The Spirit fights crime in make-believe Central City, but the masked hero and his creator, cartoonist Will Eisner, have real friends in Arkansas. Michael Barrier of Little Rock knew Eisner and included some of the late Eisner's work as among the best in A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics (1982). Barrier was the book's co-editor. He writes about the native New Yorker on his Web site, www.michaelbarrier.com.
Eisner "delighted in the narrative and expressive possibilities of a new medium," Barrier says.
The new movie, The Spirit, is based on the cinematic look of comics that Eisner drew back when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, Frank Sinatra sang with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra and Europe was at war.
Eisner caught the shadowy look of film noir - the rainy nights just like those that made Humphrey Bogart and Alan Ladd turn up their trench-coat collars, and the sultry dames invariably up to no good. Randy Duncan, professor of communications and theatre arts at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, welcomed Eisner to the campus in 1993. He remembers how the busy artist volunteered "out of the blue" to teach two days of free workshops on comic art.
Eisner was 76 at the time, but "Will never seemed old to me," Duncan says. "He was always full of energy, and I think that was because he remained ambitious. He liked to joke that he was hoping to win the Promising Newcomer Award at the Eisner Awards (named for him, the comics industry's equivalent of the Academy Awards.)
"He certainly kept challenging himself with trying new approaches in his work," Duncan says
By the time of his death in 2005, Eisner had left The Spirit long behind, like a blue hat blown off in the artist's chase after something new. His last book, The Plot (2005), details his investigation of an anti-Semitic forgery.
Life, in Pictures (2007) collects several of Eisner's comics about growing up in the Bronx. The effect is a thinly-disguised autobiography about a young cartoonist in the rough-and-tumble beginnings of comic-book publishing.
Eisner drew The Spirit for newspapers as a comic-book insert from 1940 to 1952. The idea allowed Sunday papers to compete with comic-book spinner racks for the attention of millions of readers. It was a different world.
Comics still needed inventing. Many of the flourishes that are familiar in today's comics, Eisner made up on the spot to meet crushing deadlines. Comics historians and scholars like Duncan and Barrier have studied his work ever since.
"I had gotten to know Will about five years earlier when I interviewed him as part of the research for my doctoral dissertation," Duncan says. His paper on "Panel Analysis: The Rhetoric of Comic Book Form" laid the groundwork for his current project, a textbook on comics.
Eisner "experimented with the comics art form," Duncan says, but "he saw himself as a storyteller."
The Spirit's story is pure but lasting simplicity: police officer Denny Colt wakes up in his grave to find out he wasn't really dead, merely slipped into "suspended animation" by a criminal mastermind, the Cobra. Denny Colt becomes The Spirit, and all the crooks who thought he'd been rubbed out have a shock - and a sock (!) - coming.
But even Eisner supposed the character was down for good when he quit the strip. Truman was president, Johnny Mercer sang "Glow Worm," and Eisner moved on to projects he found more interesting.
"I've done it ... as well as I could," Barrier's essay quotes the artist on why he didn't want to keep drawing The Spirit. "What's the point in going back and doing it again?"
HIGH SPIRITS
Answers include that many critics, like Barrier, consider The Spirit Eisner's best work. Eisner's enduring trademark, for example, was the "splash page" (full-page scene) that opened most of his stories. In comics, it was like discovering the electric bulb - or in The Spirit's milieu, the globe light outside the police station.
Eisner worked his lettering of The Spirit into the picture as something brick-solid the character might lean against, or crawl through to find where the bodies were hidden.
"Alone among comic book men, Eisner was a cartoonist other cartoonists swiped from," Jules Feiffer says of his mentor in Feiffer's classic study, The Great Comic Book Heroes (1965).
They still do, only they don't have to be sneaky about it. Eisner's last drawing book, Expressive Anatomy for Comics and Narrative (2008), completes a trilogy of how-to books for comics artists.
Among those taken with Eisner's style, Frank Miller emerged from comic-book artist (The Dark Knight) to movie writer (Sin City) and director. Miller's conversations, and on-and-off disagreements, with Eisner literally fill a book: Eisner/Miller (2005), 350 pages.
Barrier plans to expand his thoughts on Eisner in a new book on comics, and Duncan has a biography in mind.
The Spirit wasn't done in by changing times, any more than bullets and damsels with thin, silvery knives could stop him - no, turns out he was just in a kind of suspension again.
Eisner and his best-known creation are busier than ever these days. There's artist Darwyn Cooke's new comic-book adventures of The Spirit - and even The Spirit: A Pop-Up Graphic Novel.
Just as The Spirit escaped from Wildwood Cemetery, he was bound to pop up again: a reluctant hero for gloomy times.
LOW SPIRITS
"Will was a joy to be around because he was so full of life and creative energy," Duncan says. "Yet, once you got to know him, there was an underlying seriousness, even a sadness. He was a great observer of people and a great 'people person' in a casual way, but did not form close ties with people very easily.
"Most of his stories are not upbeat. They are tales of struggle, whether it be to succeed or just to survive, and there is always the struggle to make an emotional connection. Yet, in the end, his stories almost always affirm that life is worth the struggle."
