The Will to Live

I first believed in god at age nine.

I first believed in Will Eisner at age seven.

God left at age 18. I bought my most recent Eisner collection (Hawks of the Sea – his first comic strip) last year.

I know I was seven because when I rifle through the black and white reprints of The Spirit from 1946 I recognize many of the stories. In some cases, I can still recall the color.

The Spirit ran weekly as an eight-page tabloid insert in the Sunday comics. There was nothing else like it: A complete noir story every week, beginning, middle and end. The Sunday comics were the highpoint of my week, and The Spirit was the highest.

Besides his longevity (Eisner died in 2005 at the age of 87), there are any number of reasons to see Eisner as the most influential comics artist of all time. His studio hired and encouraged such graphic stars as Jules Feiffer (whether you like Feiffer or not – I don’t), Wally Wood (I do) and various Marvel stalwarts.

His treatise on Comics and Sequential Art, so far as I know, is still the standard handbook and how-to. His interviews, comments and reprints flowed uninterrupted throughout his lifetime. He invigorated, expanded and legitimized the graphic novel in the 1970s. For biography and background, you can find 20 sites on the Internet that can fill the bill.

But none of that gives you the flavor of the man and his work. Eisner pretty much invented the modern splash-page intro, and he did it better than anyone else. “The Spirit,” on that first page, could be written in block letters, in smoke, in the crumbling bricks of an abandoned warehouse. There would be seeping blood or hints of a ghostly presence. Or simply a page of closely hand-lettered explication. No one week looked like another.

But where I think Eisner most excelled, and which no one previous to the graphic novels of the last couple decades could match him, was in talking directly to the reader. I mean, he was talking to me. He introduced his stories as though he was sitting in the armchair across from me, reminiscing. He pulled you in not just with the wonder of his tales (which were wonderful), but with the immediacy of the experience.

The Spirit was the alter ego of Denny Colt, supposedly dead but operating from a hollowed out sanctuary beneath his grave (one with a huge, arched, multi-paned window that you might think would draw attention). He wore a simple eye-encircling mask which hid little but his eyebrows. He dressed entirely in blue-black: blue-black mask, blue-black suit, blue-black hat, blue-black tie and shoes. (I’ve never been sure if all was black with blue glints from the lighting, or all was blue with black from shadow.)

Part detective, larger part vigilante, he acted as an ex officio arm of the police department of Central City, headed by Commissioner Dolan, who might often disapproved of his methods but seldom of his results. With his pipe and dapper hat, Dolan, while overseeing a metropolis of crime, was a throwback cross between small-town police chief and Western sheriff.

In no way invincible but tough as nails and endlessly rebounding, The Spirit lived on intelligence, brute force, stalwart confidence (except in the case of certain women) and an unfailing sense of humor. He could laugh at fate, criminals and his own foibles with equal gusto.

Color reprints of The Spirit are hard to come by, if only because it seems next to impossible to reproduce the original color spectrum of those Sunday comics. That’s a shame, because Eisner used color as both striking accent and clue. The femmes fatale wore brilliant red or green dresses and gowns. The reader could always recognize arch villain The Octopus, whose true face is never seen, by his purple, open-backed gloves (of which the characters took not the least note).

Eisner was a master story-teller, and if the the week’s tale demanded that The Spirit defer to another character, he would slip graciously into the  background. Supernatural elements, which seldom interacted directly with The Spirit, often dominated. One tale follows a ghost intent on seeing that his tax return gets mailed on time. Another takes a sojourn with the commissioner’s ancestor, The O'Dolan, and fellow apparition as they prowl Central City.

There’s a gun, made from molten steel into which a man was plunged, that shoots by itself. There’s a talking bull, a sentient cockroach, a two-bit criminal who can stop time, a Christmas encounter with Santa Claus, and most memorably, a non-descript little man who learns to fly but doesn’t live to tell the tale. The Spirit has his adventure in each of these adventures, but it’s almost unimportant next to the stories of ordinary people involved in extraordinary situations.

During World War II and for many years after leaving The Spirit around 1951, Eisner produced graphic manuals for the army. (I haven’t seen these, but I’m sure they were unique.) He came back on the popular scene in the 1970s with A Contract with God, not the first graphic novel, as some have thought, but the first to gain wide attention as a work of serious intent.

In this and in later graphic novels, such as Dropsie Avenue, as well as in collections of graphic short stories, Eisner extolled the history of New York and his own humble Jewish ancestry. Artistically, they are his supreme works. No one more completely broke the bounds of the comic box frame: Flames, smoke and palm trees seared and snaked through multiple panels, even whole pages, giving vibrant animation without the need for verbalized sound-effects.

In his final decade, Eisner was still experimenting. Sundiata, based on a delightful myth cycle of West Africa, came out in 2002. The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was published in 2005, the year of his death.

Nietzsche said “God is dead.” The obits say the same of Eisner. I’ll flip you for who has made his afterlife the more enjoyable.

by Derek Davis