Publication history
In late 1939, Everett M. "Busy" Arnold, publisher of the Quality Comics comic-book line, began exploring an expansion into newspaper Sunday supplements, aware that many newspapers felt they had to compete with the suddenly burgeoning new medium of American comic books, as exemplified by the Chicago Tribune Comic Book, premiering two months before "The Spirit Section".[3] Arnold compiled a presentation piece with existing Quality Comics material. An editor of The Washington Star liked George Brenner's comic-book feature "The Clock", but not Brenner's art, and was favorably disposed toward a Lou Fine strip. Arnold, concerned over the meticulous Fine's slowness and his ability to meet deadlines, claimed it was the work of Eisner, Fine's boss at the Eisner & Iger studio, from which Arnold bought his outsourced comics work.
In "late '39, just before Christmas time", Eisner recalled in 1979,[4] "Arnold came to me and said that the Sunday newspapers were looking for a way of getting into this comic book boom". In a 2004 interview, Eisner elaborated on that meeting:
"'Busy' invited me up for lunch one day and introduced me to [sales manager of the Des Moines Register and Tribune Syndicate] Henry Martin, who said, 'The newspapers in this country, particularly the Sunday papers, are looking to compete with comics books, and they would like to get a comic-book insert into the newspapers'... Martin asked if I could do it... It meant that I'd have to leave Eisner & Iger [which] was making money; we were very profitable at that time and things were going very well. A hard decision. Anyway, I agreed to do the Sunday comic book and we started discussing the deal [which] was that we'd be partners in the 'Comic Book Section', as they called it at that time.[5]"
Eisner negotiated an agreement with the syndicate in which Arnold would copyright the feature but, "Written down in the contract I had with 'Busy' Arnold— and this contract exists today as the basis for my copyright ownership— Arnold agreed that it was my property. They agreed that if we had a split-up in any way, the property would revert to me on that day that happened. My attorney went to 'Busy' Arnold and his family, and they all signed a release agreeing that they would not pursue the question of ownership."[5] This would include the eventual backup features, "Mr. Mystic" and "Lady Luck."
Selling his share of their firm to Iger, who would continue to package comics as the S. M. Iger Studio and as Phoenix Features through 1955, for $20,000,[6] Eisner left to create "The Spirit Section". "They gave me an adult audience", Eisner said in 1997, "and I wanted to write better things than superheroes. Comic books were a ghetto. I sold my part of the enterprise to my associate and then began The Spirit. They wanted an heroic character, a costumed character. They asked me if he'd have a costume. And I put a mask on him and said, 'Yes, he has a costume!'"[7]
The character and the types of stories Eisner would tell, Eisner said in 1978, derived from his desire
"...to do short stories. I always regarded comics as a legitimate medium, my medium. Creating a detective character would... provide me with the most viable vehicle for the kind of stories I could best tell. The syndicate people weren't in full agreement with me... [I]n my first discussion with 'Busy' Arnold, his thinking centered around a superhero kind of character—a costumed character; we didn't use the word 'superhero' in those days... and I argued vehemently against it because I [had] had my bellyful of creating costumed heroes at Eisner and Iger... [S]o actually one evening, around three in the morning, I was still working, trying to find it—I only had about a week-and-a-half or two weeks in which to produce the first issue, the whole deal was done in quite a rush—and I came up with an outlaw hero, suitable, I felt, for an adult audience."
The character's name, he said in that interview, came from Arnold: "When 'Busy' Arnold called, he suggested a kind of ghost or some kind of metaphysical character. He said, 'How about a thing called the Ghost?' and I said, 'Naw, that's not any good,' and he said, 'Well, then, call it the Spirit; there's nothing like that around.' I said, 'Well, I don't know what you mean.,' and he said, 'Well, you can figure that out—I just like the words "the Spirit."' He was calling from a bar somewhere, I think... [A]nd actually, the more I thought about it the more I realized I didn't care about the name."[8]
The Spirit, an initially eight (and later seven) page urban-crimefighter series, ran with the initial backup features "Mr. Mystic" and "Lady Luck" in a 16-page Sunday supplement (colloquially called "The Spirit Section") that was eventually distributed in 20 newspapers with a combined circulation of as many as five million copies.[9] It premiered June 2, 1940, and continued through 1952. Eisner, the overall editor, wrote and drew most Spirit entries, with the uncredited assistance of his studio of assistants and collaborators, though with Eisner's singular vision a unifying factor.[10] From 1940–1950, Busy Arnold reprinted Spirit stories under his Quality Comics banner, first individually from 1940–1947 as one of the features in ninety-two issues of Police Comics (#11–102),[11] and from 1944–1950 as twenty-two issues of an associated Spirit comic book with several stories per issue.[12] From 1952–1954, Fiction House published five issues of their own Spirit reprint comic book, continuing this process.[13]
Eisner was drafted into the U.S. Army in late 1941, "and then had about another half-year which the government gave me to clean up my affairs before going off" to fight in World War II.[8] In his absence, the newspaper syndicate used ghost writers and artists to continue the strip, including Manly Wade Wellman, William Woolfolk, Jack Cole and Lou Fine.[14]
Eisner's rumpled, masked hero (with his headquarters under the tombstone of his supposedly deceased true identity, Denny Colt) and his gritty, detailed view of big-city life (based on Eisner's Jewish upbringing in New York City) both reflected and anticipated the noir outlook of film and fiction in the 1940s.[15] Eisner said in 2001 that he created the strip as a vehicle to explore various genres: "When I created The Spirit, I never had any intention of creating a superhero. I never felt The Spirit would dominate the feature. He served as a sort of an identity for the strip. The stories were what I was interested in."[16] In some episodes, the nominal hero makes a brief, almost incidental appearance while the story focuses on a real-life drama played out in streets, dilapidated tenements, and smoke-filled back rooms. Yet along with violence and pathos, the feature lived on humor, both subtle and overt. He was shot, knocked silly, bruised, often amazed into near immobility and constantly confused by beautiful women.[17]
The feature ended with the October 5, 1952, edition. As The Comics Journal editor-publisher Gary Groth wrote, "By the late '40s, Eisner's participation in the strip had dwindled to a largely supervisory role. ... Eisner hired Jerry Grandenetti and Jim Dixon to occasionally ink his pencils. By 1950, Jules Feiffer was writing most of the strips, and Grandenetti, Dixon, and Al Wenzel were drawing them."[18] Grandenetti, who penciled as a ghost-artist under Eisner's byline, said in 2005 that before the feature's demise, Eisner had "tried everything. Had me penciling 'The Spirit'. Later on it was Wally Wood", who drew the final installments.[19]
