Customer Reviews

Spirit Archives, Volume 7

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Basically The Spirit is a crime fighting hero who uses ingenuity and physical skill, rather than super powers, to defeat evil. He is witty likeable and politically incorrect. The comic pioneered many layout techniques and so many super heros are modeled after The Spirit. The story lines and comics hold up even now more than 60 years later and I recommend for comic book fans to try out the series.

Volume 7 of The Spirit Archives contains reprints of comics written from July 4 - December 26, 1943. During this time Eisner was still absent (he had been drafted). In Volume 7 The Spirit returns to his roots. Rather than fight Nazis he focuses more on the home front. He must save love-interest Ellen Dolan when when she is framed for a murder. As in the first volume The Spirit is himself framed for a murder and must evade the police as he fights crime. Also in a return to roots The Spirit is up against femme fatale villains in a kidnapping story.

Purists will complain that The Spirit was better with Eisner in charge. These comics still hold up. On the other hand I would recommend this for die hard fans only. If you are new to the series then try out any one of Volume 1-4 or 12 or higher. Will Eisner (after whom the Eisner Award was named) had creative control of those volumes so they are more historically significant. I recommend Volume 7 along with the rest of the series to libraries, because this is a unique opportunity to archive the entire run of a very influential comic.

This volume of the Spirit Archives covers July to December, 1943. Will Eisner was in the Army at the time, so the comic was written and drawn by other people. It was a decent adventure strip during this time period, but not nearly as good as when Eisner was doing the strip himself.

Will Eisner only wrote one story in volume 7, and he also did layouts for that story, Aug 15, 1943. The finished art is by unknown staff artists at Quality Comics. Lou Fine apparently had nothing to do with it, or for that matter, any other Spirit after August 8 until, just maybe, late December. But this story is unique for its time. It marks the first appearance of Eisner's more cartoony post-war style. In fact, if you threw it into a pile of 1946-1948 Spirit sections, you would find it identical in style of writing and art to several other stories of that later period. The unknown Quality Comics staff artists must have projected Eisner's layouts onto their Strathmore and traced them. It is a unique foreshadowing of what was to come, perhaps worth buying this volume just for the one story. But after this, there is no more Eisner until Dec 23, 1945, in volume 11. Lou Fine's artwork by this time has become more stylized and distant from Eisner's pre-war style of drawing.

Will Eisner is the only comic book artist to ever have his work shown in a museum of art. His most important work is the Spirit. The Spirit Archives series has brought together all of his work, that was printed in a weekly newspaper insert. However, after the work found in volumes 1 and 2, Eisner was called to active duty and served in the army during World War II. The Spirit carried on, but it was drawn by other artists. Eisner's work does not pick up again until the stories found in Volume 12 of the Archives series. The work in Volumes 3-11 is fine, but it is not the work of Will Eisner.