. Anyway, I agreed to do the Sunday comic book and we started discussing the deal [which] was that we'd be partners in the "Comic Book Section", as they called it at that time. [2]
   
The Spirit

The new series "gave me an adult audience," Eisner said in 1997, "and I wanted to write better things than super-heroes. Comic books were a ghetto. I sold my part of the enterprise to my associate and then began The Spirit. They wanted an heroic character, a costumed character. They asked me if he'd have a costume. And I put a mask on him and said, 'Yes, he has a costume!'" [3]

A classic Eisner cover for The Spirit, Oct. 6, 1946. Note the innovative use of title design, the mix of color and black-and-white, and the shadowing and texturing that combine for exotic noir effect. Other Spirit stories could be whimsical, gritty, folklorish, sentimental, horrific, or mystical, yet always humanistic.
Enlarge
A classic Eisner cover for The Spirit, Oct. 6, 1946. Note the innovative use of title design, the mix of color and black-and-white, and the shadowing and texturing that combine for exotic noir effect. Other Spirit stories could be whimsical, gritty, folklorish, sentimental, horrific, or mystical, yet always humanistic.

During World War II, Eisner served in the U.S. Army. In his absence, the newspaper syndicate used ghost writers and artists to continue the strip, including Manly Wade Wellman, William Woolfolk, and Lou Fine.

[edit] Character history

The Spirit, referred to in one newspaper article cited below as "the only real middle-class crimefighter", was the hero persona of young detective Denny Colt. Presumed killed in the first three pages of the premiere story, Colt later revealed to his friend, Central City Police Commissioner Dolan, that he had in fact gone into suspended animation caused by one of archvillain Dr. Cobra's experiments. When Colt awakened in Wildwood Cemetery, he established a base there and, using his newfound anonymity, began a life of fighting crime wearing only a small domino mask, blue business suit, fedora hat and gloves for a costume. The Spirit dispensed justice, funding his adventures with the rewards for capturing villains.

The Spirit was based in Central City, but his adventures took him around the globe. He met up with eccentrics, kooks, and beautiful but deadly femme fatales (most notably P'Gell), bringing his own form of justice to all of them. The story changed continually, but certain themes remained constant: the love between the Spirit and Dolan's feisty proto-feminist daughter Ellen; the annual "Christmas Spirit" stories; and the Octopus (a psychopathic criminal mastermind who was never seen, except for his distinctive gloves).

[edit] Ebony White in perspective

Eisner is sometimes criticized for his depiction of Ebony White, the Spirit's African American sidekick. He later admitted to consciously stereotyping the character, but said he tried to do so with "responsibility", and argued that "at the time humor consisted in our society of bad English and physical difference in identity." [4] The character developed beyond the stereotype as the series progressed, and Eisner also introduced black characters (such as the plain-speaking Detective Grey) who defied popular stereotypes.

In a 1966 New York Herald Tribune feature by his former office manager-turned-journalist, Marilyn Mercer wrote, "Ebony never drew criticism from Negro groups (in fact, Eisner was commended by some for using him), perhaps because, although his speech pattern was early Minstrel Show, he himself derived from another literary tradition: he was a combination of Tom Sawyer and Penrod, with a touch of Horatio Alger hero, and color didn't really come into it". [5]

Harvey Comics' The Spirit #1 (Oct. 1966), art by Will Eisner
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Harvey Comics' The Spirit #1 (Oct. 1966), art by Will Eisner

[edit] Latter-day Spirit comics

Harvey Comics reprinted several Spirit stories in two giant-size, 25-cent comic books published October 1966 and March 1967, each with new Eisner covers.

  • The first of these two 60-page issues opened with a new seven-page retelling of the Spirit's origin by writer-penciler-inker Eisner (with inking assist by Chuck Kramer). Also new was the text feature "An Interview With the Spirit", credited to Marilyn Mercer; and writer-artist Eisner's two-page featurette "Spirit Lab: Invincible Devices". Reprinted were the seven-page Spirit stories "Lorelei Rox" (Sept. 19, 1948), "Two Lives" (Dec. 12, 1948), "Agent Cosmek" a.k.a. "Visitor" (Feb. 13, 1949), "The Story of Rat-Tat the Toy Machine Gun" (Sept. 4, 1949), "Ten Minutes" (Sept. 11, 1949; script credited to Jules Feiffer), "Thorne Strand" (Jan. 23, 1949), and "Gerhard Schnobble" (Sept. 5, 1948).
  • The second opened with a new seven-page story by writer-artist Eisner, "Octopus: The Life Story of the King of Crime," giving the heretofore unrevealed origin of the Spirit's archnemesis The Octopus, as well as his given name (Zitzbath Zark). Also new was the two-page text feature "The Spirit Answers Your Mail", and writer-artist Eisner's two-page featurette "The Spirit Lab: The Man From MSD". Reprinted were the seven-page Spirit stories "Plaster of Paris" (Nov. 7, 1948), "The Deadly Comic Book" (Feb. 27, 1949), "Rudy the Barber" (Oct. 22, 1950), "The Story of Sam, the Saucer That Wanted To Fly" (Sept. 17, 1950), "Sam Chapparell" a.k.a. "Gold" (Oct. 10, 1948), "La Cucaracha" (Nov. 19, 1950), and "The Halloween Spirit of 1948: Ellen Meets Hazel" a.k.a. "Halloween".

