The twenty-sixty and final volume of DC's Will Eisner's The Spirit Archives features work done by Eisner for the character from the 1950's through his final work on his most famous character in the early 2000's. That quite a range of time, but this volume delivers. This one will read quite quickly because the bulk of the page count is made up of artwork and covers produced by Eisner for Kitchen Sink. The importance of Denis Kitchen and his Kitchen Sink independent underground brand cannot be overstated. Let's take it decade by decade as does the book.
1950s
We get two pieces from the 50's, the thumbnails by Jules Feiffer for the story labeled "Outer Space" which tells what happened to the farmer and the alien who kidnapped him in the final published Spirit tale. And we get the typed script for a story about a cigar-smoking villain and his henchmen who try to kidnap Professor Skol and Captain Delf, two of the survivors who traveled to the Moon with The Spirit.
1960's
This section starts out with a five-page story produced for The New York Herald Tribune Sunday Magazine. In this story The Spirit lives and works in the actual New York City and not its fictional counterpart "Central City". This story sounds very much like a typical Spirit story but deals with the real mayoral race between candidates John Lindsey, Abe Beame, and William F. Buckley. My favorite moment comes when The Spirit tries to recruit Ebony only to find him fifteen years older and working as an executive and having no desire to follow on after his former pal. We even get appearances by Ellen Dolan and an eighty-seven-year-old Eustace Dolan.
Then we focus on the Harvey Comics reprints from the mid 60's. The superhero boom was beginning, and Harvey was looking for heroes and snatched up The Spirit and cajoled Eisner to do some new stories. In the first issue we get a new version of his origin story and in the second we get an origin story for the archfiend The Octopus. Both issues also feature short two-page efforts called "Spirit Lab" in which a scientist pitches keen gimmicks to enhance The Spirit's crime-fighting skills, but ends up contacting a parody of the UNCLE organization.
1970's
The 70's begin with The Spirit and Commissioner Dolan making a cameo appearance on a 1972 cover of the underground comic SNARF. This is the first of many appearances The Spirit will make for Kitchen Sink Comics.
Then in 1973 we get what are called the "Underground Spirits" from Kitchen Sink. In the first of these collections which gather vintage tales we get four new Eisner pages, each a spoof of sorts about changing times and attitudes toward crime. Ebony does an interview with black journalist and attempts to kill the notion that he was demeaned by his role in the stories. In the second issue, Eisner uses his four new pages to give us a stunning P'Gell yarn in which she plays The Spirit as well as her two lovers against one another in a bid for a jewel.
Then again in 1973 we get "The Invader", a full-color story from Tabloid Press which resulted from a class Eisner taught at the Sheridan College in Canada. This the story of a man from outer space who is the vanguard of an invading force but who finds life difficult on the Earth when he's mugged and then manhandled by various gangs before being saved by The Spirit.
In 1974 we are treated to The Spirit Coloring Book from Eisner's own Poorhouse Press. This book takes classic Spirit splash pages and offers them up to the reader to color for themselves. I could never do that to a book and have never even thought of doing that to my copy.
We then are treated to quite a bit of vintage Spirit artwork, including the The Spirit Portfolio plates as well as many pages of pencil drafts for that project.
One thing not included in this volume are the covers from the Warren run of the series. It's an unfortunate oversight and I cannot fathom aside from page count why they didn't include what are some of Eisner's strongest images of the classic hero.
But we are treated to ALL of the Kitchen Sink covers beginning with issue seventeen of the series which continued the Warren numbering. This includes a few pages by Eisner and Kitchen.
1980's
We also get ALL of the covers for The Spirit comics produced by Kitchen Sink both for the magazine and the later comic.
We also get the pages Eisner created for the "Spirit Jam" issue of the magazine's run in which other creators were invited to create a story. We also get four pages created by both Eisner and Dave Sim for a mash-up of Cerebus the Aardvark and The Spirit.
We are treated to the rest of the Kitchen Sink covers as well as sundry spot art for various events such as the eightieth anniversary of Batman.
2000's
We get Will Eisner's final work on The Spirit with a few great illustrations and a story in which The Spirit joins forces with Michael Chabon's The Escapist. This is the final Spirit story produced by Eisner.
This is an exceedingly fun volume, a proper peek at some of the more obscure Spirit artwork over the decades. There are pieces not included, save for the Warren oversight nothing too significant. And that's a wrap on my year-long look at these archive editions...almost.
Next time we take a gander at the unofficial twenty-seventh volume of the series which was produced by Dark Horse Comics and gathers together the Will Eisner sanctioned stories by various talents from Kitchen Sink in the late 90's.
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