Warren Magazines, the publisher of Creepy, Eerie,and Vampirella offered a window to many fans my age to the greatness of Will Eisner's The Spirit. I'd read how good Eisner's comic was, and I'd even seen a sample in The Great Comic Book Heroes, but somehow that early version of the series didn't communicate to me how awesome the strip had been. That would have to wait for Warren's black and white version to hit the stands. That series changed how I saw comics forever, and it gave me immense respect for the mature talent of Will Eisner.
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Maybe you can help solve this mystery for me.
ReplyDeleteMany, MANY years ago, I read a Spirit story that was virtually dialog free. It was set on a subway train and the Spirit was posting as a blind man initially, but he was set upon by The Octopus and thugs. This led to one of their many "final showdowns."
That story, however, was nowhere to be found in the recently concluded hardback series from DC... the one that supposedly included all the original Spirit strips.
Did I imagine this story? Or does it exist out there somewhere?
That does rings a bell with me. I'll have to wait to get access to my collection, but that does sound like a story I've read. Short of going through every comic, I've no quick way to find it.
ReplyDeleteI've not gotten the archives, so I cannot answer for those alas.
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I did a little research. And I found in the Kitchen Sink Spirit #32 the most infamous story in which The Spirit and The Octopus tangle, part of a sequence in which the Spirit is blinded.
ReplyDeleteThat story is accompanied by a whole section of then new material by Eisner about Subways, nearly all of it in pantomime. There is one story in which a guy who could well be blind is accosted by a drunk.
I wonder if a blended memory of these stories account for our confusion.
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