The Collected John Law!

The folks at Hard Case Crime have given us a real treat in The Collected Will Eisner's John Law. All of the John Law material is now easily available between two handsome covers. This is material created by Will Eisner and his team back in the 1940's when he was briefly considering starting his own line-up of comics for the newsstands as well as more modern material fashioned by Australian artist Gary Chaloner which takes many of Eisner's noir fragments and cements them into a fascinating and quite spooky whole. 

When the project failed to come together, Eisner took the elements of the stories and refashioned into stories for The Spirit Section. Four Spirit stories developed from this material, including the seminal two-part Sand Saref tale. 

I first became aware of these John Law Detective stories when Eclipse Comics was able to put together a one-shot comic at the same time that Kitchen Sink was rolling with The Spirit reprints. I was fascinated even then to get a glimpse behind the scenes of how comics can come together. 

Eisner was pitching all kinds of books and formats for these characters as well as others which never saw the light of day such as Melba Girl Detective. Originally Nubbin the Shoeshine Boy was to be the headliner. 

But then Eisner switched gears, and the beefy, one-eyed John Law took the lead. His similarity to The Spirit is evident, making the shift over to that series relatively simple to do. (I'll have more to say on these Spirit stories tomorrow.)

In the early 2000's Gary Chaloner was put into contact with Denis Kitchen by way of Kurt Busiek and it turned out that Chaloner was handed the keys to the Crossroads kingdom when he was given the okay by Eisner himself to continue the John Law adventures. 

Chaloner wisely chose to take the character and give him an even darker tone, adding a modern noir gloss to the already heady environment. Since the stories had in many ways become part of The Spirit mythos, Chaloner took steps to make the character distinctive replacing and adding to keep the structure if not all the details. 

In two collections (Dead Man Walking and Angels and Ashes, Devils and Dust) Chaloner added both Lady Luck and Mr. Mystic to the Crossroads universe. Crossroads is supposed to be a stand-in for Los Angeles just as Central City seems very much like New York City. This change alone gives the stories a fresh feel. The stories are hard-edged with the supernatural a regular aspect of the goings on. From the first collection we get "Meet John Law", "The Opal Skull" (originally a Spirit story intended for Dark Horse and later reconverted to same) and "Law, Luck and a Dead-Eye Mystic". And the remaining stories are "What Nubbin Knew..." and "The Half Dead Nubbin Butts", and a story I title "Law's Spook Squad". 

In a new story for the Hard Case Crime collection, we get a glimpse at what Chaloner had planned for Law, a team of detectives made up of Eisner alumni from all over. We get Harry Carey from the pages of WoW Magazine! from 1936, "Hammer" Donovan from Detective Picture Stories #4 from 1937, Melba Chase P.I. from the unpublished "Tab" The Weekly Comic from 1947 and Lieutenant Oren Grey from a couple of Spirit stories appearing in 1947 and 1948. It was a rich cast with plenty of villainy on display from the likes of corrupt cop Detective Reznick, gunman Ray Hades, and Law's boyhood friend, the gangster Enzo "The Angel" D'Angelo. 

This collection is highly recommended, not only for just fans of Eisner or The Spirit, but for fans of good noir crime stories. 

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