Word: spirited
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Will Eisner, The Spirit's creator, was one of the best of the comic book artists of the '30's and '40's. He wrote his own strips, and drew them in a violent graphic style related to the German expressionist approach to moviemaking practiced by Fritz Lang, G. W. Pabst, and F. W. Murnau. Eisner's strip was filled with horrifying close-ups, weird shadows, and strange angles. Jules Feiffer claims that The Spirit's world looked "more real than the world of other comic book men because it looked that much more like a movie...
...premiss of The Spirit is pleasently aboard. The hero is (quoting Eisner) "really Denny Cok, a young criminologist presumed dead by the public but who continues to assist sosociety behind the maskk of The Spirit. That he operates out of Wildwood Cemetery where he is supposed to be buried, is known only to commissioner Dolan, and his daughter Ellen...
Although Eisner's plotting and characterization (he specialized in lush villainesses) made The Spirit an early comic book excursion into Terry and the Pirates-type-exoticism, The Spirit himself was a genial, middle-class fellow in a baggy blue suit and a Lone Ranger mask: hardly one of your invincible superheroes. Perhaps the magnetic appeal of Denny Colt resulted from Eisner's combination of a wholesome American hero and a sinister world of shadowy evil. In any case, Eisner and his Spirit were a tremendous influence on comic strip artists of the next generation...
...current version of The Spirit isn't Eisner's; the stories are new, although no efforts have been made to make the characters or the situations up-to-date. They are drawn by three or four artists, among them Wallace Wood and Jack Davis...
...current Spirit says true to its model. The drawing emphasizes the detail of light, shadow, and angular point-of-view that distinguished the dramatic visualization of sound effects: one superb panel shows a progression of muddy footprints on concrete, the words "click" and "clack" written in tiny lettering next to each foot puddle. With the possible exception of Leonard Starr's newspaper strip On Stage, The Spirit is comic strip art at its most inventive...