THE SPIRIT Volume 1 Hardcover

Will Eisner helped to created many of the seminal heroes for Quality Comics, then left to create The Spirit for the newspapers — his masterpiece of story and art. So of course Quality began collecting the 8-page stories. Here they are as they first appeared in issues #1-4 of the very first Spirit comic books. The stories are presented in a wide variety of styles, from straight forward crime drama and noir to lighthearted adventure, from mystery and horror to comedy and love stories, often with hybrid elements that twisted genre and reader expectations. The Spirit was one of the very highest points of achievement during the Golden Age. Eisner began the strip, left during the war, and then returned to add creators such as Jules Feiffer and Jerry Grandenetti, who contributed so many of the very best stories. While in the service, the superlative Lou Fine became one of the ghost artists on the weekly stories. Jack Cole also became a contributor, but his work is harder to identify than Fine's. The stories here are NOT chronological with the first Spirit -- those stories began in Police Comics #12 and ran for the next 100 issues in that title. These take up with the wartime issues and are a mix of Eisner and Fine work -- and perhaps some Jack Cole too, I suspect, looking at these. Created by Eisner, The Spirit is a masked crime fighter who fights crime with the blessing of the city's Police Commissioner Dolan, an old friend. Despite the Spirit's origin as detective/criminologist Denny Colt, his real identity was rarely referred to after his first appearance, and for all intents and purposes he was simply "The Spirit." Quality Comics was an American comic book publishing company that operated from 1937 to 1956 and was largely influential in creating the Golden Age of comic books. From 1940-1950, printer Everett M. "Busy" Arnold reprinted Eisner's Spirit stories under his Quality Comics banner, first in the back pages of Police Comics, the home of Plastic Man, and next in his own title, the first of many iterations from many, many publishers to come. Quality was also the home of Blackhawk, Plastic Man, Dollman, the first Phantom Lady, Midnight, Kid Eternity, The Human Bomb, and many, many more fine heroes. Some have been revived by present owner DC in comics in the last few decades. And The Spirit, except for a short time in the 1950s, has never left the comics scene, continuously collected by a variety of publishers.