In one of his most-reprinted stories, "Meet P'Gell," Eisner opens with a scene of The Spirit characteristically in the background. (Sometimes, the hero barely appeared at all.) He has on a gumshoe's coat and hat, and just a hint of Eisner's only concession to making him look like a superhero: a minuscule black mask The Lone Ranger might have thrown away.
Eisner "admired the skill of many of the contemporary comics artists," Duncan says. "But he dismissed most superhero comic books as 'pretty wallpaper'; the pictures were nice to look at, but there was not much story underneath the pictures."
The real eye-catcher in this tale is the slinky vamp on a chaise lounge, looking straight to the reader with hooded eyes and a warning: "I am P'Gell ... and this is not a story for little boys!"
Eisner's tales of The Spirit "were rarely fantasies in the strict sense of the word," Barrier says, "but had very little to do with anything happening in the real world. Today's comic-book artists, by contrast, seem to take themselves and their stories very seriously, indeed, and to cherish the conceit that their superhero characters - who are a lot more fantastic than The Spirit - could exist in a world very much like our own."
Barrier would have chosen a different director for the movie, one with a lighter touch.
"An animated version, directed by Brad Bird, would have made a lot more sense," he says. "Bird's The Incredibles [2004] has a lot more in common with Eisner's stories than any of Miller's comicbook stories."
Just now, computer graphics have caught up to what Eisner could do with a bottle of ink. But Hollywood might never be ready for the likes of, say, Eisner's "The Story of Gerhard Shnobble."
Gerhard is a dumpy little man who can fly. Or could, but the world won't allow it. Gerhard's father paddles the ability out of him, as a boy, to make him grow up "normal, sound, steady."
One day, Gerhard can't stand his normal loser's life anymore, and he jumps off a roof - and flies! "I'll be famous," he thinks, "heh, heh."
It's just his continuing bad luck to glide past The Spirit. The hero is too busy dealing justice to a gang of crooks to notice the little man in the sky. The bad guys pull guns, and a stray shot nails Gerhard. He falls like a dead duck, and still, nobody sees what happened. Nobody cares.
"But do not weep for Shnobble," Eisner ends the account. "Rather shed a tear for all mankind."
"The Spirit reeked of lower middle-class," Feiffer writes. Eisner's economically masked hero took at least as many lumps as he dished out, and bled spatters of black, and made do with low expectations. The Spirit's heroics seemed real for the time it took to read them, Feiffer writes, but time and again turned out to be incidental to "somebody else's game." It was hard to say the do-gooder did much good, and he never even tried to bail out Wall Street.
But he always got up again.
"Will was half artist and half businessman," Duncan says. "To maintain his independence as an artist, Will had always had to be an entrepreneur to support his family. He was always looking for ways to make a profit on his creative properties.
"Particularly toward the end of his life he started thinking about making sure his wife, Ann, would be financially comfortable. He sold some artwork and signed some deals he might not have done 10 years earlier.
"I think he would have approached the movie the same way I intend to, not as a Spirit movie, but as a Frank Miller movie."
Miller already has said he would like to do another film about The Spirit, but Eisner's family isn't waiting for Hollywood's approval to keep the momentum going.
"Certainly, Will Eisner is, and has been, a great deal more than The Spirit," says Carl Gropper, 62, of Paramus, N.J. He knew the artist as "Uncle Will," and discovered The Spirit in the bound copies of old newsprint that Eisner kept.
Today, Gropper is curator and chief executive officer of Will Eisner Studios, Inc. and its Web site at www.willeisner.com, devoted to Eisner's legacy.
Eisner sold The Spirit's movie rights to producer Michael Uslan in 1994, Gropper says. Had his Uncle Will lived to see the finally resulting movie, "I think he would have enjoyed it. He would have seen it as Frank Miller's adaptation of his early work."
Drafted into the Army in World War II, Eisner turned his comicbook skills to illustrated training manuals and tip sheets. In one, a mermaid lectures a dopey soldier against washing his truck in salty ocean water. ("It ruins and corrodes delicate parts.") In another, an airman learns why the bomb he dropped didn't go off: He forgot to move "that old lever" to arm.
Eisner's instructional comics taught and entertained the troops as much as "you could enjoy changing the oil in a Jeep," Gropper says. The experience left the artist convinced that comics could do much, much more than fill colored panels.
"I think he was proudest of some of the graphic novels he produced," Gropper says.
Eisner didn't claim to have invented the graphic novel, but he wrote and drew the one often credited as a revolution in the genre: A Contract With God (1978). The book's four stories recount Eisner's memories and feelings about the Jewish tenement neighborhood where he grew up in the 1930s. It considers why God doesn't always seem to play fair.
Dropsie Avenue and A Life Force continue Eisner's fascination with people who rise above, or don't, or somehow come to terms with their lives and losses in the reallife city, where The Spirit never came to the rescue. People did for themselves.
"I believe he really enjoyed what he did and the work he produced for almost 60 years," Gropper says. "It amazes me, the different things he worked on."
Gropper passes on the hope he imagines his Uncle Will would have attached to The Spirit movie, and to the character's modern-day revival:
"I hope some people who go see the movie also read some of the other books," he says, "and perhaps get into drawing."
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