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.

Rip Off

Not So Famous Publisher Of Filmland!

James Warren is one of the most important people in the history of comic books, who as it turned out never published a comic book. Rather he published magazines, larger more up-scale items which in dynamic black and white presented a somewhat more sophisticated attitude about the graphic storytelling beneath sometimes admittedly pretty garish covers. He didn't start out wanting to be Stan Lee, though he did come to regard Marvel's maven as his primary competition.

James Warren wanted to be Hugh Hefner, the prophet of sexual emancipation who in many ways defined the pop culture of the 50's,60's and 70's. To that end his first publication was a Playboy-like magazine called After Hours. There were a lot of publishers who wanted to be Hugh Hefner though and the newsstands were stuffed with magazines featuring naked and semi-naked dames to quicken the libidos of America far and wide. So After Hours did not last and left Warren casting about for another way to make hay as the sun glimmered on the robust publishing business set to meet the needs and desires of the burgeoning baby boomers. One thing they seemed to like was monsters.

So Warren collaborated with a science fiction fan with a penchant for horror named Forry J Ackerman to create Famous Monsters of Filmland, a magazine that became the bible for the up and coming "Monsterkids" who gobbled up every morsel about monsters, both classic and new. The first cover for FMoF above shows James Warren under a Frankenstein mask alongside a buxom dame, giving off signals to both the Playboys and the "Monsterkids" at the same time. It seemed to work because the success of this presumed one-shot triggered the Warren Publishing empire. Here are some of the magazines of that "empire". 

Warren Publishing seemed in some ways like a small outfit, and in many ways it was. A limited staff but able to reach out to some of the best talent in the industry, both domestically and overseas. Warren wanted to be Hugh Hefner, but to this fanboy that would've been a waste. We already had Hugh Hefner, what we needed was James Warren. 

Rip Off

Wraith To The Finish!

The Wraith is Michael T. Gilbert's 70's reinvention of the classic Eisner The Spirit. According to Gilbert he was casting about for work in those halcyon days when comics seemed to about to expel the last gasp just any minute and found work with Mike Friedrich's little Star*Reach outfit. Specifically in a short-lived comic dubbed Quack which hoped to reap some of the glamour stirred up by the out-of-nowhere ascendancy of Marvel's Howard the Duck. Suddenly the superhero was displaced and funny animals were on...if only briefly. 

Looking for inspiration, Gilbert was a fan of The Spirit and thought a funny animal version might just work. He produced seven stories featuring The Wraith, one each for the six issues of Quack and another for his later comic Strange Brew published by Aardvark-Vanaheim. And as far as I know that's all of the Wraith there is.

The Wraith begin as a slight homage to the classic Eisner hero and little else, saving a lady of the evening from her employers. Other stories have him battling mad scientists and even falling in love on an isolated island. The stories are in continuity, so despite their frolicsome nature what happens is remembered. That adds quite a bit to stories which by design are often quite slender, the whole perhaps greater than the sum of the parts. The one cover appearance for "The Reality Ray" really shows how offbeat and creative Gilbert was in trying to make the stories click.

The tome I read featured very detailed text pages by Gilbert about how The Wraith came to be and how his misadventures often reflected Gilbert's own personal life at the time. We also get a nifty explanation of some of the techniques Gilbert used. We are seeing an artist grow in real time with these stories and this background info helps to make sense of the style and thematic changes.

But Gilbert seemed all too ready to leave The Wraith, suggesting he'd done all he could do and it was time for other projects (such as his most famous creation Mr.Monster --more tomorrow on that). I doubt he thinks that still today and I wonder if and when we'll ever see another Wraith tale. I'd be interested.

Rip Off