The Spirit At Warren

Jim Warren was a huge fan of Will Eisner and The Spirit, so when the chance came to reprint the strip, he didn't mess about. Emboldened by the success of Creepy, Eerie & Vampirella, Warren went the total fanboy route and put out Eisner's seminal newspaper strip in it's own book, the only time a Warren mag centered solely on one single character.
Not that it was all plain sailing. Eisner himself hated the Basil Gogos painting above that fronted the premiere issue, being as it was, a rejig of an old character of Will's named John Law, and not The Spirit at all. So much so, he insisted on doing all future covers himself. No fool he, Warren immediately accepted.

 

As anyone with any nous knows, The Spirit is one of the all-time great comic strips, Eisner putting together what amounts to a complete movie in every 7 or 8 page episode. Sometimes it's film noir, sometime comedy, sometimes high adventure, sometimes sci-fi. Sometimes The Spirit barely appears in his own strip at all. Plus, artwise, Eisner was decades ahead of anybody else, as proven by the influence he and The Spirit have had. Frank Miller, for instance, has built an entire career by 'doing Eisner'. Then, of course, he went off and made a terrible Spirit movie, but let's not upset Ebony, or ourselves, again over that.

Warren's Spirit was an absolute treat, if like me, you'd heard of this comic character but never actually seen any episodes. Not only did you get the original stories ( that hadn't dated one iota ) but little treats like:

And:

Here's some of the Technicolour pieces from the middle of the book, the first being coloured by no less than the mighty Richard Corben:

Hamlet On A Rooftop

Only Will Eisner would adapt Shakespeare for fun. Hamlet On A Rooftop appeared in Will's seminal bible for aspiring cartoonists Comics & Sequential Art, but I'm almost certain it appeared in a few other places before that. As you'd expect, it's a masterclass in page construction, characterization & storytelling. Will is obviously the stage director of this performance, but he's the actor too, choosing where to break up the bard's text, panel by panel, making sure you read it at the pace, and with the inflection, he wants you to.
Every writer/artist does this, of course, but it's never more obvious than in this piece. I saw an interview once with Frank Miller, who said a cartoonist has to be really smart to slow the reader down, whereas a movie director just has to leave the camera running. Will Eisner was really smart.

The Spirit Jam

As it's Monday, I'm sure we could all do with a pick-me-up, so from 1981, here's the absolutely- beyond-incredible Spirit Jam, starring, well, just about everybody! Here's associate editor Cat Yronwode's introduction:
" Like a musical jam session, this 36 page extravaganza does have a cohesive refrain, a basic plotline. But within that context each contributor was given virtually unlimited freedom to create characters, situations, dialogue & subplots. The result is a story which meanders from serious adventure to parody and back again, with numerous in-jokes along the way. "
Imagine It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in comic book form, and you have some idea of how insanely brilliant this piece is. Luckily, you don't have to imagine, 'cos here's the whole thing.!