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The Only Real Middle-Class Crimefighter
- University Press of Mississippi
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3 The Only Real Middle-Class Crimefighter MARILYN MERCER / 1965 From New York: The Sunday Herald Tribune Magazine, January 9, 1966, pp. 8 and 55. It started with Jules Feiffer saying in his book, The Great Comic Book Heroes, that in the golden age of comic books a seminal force in the industry, the comic artist most likely to be imitated by other comic artists, was Will Eisner, who, between 1940 and 1952 with a few years off for World War II, wrote and drew The Spirit, a comic-book-size seven-page supplement syndicated in Sunday newspapers. Not everybody remembers The Spirit, but those who do tend to remember it distinctly and with passion. The Spirit was a burlesque of, among other things, the standard adventure comic. However, it started off (on June 2, 1940) in the classic comic book manner. In the first installment, Denny Colt, a young criminologist, is pursuing Dr. Cobra, a mad scientist. When Dr. Cobra’s secret formula explodes all over the laboratory, Denny is immobilized, taken for dead, and buried in Wildwood Cemetery. A few panels later, Denny arrives in Police Commissioner Dolan’s headquarters , explains that he is alive but wishes to take advantage of his supposed death so that he can “go after criminals the law cannot touch.” And so he puts on a blue mask and becomes The Spirit, operating out of Wildwood Cemetery with the assistance of Dolan, Dolan’s beautiful daughter Ellen, and a small Negro boy named Ebony. Eisner, however, could not play it straight for long. As the strip progressed, The Spirit as serious crimefighter gave way to The Spirit as not so serious focal point for whatever zany fantasy Eisner felt inspired to build around him that week. Crime became incidental; sometimes Eisner forgot to put it in. The stories ranged from adventures in the mysterious East to politics in Central City to living soap opera. They were always funny. 4 will eisner: conversations A lot of people in those days wanted to work for Eisner. Marginal types because of the fine, lunatic quality of his imagination; career comic artists because of his technical excellence—for one thing, he drew better than anyone else. I worked for him between 1946 and 1948, along with Jules Feiffer, in a five-man shop at 37 Wall Street where we turned out a weekly Spirit, assorted comic book features, and an occasional advertising brochure. As I remember it, I was a writer and Jules was the office boy. As Jules remembers it, he was an artist and I was the secretary. Will can’t really remember it very clearly. It is his recollection that Jules developed into an excellent writer and I did a good job of keeping the books. Neither one of us could, by Eisner standards, draw. When I discovered that Eisner, who had given up comic strips in 1952, was in New York, I called him. He had had other, similar calls since the onset of the Great Comic Book Revival. “It is,” he said, “interesting to be a legend in one’s time. What do you do when you’re a grand old man before you even have a chance to be a grand young man?” I found him, reasonably grand and still reasonably young, in his office at 421 Park Avenue South, with a wall of bookshelves displaying a row of old, bound volumes of The Spirit. Now a full-time businessman and commuter (he lives in White Plains with his wife and two children), he has been engaged for the past fifteen years primarily in publishing semi-technical instruction manuals. The principal client of his firm, American Visuals Corporation, is the Department of the Army, for which he turns out P.S., a monthly magazine that explains and encourages the proper maintenance of equipment in words, diagrams, and comic strip sequences. He produces similar material for industry and other government agencies. He owns two other enterprises, Educational Supplements Corporation (social studies enrichment materials) and IPD Publishing Company (foreign language instruction manuals), and for two years ran his own newspaper syndicate, Bell-McClure-NANA. But he didn’t think that made an interesting story. “What you really want to say,” he said, rising to the challenge—Eisner always wrote his own scripts better than anyone else—“is that after searching through the streets of the city you finally found Will Eisner, sitting on a box in an empty...