The Spirit of Youth (and Ducks)

Through all my years, the daily comics (“the funnies” as they were once called) have been my nearest thing to religion. At home in the late 1940s, we subscribed to the Philadelphia Inquirer as well as the Evening Bulletin, then  the largest-circulation evening daily in the country.

Sometime in there, the Inquirer Sunday color comics took on a new glossy sheen, using what I recall as a Rotogravure process, while the Bulletin retained the standard muted, non-reflective color on Sunday, once they absorbed the Record (which folded in 1947). The Bulletin itself succumbed in 1982. (When it closed, the paper held a week-long sale of items; I picked up their newsroom dictionary, the Webster’s Second International, glued to a bright blue stand, along with a surprisingly comfortable wooden rolly desk chair.)

Today’s daily strips I still download. Lots of fun, but lacking the tactical fondness of the printed page. But I’m not aiming at a rampage through all the newspaper comics of yesterday. This is a paean to Will Eisner’s The Spirit, the visual anchor of my pre-teen years.

 The Spirit came out in a unique format for a newspaper “strip,” an eight-page tabloid (half-news-page) Sunday supplement folded into the comics section, in full color, a complete story each week. In our Philly suburban area, it ran in the Bulletin. It had started nationally in 1940, along with two backup features, later dropped, as an attempt by a small newspaper syndicate to insert a “comic book” into Sunday newspapers.

I still recall details of Spirit episodes I read in 1946, when I was seven; they included a talking cockroach, a talking bull, a gun that fired spontaneously, and similar beautifully realized absurdities. Several I’ve read again in reprints over the years, and though my memories have had to be mildly adjusted, I’m amazed how true those plot-lines stayed in my head.

The Spirit himself was the quintessential noir hero of that quintessentially noir decade (though I hadn’t see many movies and knew nothing of noir film as a wee kid). He shlepped through the rain and filth and trash of Central City, a maybe five-percent-fictionalized New York that contained more atmosphere than all of Mars. Equal parts detective and vigilante with an impregnable moral code, he was tough and resilient as a cheap steak, fallible but extraordinarily lucky; he hobbled through several episodes on crutches after his legs had been shot to sponge by a machine gun.

He wore a blue-black snap-brim hat, blue-black suit (with blue-black tie!) and a dinky blue-black eye-mask which somehow made it impossible for anyone – other than Police Commissioner Dolan and his daughter Ellen, The Spirit’s true love – to recognize him as Denny Colt.

Colt had somehow been mistakenly buried while in a coma. Once awake and revitalized, he made his headquarters as The Spirit in a hollowed-out complex under his own grave in Wildwood Cemetery: Despite being underground, and despite The Spirit’s cling to a secret identity, this “hideaway” boasted a massive, mullioned oval window looking out on the Central City skyline.

This sort of offbeat, mis-aligned humor – sometimes overt, often inherent – kept The Spirit from becoming a self-referential ego trip. A similar example: The Octopus, The Spirit’s never-identified nemesis, was a master of unending disguises; in one episode, The Spirit pulls mask after mask from the arch-criminal’s head as he sinks into quicksand, but never reaches his true visage. Yet The Octopus always – always – wore purple gloves with three vertical yellowish stripes – his skin showing through? No one in the strip ever knew who they were dealing with – but the reader always recognized The Octopus, sending another chuckle up our sleeves.

Most of the early reprints of The Spirit, from the ‘70s, were in black and white, which lost this kind of tinted subtlety – and a lot more, since Eisner was a master of color. Also, nearly all the reprints I’ve run across over time leave off the separate gag that ran about an inch high across the bottom of every internal page: a tiny, spark-plug guy with a hat down over his eyes who never spoke but dealt with life’s niggling annoyances – like a buzzing fly – by chasing them with a cleaver or blowing them up with dynamite.

Eisner’s magnificent title pages rang every conceivable change on the words “The Spirit,” not just skewing their typeface or outline, but transforming them into crumbling facades, collapsing piers, billboards, smoke, fire and siren calls. As a kid, I’d sometimes stare at the cover for five minutes before turning the page.

In one interview, Eisner talks about his love of O. Henry and de Maupassant, and of wanting to write short stories in comic-strip form. He succeeded by introducing a wild collection of minor characters into The Spirit, some of whom became irregular regulars, while others coursed through like shooting stars before (more often than not) dying unheralded. One of his own favorite episodes (and mine) tells the tale of Gerhardt Schnobble, a nobody who discovers that he can fly. In this tale, The Spirit appears only tangentially, unintentionally causing the death of Gerhardt as he swoops from the top of a skyscraper.

Occasionally, The Spirit’s young graveyard sidekicks take over the story: brash, sentimental Sammy and minstrel-faced Ebony. Alas, poor Ebony would never be let out to play nowadays; ya gotta lock up those apparent stereotypes – though neither Ebony or anyone else in The Spirit was a stereotype.

