The Spirit In The Sky!

Will Eisner's The Spirit is renowned as arguably the most sophisticated comic of its time, the heady Golden Age of comics. Eisner was one of the most important pioneers in the development of the comic book though The Spirit was primarily a comic drawn for newspaper distribution. The Spirit was always a group effort, with Eisner leading the team. But when he was tasked to join the military during WWII, the group was made up of talented but not particularly inspired men. When Eisner returned after the war The Spirit hit new heights, but eventually sales dimmed and Eisner grew somewhat eager for new things to do. So he sought out new talents to take over. Wally Wood had worked for Eisner early on in his career but in 1952 when Eisner sought him out to take the helm of a somewhat transformed Spirit, Wood was in the early days of his first mature period.

Wood and others, notably Jules Feiffer on writing took The Spirit into space, a region Wood had made famous on many an EC comic book cover and elsewhere. Wood brought that special panache to the pages of the The Spirit as Denny Colt was given the thankless job of riding herd on a handful of prison inmates seeking early release by taking part in the exceedingly dangerous mission to land on the Earth's Moon.

How they get there and what happens when they do is related in The Outer Space Spirit, a classic collection from Kitchen Sink. We see how the strip begins to change, we see Wood at his best and then we see the strip once again begin to grope as deadlines are missed and subscribers demonstrate displeasure. They bought cops and robbers with a hint of O'Henry, not space jockeys tumbling beyond Earth's fragile atmosphere. The strip was winding down and Wood was gone long before the last pages were drawn, but it was for the briefest of moments a delightful fusion of a great character and some of the greatest talents.

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