I wrote this for the Chicago Comics Convention “ashcan” tribute to Will Eisner in 1996.

The Best of the Spirit

It isn’t yet easy or comfortable for me to write about Will Eisner. He was too important, and making notes for this introduction reminded me how much I miss Will Eisner my friend, and rereading the stories in here reminded me that I miss Will Eisner the storyteller, the craftsman, the dreamer, the artist. Which is probably the wrong place to start something that is an unabashed celebration of part of Will Eisner’s work, but it’s nonetheless true.

When Will Eisner died he was as respected and as revered around the world as he would let us respect and revere him. He was a teacher and an innovator. He started out so far ahead of the game that it took the rest of the world literally sixty years to catch up.

Will’s life is, in miniature, a history of American comics. He was one of the very first people to run a studio making commercial comic books, but while his contemporaries dreamed of getting out of the comics ghetto and into more lucrative and respectable places—advertising, perhaps, or illustration, or even fine art—Will had no desire to escape. He was trying to create an art form.

There are arguments today about whether or not Will was actually the first person to coin the term “graphic novel” for his book of short stories A Contract with God, the book that kicked off the third act of Will’s creative life. There are far fewer arguments about what Will actually did in the 1940s with the Spirit stories, or about the influence Will had on the world of comics all through his creative life—and that his stories had too.

I’ll step forward here: I bought my first copy of The Spirit in 1975, in a basement comics shop in South London. I saw it hanging on a wall, and I knew that, whatever it was, I wanted it. I would have been about fourteen. It was the second (and final) issue of Harvey Comics’ Spirit reprints, and reading it on the train home I had no idea that the stories I was reading were thirty years old at the time. They were fresher and smarter than anything I’d seen in comics—seven-page stories that somehow managed to leave out everything that wasn’t the story, while telling wonderful tales of beautiful women and unfortunate men, of human fallibility and of occasional redemption, stories through which the Spirit would wander, bemused and often beaten up, a McGuffin in a mask and hat.

I loved The Spirit then. I loved the choices that Will made, the confidence, the way the art and the story meshed. I read those stories and I wanted to write comics too.

Two or three years later I stopped reading comics, disappointed and disillusioned by the medium as only a sixteen-year-old can be, but even then I kept reading The Spirit—I would go to London and bring back copies of the Kitchen Sink reprints, and the Warren reprints, and read them with unalloyed pleasure, such that when, as a twenty-five-year-old, I decided it was time to learn how to write comics, I went out and bought Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art, and pored over it like a rabbinical student studying his Torah.