The Best of the Spirit

I had read a story or two of the Spirit when I was younger, and I remember being underwhelmed by it at the time. After reading Eisner's Contract With God, however, I decided to give the Spirit another shot, and I'm glad that I did.

Eisner is a very visual storyteller, and he displays a mastery over the panel in his art. He quite liberally brings in elements from children's books, classic art, and other sources; he shows a total mastery over the texture of the drawings he's creating, and controls blank space throughout the page like a conductor in front of a symphony.

Something else that I found absolutely fascinating about the stories is how willing Eisner was to have them not be about The Spirit himself. I mean, he's a fairly standard masked crime-fighter type, so there's not that much about him that would necessarily sustain a series over a long period of time; as a result, Eisner tells these little stories about people living in the inner city, who happen to interact with the Spirit in some minuscule way. I counted in one story; the Spirit was featured in only twelve panels over a ten page story. That provides a great deal of creative flexibility, and Eisner really took it and ran with it.

If you're a comics fan, this is something that you definitely should read. Even if you're not, it's still very readable and, like Gaiman's Sandman series, really opens up the possibility of what graphic fiction can be about.