THE SPIRIT Volume 3

Many of these stories are from the mid-1940s, when Will Eisner was in the service. He recruited the talents of Lou Fine, Jack Cole and others to join his studio and draw the Spirit adventures each week, which were then collected in Quality’s The Spirit Comics, the source for these stories. 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. Eisner returned to draw several covers here. By the time the stories were being collected, these were all new work. The Spirit is a fictional 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." Publisher Note: Comic book stories from the 1940s and 1950s may depict some ethnic and racial prejudices that were once commonplace in American culture. While not representing the publisher's view of today's society, these stories are printed as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.