Volume 48, Number 10 · June 21, 2001
The Spirit of the Spirit
By David Hajdu
BOOKS BY WILL EISNER DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
The Spirit Archives
Will Eisner
DC Comics,Volume One, 240 pp., $49.95;Volume Two, 218 pp., $49.95;Volume Three, 218 pp., $49.95;Volume Four, 224 pp., $49.95
Outer Space Spirit: 1952
by Will Eisner, Jules Feiffer, and Wally Wood
Kitchen Sink Press(out of print)
A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories
Will Eisner
DC Comics, 183 pp., $12.95 (paper)
Life on Another Planet
Will Eisner
DC Comics, 136 pp., $12.95 (paper)
New York: The Big City
Will Eisner
DC Comics, 144 pp., $12.95 (paper)
Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood
Will Eisner
DC Comics, 170 pp., $14.95 (paper)
The Building
Will Eisner
Kitchen Sink Press/Bench Press, 88 pp., $25.00; DC Comics, $12.95 (paper)
Invisible People
Will Eisner
DC Comics, 117 pp., $12.95 (paper)
Minor Miracles
Will Eisner
DC Comics, 110 pp., $29.95; $12.95 (paper)
Family Matter
Will Eisner
Kitchen Sink Press/Bench Press, 76 pp., $24.95; DC Comics, $15.95 (paper)
Will Eisner Reader: Seven Graphic Stories by a Comics Master
Kitchen Sink Press/Bench Press,88 pp., $9.95 (paper)
The pages of most comic books are battlefields for hypertrophied mutants and space aliens raging gaudy supernatural war. This has been the case for generations now, the norm in a junk-entertainment genre whose elemental function has always been to commodify the testosterone delirium of male adolescence. To scan the racks of a comics shop like, say, Jim Hanley's Universe in midtown Manhattan is to be assaulted by costumed mercenaries such as Darkchylde and Hellboy in stories like 'Seed of Destruction.' Look closely, and you may recognize some of the old heroes—Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Fantastic Four, and their superfriends—still fighting in increasingly pumped- and sexed-up transmutations. Poke around the middle of the store, and you'll find a mix of subgenres: reprints of vintage comics; the arty (and often raw) 'comix' indebted to the underground movement of the 1960s; and Japanese titles based on the hyperactive animé cartoons. If you make it to the back of the last aisle on the far right, alongside the wall where the T-shirts are hanging, you'll find a display of hard and paperback covers startling for their incongruity, with images of Jewish immigrants in the Bronx of the Depression years, slumped old men, ranting neighbors, a squabbling family.... You're in the Will Eisner section, where the comics medium becomes something naturalistic, wry, introspective, and literate—that is, in the comics universe, something truly otherworldly.
Review, 3709 words
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