The Best of the Spirit - Softcover

Will Eisner is one of the most important creators to have worked in the comics medium. Not only did he innovate the entire newspaper strip format with The Spirit, but in A Contract With God, a book-length comic detailing life in a Jewish tenement, he is also credited with publishing the first "graphic novel" (indeed, Eisner himself coined the term). Brilliantly creative until his death in 2005, Eisner's shadow still looms large over the modern comics industry, and may it ever remain so!

*Starred Review* Balk at acquiring DC's $50-per-tome series reprinting all of The Spirit because, well, you've just never read the strip? Then this paperback showcasing the strip's essence in 22 vintage stories is your book. The earliest 2, "The Origin of the Spirit" (1940) and "Silk Satin" (1941), respectively introducing the hero and a recurring character, aren't as visually adventurous as Eisner's work after his World War II hiatus from The Spirit. Still, they already demonstrate two of Eisner's strengths in the skewed perspective and the bold, anti-naturalistic color juxtapositions of virtually every panel. In the 20 postwar stories, playing with perspective is subordinated to point of view, and expressionistic lighting justifies the clashing hues. If the changes dissipate the low-rent-cubist elan of the early stories, Eisner compensates with special effects--panels in monochrome and dichrome, special styles of panel framing, visually bracketing one stream of action within another, photo backdrops--and seldom uses any one device throughout the story. Not as easy to see but no less virtuosic than the artwork is The Spirit's complex tone as a piece of pop art that indulges and satirizes the improbabilities of crime comics but doesn't countenance any carping about the heroic and social virtues its protagonist exemplifies. Maybe you do need that big, pricey series. Ray Olson
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