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Sockless and Stalwart: Eisner's Spirit

Almost 50 years ago, as I type in 2001, a comics concept made its way into the Great Publishing Boneyard, leaving a stamp on the memory of dedicated comics fans and even people who, normally, had no particular use for comics.

A barely-costumed crimefighter - a man in a blue three-piece suit and domino mask - fought the good fight against crime from the early forties to the early fifties, brought to life by the hand and imagination of Will Eisner and a rich stable of supporting talent variously employed as supporting (and, occasionally, fill-in) artistic roles. Beyond an escape from death that provided his earliest origin story and his crimefighting handle, he lacked the paraphernalia of the crimefighters of his day; he wore no cape or tights, nor did things like transform his body to flames or fly through the air. Instead, he brought criminals to justice with his fists and his wits. Thus described, the concept seems positively dull; yet Eisner's Spirit stories remain a part of the canon of comics that few question. Even to tastes that despise comics involving crimefighters (especially the periodically-exhausted superhero form), this material remains high in general esteem.

Indeed, in the late nineties, a cell of celebrity comics creators attempted, abortively, to revive the premise. The scanned advertisement to the right lists Kurt Busiek, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and other writers; and artists such as Mike Allred, Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons, and other artists (or artist/writers), a lineup one might expect of a new creator-owned imprint rather than an attempt to resuscitate some four-color creation from the World War II and Truman eras.

What about the premise made such a cluster of first-tier talent want to take the risk of attempting to revive it? After all, the Golden Age of Comics abounded with masked mystery-men, some with much more compelling gimmicks; some pieces, furthermore, had remained viable through the recurring contraction of the comics market. The Spirit, on the other hand, had quietly ended his comics tenure in 1952 (or thereabouts) when his creator declared Enough and moved on, only to reappear in a few new sequences in the late sixties.

The Wisecracking

While nothing ever made a wisecracking hero particularly unique for a clever repartee, the Spirit nonetheless showed an unusual chutzpah with his, smirking and giving it to his enemies verbally even as he might engage in pounding them into a giant bruise with legs. Thinking back to his more popular, though generally less substantial, peers like Superman and Batman, one might note that the wisecracking, when it occurred, generally took the form of ex post facto gloating over a handcuffed prisoner.

It takes a bit more stuff in the spine to bait someone still free to clobber you with the nearest piece of furniture, and the Spirit did not seem to temper a barbed tongue in the least for the mere absence of a wall of policemen between himself and the targets of his wit. He clobbered and baited with equal joy, and, frequently, during the same moment. Early Superman stories had a bit of this kind of banter, but generally never as funny and less convincing, in that one who can repel bullets need not much fear the consequences of making someone lose his temper by means of a string of insults.

Furthermore, a comic-book hero seeks victory on a number of levels, beginning with the physical (as he beats the villains until their sinuses grow dry as the Sahara) and with the moral (as he undermines their pretentions of grandeur and their blistering self-importance). A character like Batman or the Punisher, who take their business far too seriously for its symbolic meanings, seem inherently unable to recognize the value of belittlement in the process of defanging a foe; yet bringing a man down a peg sometimes requires a multidisciplinary approach, such as the Spirit demonstrates in the scanned specimen to the right, as he both subdues and adjusts the attitude of some goon not anywhere in his own league.

The Roughhousing

In a number of ways, the Spirit embodies extremes of character rather than of power. For instance, while someone like Superman might have the ability casually to repel bullets, scoop up two or three gun-toting goons in each hand and fly them off to the nearest hoosegow, the Spirit found himself having the proverbial phlegm beaten out of him frequently. He wore bandages so often that one might begin to believe them some part of his costume; and, furthermore, he would come back from some truly grisly violent attentions to bring in his man.

How, one might ask, could a reader fail to respond to a scene where the Spirit, one arm in a sling, one eye blackened and closed, and his lip enlarged and bloody, crawled out of a stinking sewer to vie (and win) in one last physical contest with the criminals responsible to his sorry state of injury? A character like Batman might persevere until he overcame all odds, but storytellers who handle him frequently forget to make the adverse circumstances believable, granting him victories that seem too easy and therefore do not reflect the fundamental gumption necessary to define a meaningful hero.

