Sunday Funnies

Today, in a bit of a switch, I'm going to focus on a strip that I did not read in the Sunday papers when I was a kid, because it had been discontinued (in that format) some years before I was born. However, upon discovering Will Eisner's The Spirit as reprinted by Warren magazines in the seventies, I was immediately hooked.

The Spirit was produced by Eisner starting in 1940 as part of a supplement syndicated to newspapers as either a replacement for or addition to the normal Sunday color funnies. In addition to The Spirit, other features were also included in the package, making for a weekly comic book anthology.

Eisner was one of the brilliant stylists of early comic books, and his work on The Spirit was his most enduring. Much later, he essentially invented the graphic novel format, which was a natural evolution of the serialized nature of much of his earlier work.

The Spirit was a former cop named Denny Colt, who realized he could more effectively fight crime outside the constraints of the established criminal justice system (though he remained on friendly terms with Commissioner Dolan and the rest of the police force).

He battled an array of archfiends, most notably the mysterious Octopus (in the strip, you only ever saw the Octopus' gloved hands), and had amorous encounters with a wide array of femmes fatales (most of whom straddled the line between good and bad), though it seemed his true love was Ellen Dolan, daughter of the police commissioner.

While The Spirit could be pretty violent, as the hero suffered any number of pummelings at the hands of the bad guys he pursued, one of the most attractive features of The Spirit was the tongue-in-cheek humor of the strip, often turning into a parody of the adventure and super-hero genres. Although original strips were produced over fifty years ago, The Spirit has enjoyed being in print (either as reprints or in new adventures) more or less continuously since the being revived in the 1970s in the aforementioned Warren magazines. A year or so ago there was finally a film version (which I haven't seen yet) and apparently there's a new series being put out by DC Comics.

It's hard to imagine the new versions can live up to the classic originals, mainly because Eisner was such a singularly brilliant creator. But the continuing popularity of the character certainly speaks to how great the concept and character were to begin with, and I'm glad they continue to appeal to a contemporary audience.

P.S. You can read a complete Spirit Section (with Lady Luck and Mr. Mystic strips as well) at this site.