Warren Publishing and Denis Kitchen's Kitchen Sink Press published extensive reprints, first as large black-and-white magazines (the Warren part of the run eventually having a color section), then as trade paperbacks. Kitchen Sink later did a complete reprinting of the post-WWII Eisner work in a color comic series, and started another series, which lasted only 10 issues, then intended to reprint the stories from the beginning. The Warren magazines often featured new Eisner covers.

Promotional art by Darwyn Cooke for DC Comics' The Spirit
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Promotional art by Darwyn Cooke for DC Comics' The Spirit

Kitchen Sink also published a series of original Spirit stories, with contributions from Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Paul Chadwick, and Paul Pope, among others.

In the mid-2000s, DC Comics began reprinting The Spirit chronologically in the company's hardcover Archive series, in an approximately 8x10-inch format, smaller than the Kitchen Sink and Warren publications.

The final Spirit art by the late Eisner appeared in an issue[issue # needed] of The Escapist, from Dark Horse Comics.

In November 2006, DC published Batman/The Spirit, a one-shot crossover by writers Jeph Loeb and Darwyn Cooke, with Cooke and J. Bone as artists. The company announced that the following month it would publish a new ongoing sereis, The Spirit, by writer Darwyn Cooke, with art Cooke and J. Bone.[6]

[edit] Legacy and influence

  • Masked Man published by Eclipse Comics. Character and series was very similar to Will Eisner's work.
  • Jack Cole's Midnight was intended as a simple replacement for the original during Eisner's enlistment, but took on its own life in broader stories.
  • Michael T. Gilbert created a "funny animal" version dubbed The Wraith.
  • Steve Ditko's character The Question shared much of the urban visual tone of Eisner's work, as did Alan Moore's version of Ditko's character, the Watchmen anti-hero Rorschach.
  • In addition, Moore's later character of Greyshirt (originally appearing in Tomorrow Stories, and later in his own limited series Greyshirt: Indigo Sunset), consciously mimicked the character and storytelling techniques of The Spirit.

[edit] The Spirit in other media

Reprints of the Spirits adventures ran in Quality Comics and Fiction House publications shortly after their newspaper debuts.

The character was the subject of a 1987 television movie starring Sam Jones as The Spirit and Nana Visitor. Eisner disapproved of the movie's tone of camp parody,[citation needed] which resembled that of the 1960s Batman television series. Although produced as a pilot for a new series, none followed.

The Spirit was briefly mentioned in the animated film The Iron Giant while in the film, The Incredibles, Mr. Incredible attends a dinner date wearing a suit and tie that strongly resembles the Spirit's suit.

On July 19, 2006, The Hollywood Reporter said comic book writer-artist Frank Miller would write and direct the feature film The Spirit[7], previously announced as a project in 2004.[8] [9] The trade magazine reported the production company would be Odd Lot Entertainment, with executive producers including Batfilm Productions' Michael Uslan, Benjamin Melniker, and Steven Maier, and producers to include Odd Lot's Linda McDonough and Batfilm's F.J. DeSanto.

[edit] Comics

  • The Spirit, 22 issues, Quality Comics, 1944-50
  • The Spirit, 2 issues, Boardman Books (UK), 1948-1952 (repackaged by Denis McLoughlin)
  • The Spirit, 5 issues, Fiction House, 1952-54
  • The Spirit, 2 issues, I.W. Publications, 1963
  • The Spirit, 2 issues, Harvey Comics, 1966-67 (each contained new Eisner work)
  • The Spirit, 2 issues, Kitchen Sink Press, 1972 (underground)
  • The Spirit Magazine, 41 issues, Warren Publishing / Kitchen Sink #17 on, 1974-83 (black-and-white magazine)
  • The Spirit, 87 issues, Kitchen Sink Comics, 1983-92 (post-WWII Spirit, complete)
  • The Spirit: The Origin Years, 10 issues, Kitchen Sink Comics, 1992-93 (reprints from the beginning)
  • The Spirit: New Adventures, 8 issues, Kitchen Sink Comics, 1997-98
  • The Spirit, monthly series, DC Comics, 2006-

[edit] Books

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Panels #1 (Summer 1979), "Art & Commerce: An Oral Reminiscence by Will Eisner", pp. 5-21, quoted in "Rare Eisner: Making of a Genius" (see under References, below)
  2. ^ Eisner interview, Alter Ego #48 (May 2005), p. 10
  3. ^ Eisner interview, The Jack Kirby Collector #16 (June 1997)
  4. ^ Time.com (Sept. 19, 2003): Will Eisner interview
  5. ^ Mercer, Marilyn, "The Only Real Middle-Class Crimefighter", New York (Sunday supplement, New York Herald Tribune), Jan. 9, 1966; reprinted Alter Ego #48 (see under References below)
  6. ^ http://www.dccomics.com/comics/?cm=6471 DC Comics: The Spirit #1
  7. ^ The Hollywood Reporter via Reuters (July 19, 2006): " 'Spirit' Comic Comes to Life on Big Screen"
  8. ^ Variety (July 22, 2004): "Odd Lot, Batfilm join forces for 'Spirit'", by Michael Fleming
  9. ^ Cinescape (Aug. 23, 2004): "Hollywood gets into 'The Spirit': Classic comic book character slated for a film", by Patrick Sauriol

[edit] References

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