Customer Reviews

The Spirit Archives, Volume 25

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Will Eisner's run of Spirit dailies has hitherto only been available in several incomplete reprint runs. This complete edition is easily one of the most interesting volumes in the Spirit Archives series and could have been a fitting tribute to Eisner's storytelling genius - as well as the other talented artists who helped him out and even took over the feature during the war years. True, daily strip adventures were not Eisner's preferred storytelling format and for obvious reasons these stories lack the stunning page layouts found in his comic book-sized Spirit stories. However, the introduced characters are intriguing and it's absolutely fascinating to see how Eisner & C:o struggle to use the limited space in each daily strip as effectively as possible. Tom Spurgeon makes some quite interesting points in his introduction and the reproduction of the artwork is, if not excellent at least very, very good. Sadly, this book has one unforgivable flaw: its size and proportions! Readability has been sacrificed to keep this volume the same size as previous volumes in the series. I have seen many comic strip editions where I've felt the strips were reprinted too small, but this is beyond reason even for such relatively young eyes as mine. I'll simply quote a comic book editor friend who recently pointed out that prioritizing form before function is never a good idea. This volume demonstrates just why!

By the way, my three stars are intended as an average of great stories, artwork and reproduction (4.5 stars) and the size of the strips (1 star).

I was looking forward to these complete daily strips of The Spirit from 1941 to 1944. Well, I just received the book, and was disapointed to say the least.
For some reason, DC decided to keep the same 6.8 x 10.5 size as other Spirit Archives which was ok. But for these daily strips it means 4 daily strips within a frame of 6" x 8 1/2" or less! Strips are so small they're hard to read!!!
A thousand curses on DC Comics!

The Spirit Archives are almost complete with Vol. 25. The size of the strips has been commented on already and while they are on the small size they are readable (although a magnifying glass does help).They are worth having just to complete the series and also there is really no other way to have them in your collection. Well worth it.

Great service by the people I ordered it from, got here faster than I thought it would. A beautiful book. The images are a little small, but that's fine.