THE SPIRIT

In the last years of his life, Will Eisner, having emerged from the relative obscurity of historic icon to the eminence of living legend, authorized new adventures for his famed creation, the Spirit. Eisner had been pestered from some years — since his re-emergence in the late 1970s — to revive the character in new stories, but, except for a few short pieces he did for Denis Kitchen, Eisner successfully resisted. His interest lay elsewhere — in the graphic novel as a literary form and in New York’s tenement life as subject — and I think he realized that his Spirit was a character that belonged where he’d been created, in the 1940s. Our national morality was simpler then — cleaner, starkly contrasting black and white choices — and against those well-defined absolutes of yesterday, the grays of his Spirit stories played with dramatic, and sometimes comedic, intensity. But the forces for revival finally prevailed: Eisner said he wouldn’t do any new Spirit stories himself, but he said he’d have no objection to other creators conjuring up new tales. And so they did.

Alas, the essential Spirit, the creation we so fondly remember and quietly worship at the altar of, still eluded a confident and convincing grasp by any of this generation of dedicated votaries. But Mike Ploog in a brace of issues of the DC reincarnation, Nos. 31 and 32 of The Spirit, came close.

Ploog once worked in the Eisner shop during the period Eisner was producing educational comics and the military safety magazine, P.S., and he drew in a style that echoed Eisner’s almost exactly. Ploog’d got the job with Eisner because he had military experience as well as artistic ability: he was an ex-Marine, and at Leatherneck, the Corps’ magazine, he’d learned to draw by aping Eisner. Here, I thought, was a candidate with promise. And so it proved.

Writing for his own pictures, Ploog lays out a three-stranded narrative involving an ancient Irish artifact with magical properties, an Irish elf, a clutch of homeless bums on the waterfront, a gang of hoodlums posing as a dock workers union, a Marine general blinded by his dedication to all things military, and a band of rough-looking Arabs led by a femme fatale of the best Eisner San Serif P’Gell sort — Adios, a beret-wearing blonde beauty with a  plunging neckline and bare midriff, who packs a pair of very large pistols and who seems not at all smitten by the Spirit’s macho manners. Typical Eisner. As are numerous elements of comedy that enliven the proceedings throughout (the Marine general being one of the most blatant).

In the final pages of the book, Ploog’s three strands interlock in a grand crescendo of a finale in which each of the threads achieves a satisfactory individual conclusion. The artifact is recovered, the elf goes back to Ireland, captives are released or rescued, the Marine general doesn’t get to attack the island in the city’s bay with atomic weapons, and the waterfront riffraff get a reward.

In the ingenuity of his devices and the interlocking of a three-stranded tale, Ploog ably mimics the Master, and in slinging satirical barbs at mindless militarism and the equally mindless preoccupations of environmentalists, he goes the Master one better.

For a more detailed — well, longer — examination of how the Spirit has fared since taken on by another generation of cartooners, consult the usual place, R&R, Op. 248.