Word: spirit
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...Village Voice and other papers. But Feiffer knew the superhero comics so well because he loves them as a kid and he wanted to be an artist; he studied these strips from the wrist up. In his late teens he assisted Will Eisner in drawing The Spirit. Here's his evocative iconography of the comics hero...
...thinkers." In the biz from his teens (everybody started young in comics), Eisner wanted to break out of the newspaper-illustration straitjacket, saying, "A daily strip to me is like trying to conduct an orchestra in a telephone booth." So at 23, on June 2, 1940, he introduced The Spirit, which ran as a separate comic book in the Sunday papers - an eight-page symphony, if you will. Not a graphic novel, yet, but a graphic short story...
...hero was another strong man with a secret identity: in this case, Denny Colt, a detective who was believed killed and resurrected himself as the do-gooder Spirit. With Superman and Batman and their caped cronies running altruistically amok through urban mean streets, Eisner was encouraged to make his protagonist a bit more like them; only reluctantly did he slap a mask on the Spirit to establish his kinship to the superheroes. New York (Metropolis, Gotham) was here called Central City, though later the Spirit traveled abroad. Sometimes he nearly disappeared from his own strip, making only a perfunctory appearance...
...peruse the strip in sequence - as you can in the handsome collection called The Spirit Archives, now up to its 22nd volume - is to see Eisner shift within genres and tones. One week's story might be a melodrama, the next a comedy, the third a parable. But beyond the variety of stories was a striking visual consistency: the tone was bold, dark and mature - a grownup vision, compared to the adolescent world-view of the standard superhero strip. To quote Feiffer: "Will Eisner was an early master of the German expressionist approach in comic books - the Fritz Lang school...
Beah's book, A Long Way Gone (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 229 pages), which comes out this month, is a breathtaking and unself-pitying account of how a gentle spirit survives a childhood from which all the innocence has suddenly been sucked out. It's a truly riveting memoir. But just as crucial to its success is its arrival at what might be called a cultural sweet spot for the African child soldier. The kid-at-arms has become a pop-cultural trope of late. He's in novels, movies, magazines and on TV, flaunting his Uzi like a giant foam...