| "Johnny
Marsten"
(June 30, 1940)
This [...] story
shows a rapid maturation of approach and a temporary discarding
of the pulpier elements that existed in the earliest Spirit stories
for a more sentimental flavor. "Johnny Marsten" (June 30, 1940)
is the first story that indicates that Eisner was getting a handle
on the approach that would dominate the feature throughout its existence.
As an important touchstone for Eisner, "Johnny Marsten" was the
result of a maturing creative vision, one that knew readers would
get far more from a story containing human emotions than one containing
incessantly combative mesomorphs.
"I remember this story fondly, because I saw it as
a creative risk that really paid off, and in fact led me to do more
of this type of thing," Eisner said, noting that few comics heroes
of his day, in either books or strips, showed a sensitive side.
"There was a tendency to create heroes who never revealed their
emotions, if they had any to reveal," Eisner said. "But to me, The
Spirit as I conceived him did have an emotional side, and I was
just beginning to bring it out with this story." Eisner was willing
to take the risk because the story was appearing before a newspaper
audience, which was older and generally more wellread than was the
typical comicbook audience. "I figured the newspaper reader would
tolerate a different approach to a story," Eisner said. "Over the
years there had been so many different kinds of comic strips, so
many approaches to telling a story, that I thought of this as another
experiment with comics. Fortunately, it flew."
Eisner' s desire to create a hero who could fight
with his head as well as his fists bore fruit in "Johnny Marsten."
Demonstrating himself as something of a Renaissance man, The Spirit
methodically cleans out gambling rings, breaking banks and skulls.
"In my mind, he was a versatile character who was equally adept
in any number of situations, and this was another manifestation
of that," he said. "I liked the idea of the hero who could walk
into a very foreign environment and take command."
The conclusion of "Johnny Marsten" is pure Eisner,
with the crooks doublecrossing each other all over the place and
The Spirit shedding a single tear as he learns of the happy ending.
"This story moves fast because I had a lot to put in, and as a result
it packs a punch, I think," he said. "On the same page that the
criminals get brought to justice, you find out how Johnny' s story
ended and you see The Spirit showing his human traits. Working with
seven pages demanded this sort of treatment."
Artistically, Eisner was still experimenting with
the startling viewpoints and panel structures that would underpin
his career. On page 3 in the first panel of the middle tier, the
gangster car speeds through a distorted arch with the panel borders
serving as background design elements. On page 6, Eisner changes
perspectives frequently and effectively, contributing to the effect
of being in a car-chase. In the first panel, he arranges "windshields"
around the target, and in the third panel the cars lurch at each
other vertically. "I was trying to disorient the perspectives, because
I thought it was a scene that required the reader to feel a little
chaos. I don't know if I thought about it in those terms back then
or if it just seemed like the 'right thing' to do, but it worked
here."
"The Black Queen's Army"
(July 7, 1940)
"The Black Queen's Army" (July 7, 1940) is
one of what Eisner considers his early failures. Maybe the plot
was too bloated to fit into seven pages; maybe it was too preposterous.
Maybe it was The Spirit's autoplane, which was perhaps the apotheosis
of Eisner' s fascination with pulp paraphernalia. "The car was silly,"
Eisner said. "It had no real place in the strip, and I think The
Spirit was not too fond of it either; I forced it on him. But at
least I didn't force it for too long, and it was soon dropped."
Eisner said
the story showed a young artist ambitiously overreaching, abandoning
such niceties as plot. "I was biting off more than I could chew
here, but I tried to make it work, that much is clear," he said.
It's interesting that Eisner brought back the character
of the Black Queen, indicating that he intended to weave continuity
into the stories. "I wanted to develop characters that readers would
remember, so I could bring them back and have the readers already
know something about them" he said. "I thought that with a newspaper
audience, which is used to following characters in comic strips
for years and years, that I would be able to do that. Ultimately,
The Spirit was filled with characters who had long histories
throughout the feature. The Black Queen is the first of these."
"Mr. Midnight"
(July 14, 1940)
In "Mr. Midnight" (July 14, 1940), Eisner
gains a sure footing with a fast-paced tale that puts both The Spirit's
brain and brawn through their paces. "This is the way I conceived
The Spirit — a man who could think his way to a solution, but
who could also get into a free-for-all and prevail," Eisner said.
"And I was still emphasizing his ability to take all manner of beatings
with no apparent ill effects."
Eisner fashioned the Mr. Midnight character as an
amalgam of actors John Carradine and John
Barrymore, whose work Eisner had enjoyed. The beginning
of "Mr. Midnight" cements the relationship between The Spirit and
Commissioner Dolan as one of mutual support and friendship. "Later,
they kind of had more of an unspoken father-son relationship, but
when I was refining the characters' relationships, as I was in this
story, it was more of a mutually beneficial relationship, with the
fact that they liked each other sort of a bonus," Eisner said.
Eisner,
who had begun experimenting with a Japanese brush around this time,
was still moving his "camera" all over the place to provide an array
of angles and perspective distortions. "The brush I was using was
slowing me down because I wasn't used to it, but I was really enjoying
the art I was producing." Pages 6 and 7 show the frantic pace Eisner
was able to achieve through the use of unusual angles and distances;
the two pages flow rapidly, abetted by Eisner's spare dialogue.
"I knew then that dialogue slowed down the action," he said, commenting
on the tendency in superhero comic books to have protracted discourses
during supposedly rapid-fire action, two opposing elements.
Also worthy of note in "Mr. Midnight" is the use of
time, a favorite device of Eisner's. Indeed, the villain's own name
signifies time. Page 2 contains the clock face, a visual cue Eisner
refined over the years, with perhaps its best known use occurring
in "Ten Minutes."
"Even though these stories were more intuitive than
intellectual, I had worked in the field long enough to know there
were certain limitations that had to be overcome on the comic book
page, one of them being the illusion of time. How do you slow time
down? How do you speed it up? I was trying to answer these questions,
and this was one of my experiments."
"Eldas Thayer"
(July 21, 1940)
The Spirit becomes extralegal in "Eldas Thayer"
(July 21, 1940). This aspect of the feature became important over
the years, as several key stories hinged on Dolan's close association
with the vigilante Spirit. Eisner got a lot of mileage
over the years out of the fact that his hero wasn't a cop, a continuity
thread that was carefully maintained with only a lapse or two, and
those happening on someone else's watch. "This made the relationship
between Dolan and The Spirit more complicated, which is one of the
reasons I liked it," Eisner said.
Again in "Eldas Thayer," Eisner mines the pulp aspect
of The Spirit that he eventually sloughed off. On page
4, The Spirit is shown working in his underground lab, surrounded
by all the trappings of a scientist. And speaking of pulp, check
out the suicide method that Thayer engineered on page 2 — did
this guy read too many Rube Goldberg cartoons or
what? Eisner knows his criminals — that much is certain from
the bombmaking scene on page 7. Such bombs have actually been made
and detonated by inmates in the way Eisner describes.
This story also shows Eisner's increasing dexterity
at combining drama, action, and tongue-in-cheek humor. On page 6,
while The Spirit is evading a massive police dragnet, Eisner shows
two policemen tackling a decoy Spirit in a purely slapstick sequence,
yet one that doesn't disrupt the flow of the scene's action. "I
always thought that humor and action weren't mutually exclusive
elements, and that humor could be used to leaven many scenes. This
is an early manifestation of that belief," he said. "That was one
of the great things about The Spirit, and indeed one of
the things that convinced me to do it — the opportunity to
try many of the things that I wanted. And if something didn't quite
work out, as in the Black Queen story, I could always come back
strong next week."
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