The Spirit and Will Eisner's Early Comics

Masterpieces Created Amid the 1930s & 1940s Superhero Boom

Oct 13, 2009

Will Eisner was at the center of the nascent comic book industry by his early twenties. After founding his own company, he created the revolutionary comic The Spirit.

Will Eisner was born on March 6, 1917, in New York City, the son of Jewish immigrants. Growing up in the tenements that would inspire his later works, Eisner was a voracious reader. His tastes ran from the writings of Horatio Alger and Guy de Maupassant to newspaper strips like George Herriman's Krazy Kat.

Will Eisner's Early Comics Career

Will Eisner attended DeWitt Clinton High School, where he was exposed to and experimented with a wide range of artistic media (Batman creator Bob Kane was a classmate). After graduating in the mid-1930s, Eisner worked in a newspaper advertising. He tried getting work as a magazine cartoonist before becoming a freelancer in the then-burgeoning world of comic books.

Eisner found success in the late 1930s, teaming with Samuel Maxwell "Jerry" Iger to form the Eisner and Iger Studio. Eisner and Iger quickly became a preeminent "packager" of comics, creating and syndicating comic books for pulp publishers in America and abroad. Will Eisner created a number of popular characters, such as Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, in rapid succession.

The Eisner and Iger Studio grew very quickly, hiring numerous young artists who would go on to great success in later years, such as Jack Kirby and Bob Kane. Early on, Eisner famously turned down Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster's Superman, feeling that their work wasn't yet professional enough for New York.

In late 1939, Will Eisner was approached by comics publisher Everett "Busy" Arnold to create a weekly, sixteen-page comic for Arnold's company, Quality Comics, for distribution in Sunday newspapers. Since the position would be full time, Eisner would have to sell his stake in Eisner and Iger, which he did for $20,000.

The fruit of this new venture was The Spirit, which debuted in 1940. Eisner conceived of a mysterious masked hero who is believed dead, at once parodying and capitalizing on the immensely popular superhero genre sparked by Siegel and Schuster's Superman.

Will Eisner was the sole creator, and shrewdly retained the rights to The Spirit – something almost unheard of in comics publishing at the time. However, Eisner soon had his own studio assisting him, and other artists ghosted the Spirit comics from 1943 to 1945, when Eisner was serving in the U.S. Army.

The Spirit stories, set in fictional Central City, had a decidedly noir flavor, but Eisner's writing also had a comic side, in the tradition of Ambrose Bierce and O. Henry. Often, the Spirit himself would be a minor character, with the tale focused instead on a whimsically-named oddball. Yet The Spirit pushed the boundaries of graphic storytelling so much that it would later be referred to as the Citizen Kane of comics.

Will Eisner's Comics Hiatus

While working on The Spirit, Will Eisner formed the American Visuals Corporation. Eisner phased into creating educational and commercial art for various corporations, such as RCA Records and New York Telephone, an extension of the projects he had done for the Army. This profitable work increasingly took up Eisner's time, and he stopped production of The Spirit in 1952.

For more than twenty years, Will Eisner dropped off the comic-book scene. It wouldn't be until the late 1970s that he would re-emerge, but that wouldn't stop Eisner's later career from revolutionizing comics as much as The Spirit and his early work had.

The copyright of the article The Spirit and Will Eisner's Early Comics in Graphic Novelists is owned by Luke Arnott. Permission to republish The Spirit and Will Eisner's Early Comics in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.