The Spirit: A Celebration of 75 Years by Will Eisner
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A mixed bag, but a great piece of comics history.
The Bad:
I don’t normally start with the bad, but I’m going to in this case. It’s pretty obvious to anyone who flips through this that there is a pretty harsh depiction of The Spirit’s buddy, Ebony, who is a young black person and depicted in a manner that’s totally unacceptable today. I don’t really seek to condemn or defend this so much as to tell you it’s there, and if it’s too much to get past, then skip this book.
For me, I guess I’d compare it to Mark Twain in that I can completely understand someone who is like, “This might be a classic, but 219 N-words in a single book is over my threshold.” And I don’t think that’s wrong. The reason I compare it to Mark Twain, however, is because I think the negative depictions are very indicative of the time (early 1940’s), and because there is a lot of value to be derived if you’re willing/able to go past all that. But again, I wouldn’t look down on someone who says, “No thanks.” I don’t seek to do that so much as reassure someone who’s unsure that yes, there is good in this book that may make it worth your while.
I’ll say the other bad part. In a weird way, it’d be good to see some other comics printed at the time within this volume. The reason being, I think it’s easier to appreciate just how much further Eisner was taking the medium of comics than a lot of his contemporaries if you could see them together.
The Good: The layouts and art are pretty amazing. The title pages are so creative and interesting, way more than a lot of pages today. And the stories are sophisticated in a way that a lot of comics aren’t. This book does not hold your hand so hard that you’ll know everything that’s going on, and boy did Eisner have a willingness to tell very different stories through The Spirit, sometimes telling stories where the titular character doesn’t appear at all.
This book definitely lays the groundwork for a lot of superhero books, especially Batman (and I’ve gotta believe that a lot of the campiness of the 1960’s Batman has The Spirit to thank), and I think it also lays the groundwork for something that I’ve always loved, which is a different kind of superhero book.
Every so often, you’ll get a Spider-Man issue where he, say, spends most of the pages chatting with Wolverine about something. Or a X-Statix which shows Doop’s average day. I love these little interludes, and even though they might seem like space fillers, I feel like the writers really get into them and do interesting stuff when they don’t necessarily spotlight the main character or when they tell a very different kind of story. I think The Spirit is one of the oldest books I’ve read that has those kinds of stories, the non-superhero or superhero-adjacent story that’s surprisingly great.
Also, the essays by Neil Gaiman and Darwyn Cooke are excellent. If you’re struggling with this book for whatever reason, I’d advise just skipping to those, reading them both, and then taking another crack at it. They really speak well to what makes this book so special.
My question: I never saw the Spirit movie. Who’s seen it? What’s it like? Watching the trailer again, my suspicion is that they didn’t include enough of the fun into the story. But that’s based on 3 minutes of a movie being marketed at a time when the gruff, serious superhero was everything.