If you enjoy these tales there are more where they came from—many more, I’m happy to say. DC Comics has been publishing The Spirit Archives for several years now, and the material in the book you are holding is a selection from those volumes: a few early stories to give you context, and some stories, as good as, as interesting as, as exciting as, other Eisner Spirit stories. Which, if you’re looking for ACTION MYSTERY ADVENTURE, not to mention the rest, is pretty much as good as it gets.

My introduction to The Best of the Spirit, by Will Eisner, 2005.

Will Eisner: New York Stories

Rereading the four original graphic novels that make up this book, I was prepared for sentiment, and was surprised at how brutal so many of these stories are. They are tales as brutal, as uncaring, as a city. Two garment workers and a baby die in a fire; a hydrant that is an immigrant’s only source of water is sealed off; an old woman is robbed in front of witnesses who do nothing but jeer; a man’s life is destroyed by a newspaper typo. There’s sentiment in here, true, for sentiment is part of being human, and it would be a foolish observer of humanity who would leave it out (certainly Dickens didn’t), and Will Eisner was indeed a remarkable observer, but there is little sentimentality.

Eisner himself is visible in the stories of the City People Notebook, drawing, observing, moving through the city. You learn little about the man, his face hidden, so I shall pull a few scraps from my own mental notebook, by way of introduction.

When I first met Will he was well past the age at which most people have retired, yet there was nothing old about him—not about the way he moved (purposefully, easily), about the way he thought, the way he smiled or the way he treated others. One was only reminded that Will had been in comics since the very beginning, back since Genesis, when discussing some new wrinkle with him, some idea that would change the way that the world of comics would operate forevermore. “When we tried that in 1942 . . . ,” he’d say, and tell us whether or not it had worked back then, and why it had fallen out of use.

The working life of Will Eisner could be a three-act play. In the first act, as chronicled by Will’s semiautobiographical roman à clef “The Dreamer,” he was a man who believed in comics as a medium, a man who wrote and drew excellent comics, particularly The Spirit, perhaps the finest and most consistently ambitious creation of its kind, a man who created business models in which he kept the ownership of his work and his creations; in the second act Will Eisner left comics at a time when the future for comics looked bleak, and the Spirit newspaper supplement was in the decline, and comics for adults were seen as an impossibility, so Will went off to take his knowledge of comics to create PS magazine for the US Army, a maintenance magazine—chiefly of educational comics for adults—that he drew for the first twenty years of its existence. And the third act consisted of an entire career, begun—at an age when most people are planning their retirement—with the short stories that made up A Contract with God. Eisner’s was a remarkable body of work, produced over a period of more than sixty years, clear-eyed and consistent.