Number 490


Shanghaied Spirit


Until he was drafted into World War II, Will Eisner directed both the Sunday Spirit Comic Book Section and daily comic strip for newspapers. After he went into the service other artists, including Jack Cole, had a hand in, and the writing was handled by others. This sequence from the Spirit dailies, from March 30 to May 16, 1942, is by Eisner.

The story is classic Spirit: a great villain, the Blot*, a Popeye-ish henchman named Blind Bat, shanghaied men forced to work for the Axis, the Spirit fighting a pet shark named Max...I've scanned the sequence from Volume One of The Daily Spirit, published by Real Free Press of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 1975. I picked up four volumes of the set in the mid-'70s, and don't know how many were distributed in the U.S. At the time Warren was publishing the Sunday Spirit sections (as with many such reprintings, out of sequence), and as an adjunct to those I really enjoyed seeing the daily strip version.


Warren had the advantage of using Eisner's files, whereas the Real Free Press strips look to be second and third generation, but they're fairly clear and readable. The six-week long span of the continuity gives it some room to breathe that was sometimes lacking in Eisner's strict 7-page Sundays.

The cartoony-looking Spirit at the bottom of the logo on each page is based on Eisner's design, but was drawn by Dutch cartoonist Joost Swarte.

*Yes, comic trivia fans, Mickey Mouse had a villain called the Blot, later the Phantom Blot.

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From Mexico, El Spirit #19, July 1977. I posted another story from this issue here.