Each Spirit episode was an experiment, with a raging intensity flaring behind even the most laidback plots. Eisner reminds me of my all-time favorite short story author, the Englishman A.E. Coppard, who wrote in nearly every style known to man – which is probably why he’s not developed a consistent following. Look up his “Adam and Eve and Pinch Me.” There are no new stories, say all writers and critics, only new tellings. No. “Adam and Eve and Pinch Me” was a new story, one that both amazes and confuses me with every rereading.

While Eisner was in the army, 1942-45, The Spirit was “ghosted” by his studio crew, with a quality far below the postwar years. Eisner dropped it altogether in 1952 to go deeper into work he’d developed while serving in World War II: creating comics as teaching tools for military maintenance training. Most of all, I think, he felt he’d wrung The Spirit dry.

Over the years, Eisner may have been the most influential artist who ever drew a “comics” panel. Wally Wood, Jack Kirby and, most unlikely, Jules Feiffer – perhaps his leading assistant – came out of the his ‘40s studio. (Feiffer, despite his awards and to me puzzling reputation, is credited with the screenplay for Popeye, Robert Altman’s wretched flop with its almost inexcusable misuse of Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl.) Most recent comics masters list Eisner as a prime influence – a hard-working, detail-oriented artist and visionary rolled into one. 

In the ’70s and later, Eisner jump-started graphic novels, starting with A Contract with God. (Another time.)

About the time The Spirit folded, my non-budding teen self was dropping my allowance dime each month on Walt Disney’s Comics: Monthly comic books then cost a dime and ran to 52 pages without internal advertising, one of the few real values of living in the ’50s. These fat magazinelets introduced me, unknowingly, to the second master shaper of my comics obsession, Carl Barks.

Barks was unknown to any reader of the time, because all stories produced by the Disney studio were credited to Walt, his signature slapped on every title page. That has pissed me off for the half century since I learned Barks name. Yet I have to admit it was the case throughout the comic-book industry until recent years, and – as noted above – Eisner’s name appeared as author of The Spirit during his war years, though he had no hand, so far as I can determine, on story or drawing at the time. 

I suppose that absorption of credit is much like Andy Warhol’s “factory,” or Jeff Koons’ paintings, completed in paint-by-number fashion by his assistants. And further back, nearly all Renaissance and Baroque artists had studios that produced  “school of…” works, like the recently debated “Salvator Mundi” of… Leonardo?? Yikes, stop that right now! Look at those hands, compare them with Leonardo’s St. John! And in the best-seller world of today, we have a half gross of James Patterson books written by god knows who.

Grumble.

To get back on track, Barks started with the Disney studio in 1935 on Donald Duck animated cartoons, left Disney in ’42, but soon began Donald comic books for Western Publishing’s Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories (which peaked at 3 million readers in the mid ’50s). The WD’s Comics usually opened with a 10-page Donald and family story, followed by shorter bits, and closed with an episode of some running adventure starring Mikey Mouse.

Barks authored only the Donald Duck stories, and the difference was stark. Mickey was pleasant enough but a pale shadow following Donald, his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie – and, TA DA! Uncle Scrooge.

Though few today outside the industry recognize the names of Eisner or The Spirit, I doubt there is even a handful who are not familiar with Scrooge McDuck and his three cubic acres of money.*

Scrooge was Barks’ invention, along with Donald’s absurdly lucky cousin Gladstone Gander; crazed inventor Gyro Gearloose, and the bumbling, dedicated crooks the Beagle Boys. Scrooge first appearing in December 1947, getting his own quarterly comic in 1951. Compare Barks’ elaborate, whimsical plots, explosions of color and wide-ranging personalities with the minimalist line and repetitious situations in Peanuts, the adulation of which has always mystified me. (During the ’50s, the only strip that could equal Barks’ Scrooge was Walt Kelly’s Pogo.)

After Barks’ identity was uncovered in 1960, he continued to produce Duck stories until his “retirement” in 1966, then sporadically into the ’70s. Disney later allowed him to create and sell oil paintings of the ducks taken from old covers. A hefty limited-edition paperback of Uncle Scrooge, His Life and Times was produced by Celestial Arts in 1981, then a trade edition in ’87. Since then, complete collections of his work have been produced, usually at prices that make my toes curl.

Carl Barks died in 2000, age 99.

I’ve read nothing that indicates that Eisner and Barks ever met, but there’s one delightful connection: In 1987, Barks was one of the three inaugural inductees into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame.

by Derek Davis

* In my widely unread novel, Gifts of a Dead Man, a house owned by a squat figure who just might be the last of the Beagle Boy sports a sign in the front yard reading “CARL BARKS FOR EVERYBODY.” The owner has no dog.