The Spirit Archives, Vol. 10

January through June, 1945. The second World War is drawing to a close. Will Eisner is still tinkering away as a warrant officer in Washington, using the medium of comics to teach preventative maintenance. In New York, Eisner's creation, the vigilante detective posing as a criminal warlord, the Spirit, is still being published by talents such as Jack Cole. And yet, Eisner's creation just isn't the same without him.

Under Will Eisner, the characters had emotion. The layouts were brilliant experiments in lettering and design. The plots were simultaneously action-packed and funny. The art evoked empathy, passion and horror. Above all, an air of whimsy filled the corner of every page until it oozed off the paper. 

Without Will Eisner, the Spirit has become a soulless crime book. Instead of being imitated by the rest of the industry, the series has become just another in an endless sea of crime comics that seek to push countless envelopes. 

There are essentially 2 sections of this book. About the first 9 or 10 stories are trash. The artwork is flat but acceptable. The plots are complicated to the point of being unintelligible. The dialogue is like someone took a bunch of Sam Spade and James Cagney scripts and threw them in a blender: cliche without substance.

Then some miraculous changes around that 11th or 12th story. The art begins to pop. The colors are brighter. The story lines are now creative and the dialogue is much more polished. It lacks the charm Will Eisner brought to the characters. None of the writers that contributed to the Spirit at this time seem to be able to get Commissioner Dolan's relationship with the hero right. But it's better than the drivel that filled the first 80 pages of this book. 

I want to own the whole 26-volume Spirit archive. (There's actually 27 books in the set. But I think I own all the material that fills that final book and might not need to possess it.) Anyways, I buy (and read) these out of order. I purchase that which is affordable, not chronological order, based on many of these being out of print. Knowing now that Eisner is absent from the books containing the war years, If I am faced with two volumes of about the same price range that is favorable to my wallet and one is set during World War II and the other is not, I'll take the latter... for now.

A fair read. I wish I knew who wrote those later stories in this volume so I could give proper kudos. The difference between the halves of this volume really are as different as night and day.

Rating: 6 out of 10 stars.