Top 20 stories of The Spirit, by Will Eisner

To celebrate Will Eisner week, today Gotham Calling pays homage to The Spirit, Eisner’s crime series from the 1940/50s whose legacy has been echoing around Batman comics ever since. Cue moody saxophone.

The thing about The Spirit is that the titular vigilante was merely a MacGuffin tying disparate tales together, as Eisner and his collaborators fired in various directions, constantly experimenting with the format and trying out different styles. Inevitably, this made the series quite uneven. The early instalments were unabashedly pulpy (the Spirit even had a flying car!) and included plenty of WTF ideas (like in ‘The Tale of the Dictator’s Reform,’ where Hitler comes to America and has a heart to heart with the Spirit). The post-World War II comics are the best, often capturing the tone and visuals of the film noir Zeitgeist. However, many of those stories have not aged well at all, as they can be unbelievably misogynous and politically incorrect by today’s standards, or rely heavily on dated references (for example ‘The Lost Fortnight,’ which is a close spoof of Billy Wilder’s alcoholism drama The Lost Weekend).

On the one hand, this provides a fascinating glimpse into the time period of these comics without the filter of hindsight of Eisner’s later historical works (such as the autobiographical To the Heart of the Storm, the moving fable-like The Building, and the phenomenal series of graphic novels set on Dropsie Avenue, beginning with A Contract with God). On the other hand, I realize not everyone is as much of a history geek as I am.

Still, there are loads of timeless, brilliant tales to satisfy discerning readers. Here are my top 20:

20. Black Alley