As a respectable adult, twenty years later, Will Eisner’s work on The Spirit makes me remember why I wanted to write comics in the first place.

The joy of The Spirit, as soon as it had become what it was going to be, which was more or less once Eisner came back from the war in 1945 and reassumed control of the comic (published as a Sunday supplement in newspapers at the time, an avenue that allowed Eisner, who was always a wise businessman, the creative control and ownership he could never have had at that time on the newsstands), was not in the words, nor in the pictures, but in the smoothness and the brilliance and the willingness to experiment of the storytelling. In seven pages—normally less than sixty panels—Eisner could build a short story worthy of O. Henry, funny or tragic, sentimental or hard-bitten, or simply odd. The work was uniquely comics, existing neither in the words nor in the pictures but in the place where the words and the pictures come together, commenting on each other, reinforcing each other. Eisner’s stories were influenced by film, by theater, by radio, but were ultimately their own medium, created by a man who thought that comics was an art form, and who was proved right—but who might not have been quite so right if he had not built such a solid body of work, both in The Spirit and in the work he did from 1976 until his death, if he had not taught and inspired along the way.

A lot of the delight in The Spirit is in watching Eisner invent and discover new ways of telling stories—the use of white space and panels to represent freedom and captivity in one story, the echoing, reflecting dual panels in another, the use of the murderer’s point of view in a third. The stories in this book are, in addition to being astoundingly entertaining, a lesson in how to tell stories in comics form. “ACTION MYSTERY ADVENTURE” the panel on the top right of each Spirit splash page tells us—and to those three things one could add humor, craft, pathos, wisdom, and the most beautiful (and dangerous) women in comics.

In a world in which the idea of graphic novels—big, thick collections of comics that have heft and value—is becoming widespread and accepted, bookshops, librarians and individuals want to know what the important books are, to know which books are vital to have on their shelves. There are a few books that no self-respecting collection of graphic novels should be without, after all—Maus, for example, or Watchmen, or Jimmy Corrigan, or Bone. I’d like to suggest that this book, as an example of what the young Will Eisner could do, should be added to that set and guaranteed a place on those shelves. The postwar Spirit was a masterpiece, in the strict sense of the word—a piece of work that demonstrates that a young journeyman has now become a master of his craft.