The Unforgettable Characters

Take a Silver Age villain from Marvel Comics, strip the figure of his costume and powers, and frequently little would remain, with a few exceptions. While someone like Victor von Doom could work without the gadgetry, ordnance, or outfit, remarkable characters remained, and, today, still remain, exceptional.

However, Eisner loved human quirks, bloated egos, exaggerated emotive states, and all the fundamental human perversity that makes individuals memorable and the species in general fascinating. He sometimes used improbable powers in his characters, but did not need them to make his creations work.

Furthermore, he could play with more subtle qualities of human nature to make the villains interesting; he need not work in material as unsubtle as deformed villains like Prune Face or the Joker, and compel just as well with con men as with killers.

A Spirit nemesis could come from anywhere. Most likely, however, the onetime enemy might dissolve into the concentrated humanity one encounters in large cities; the characters remained individual in a way that did not require the kind of carnival-oddity traits one sees in the rogues' gallery of contemporaneous heroes like Batman or Dick Tracy. Eisner seems to have drawn much more from life in his character design and embellished after creating a plausible core; superhero comics, on the other hand, frequently jettisoned the human side in favor of the unusual, the fantastic, or the impossible. But for Eisner, a balding man with Coke-bottle glasses might prove just as menacing an enemy as any steroid king in tights, all depending on the circumstances and the personal qualities of the principals involved in the story.

The Women (and Reactions Thereto)

Of a multitude of interesting and compelling characters - and the more credit goes to Eisner for composing worthwhile characters that he intend to use for a single story and discard - some of the more interesting draw from the other, female, half of the human race. Before anyone would hear of Chris Claremont's strong female characters, Eisner would imprint them on a canon of pre-Code comics.

And, while the females themselves offered both considerable interest and no small cheesecake factor (typical of a number of Golden Age greats of the art of depicting the female form, such as, of course, Eisner himself, Nick Cardy, and a number of others), the dynamic could become touching, hilarious, tragic, or moving, as the needs of the story and tone required.

Imagine, if you will, for one second a scowling, persimmon-faced poser like ("the") Batman making a goofy face after getting a kiss from a blond beauty, or, even worse, staggering around in a hormonal daze in the moments that followed it. Neither possibility seems at all likely during most of the character's history, and especially in post-1969 treatments. However, the Spirit, having as his core a Red-Blooded Regular Guy, did these things with no particular affront to his dignity.

The Magic of the Blend

Reading the pages, an observer quickly begins to understand that Eisner (and supporting talent) had something going for them in the chemistry of Spirit stories, an equation perhaps less meaningful in the specific factors than in the final product rendered by such process.

I read and enjoyed the first issue or so of the Spirit book of the nineties, executed by a series of top-tier talents of excellent reputation and undeniable achievement in the medium, but, sadly, this work lacked the magic of the blend. The valiant efforts of the assembled Moore, Busiek, and Gaiman could not recapture precisely the feel of a Spirit story; a long list of dedicated artists similarly failed to give more than an echo of the feel of the art.

Indeed, the work did evoke a response from me as a reader, not so much to make me want to continue reading the 1990s adventures of the Spirit as to look for back issues of Kitchen Sink's reprints in order to enjoy the real thing, particularly the post-1945 material after Eisner returned from World War II.

Something had changed in the chemistry of the concept long ago, a fact which inclined Eisner to explore working with Wally Wood on the pieces known collectively as "The Outer Space Spirit" and, shortly afterwards, to leave the concept behind, moving on to works of greater pathos but sometimes lesser commercial appeal. And Eisner himself seems to have refused to do what the later revivalist crowd did: If he had to fake it, if he had to imitate (even imitate himself), he knew the time had come to move on, leaving to posterity and the anthologist a vital and refreshing body of work that, in many ways, ages well and stands up against the comics of today, in spite of the (presumed) 50 years' progress in the development and maturation of the medium that separates them.

Eisner, doing the Spirit strips, made much of that maturation possible.

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Column 272. Completed 03-SEP-2001.