For followers of Will Eisner's The Spirit, it's a bittersweet time: 1952 all over again. After eight years, DC Comics has completed a mammoth-scale archival project that none of Eisner's other publishers had even attempted: they've reprinted—in color restored to Eisner's specifications—the entire 12-year run of the character's groundbreaking newspaper-strip adventures, from the Spirit's first appearance on June 2, 1940 to the ladykiller detective's final bow on October 5, 1952.
The Spirit Archives just wrapped up, with the extra-long (nearly 300 pages) vol. 24, priced at $59.99 ($10 more than the previous volumes). Even though Eisner wasn't drawing every strip himself by '52, he was making careful decisions about who would fill in for him, and the final volume includes long-out-of-print work written by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer and illustrated by the late Wally Wood.
There are two more volumes to come from DC, both at the new price point: First, in September, the publisher will release the definitive reprinting of Eisner's daily Spirit strip (vol. 25).
Tentatively scheduled for December, Vol. 26 will be an anthology of Eisner's post-1952 work with the character, including rarities like the fuv-page strip he drew in 1966 for the International Herald-Tribune, in which his heroic character gets political, expressing support for then New York Mayor John V. Lindsay.
There's a final book to come in the series, too - and not from DC. But more on that later.
The completed archives are an impressive accomplishment—until now, the most thorough reprinting was done by Eisner's friend and agent Denis Kitchen, who founded and ran the much smaller publisher Kitchen Sink Press.
"My relationship with Will started when I met him in 1971," recalls Kitchen. "We were kind of an unlikely team, but we hit it off. I was a full-blown hippie at that point with long scraggly hair, bellbottoms—the works. And Will was a businessman with a suit and a vest and very little hair. Will liked to say that we both smoked pipes, just with very different substances.
"But we both had a love for comics."
Kitchen convinced Eisner that he could successfully sell The Spirit to "my crowd" - something about which Eisner was skeptical. Kitchen proved him wrong—after a couple of false starts, Kitchen Sink got The Spirit reprint series off the ground and ultimately had a good run with the property—87 traditional comics-format black-and-white reprints in the longest of several Spirit series. Kitchen and Eisner even launched a new Spirit series, with new covers by Eisner, for which the two solicited original stories from popular creators like Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore. But in 1999, after 30 years, Kitchen Sink went bankrupt.
Eisner had always tried to find mainstream distribution for his work, but he needed to get there without compromising the stories. He worked with Jim Warren's Warren Comics on The Spirit for a few years in the 70's, but broke off relations with the company after a too many 70's colors appeared on his 40's creation.
So in 2000, Eisner brought his library of material to DC (which was most interested in his celebrated graphic novels like A Contract With God and A Life Force), where, nearly 60 years after the Spirit's conception, the publisher became the first to cross the reprint finish line.
Part of the reason that DC succeeded is that, of all the companies that have had a crack at the property, DC is the only one that already had a mechanism in place for reprinting classic comics. The Archives series (to which The Spirit Archives belongs) has been around since it first published The Superman Archives, vol. 1 in 1989, and by the time Eisner brought the Spirit to them in 2000, DC had been around the block with properties ranging in cultural penetration from Enemy Ace to Batman.
"I'd like to think that there are a couple of things we gain in trade for being so big and moving more slowly," chuckles DC publisher and president Paul Levitz. "We have greater efficiency in distribution and in manufacturing than some of the smaller publishers."
But back to that mysterious final volume: Eisner brokered an odd deal when he sold The Spirit. DC would reprint the first 26 volumes of The Spirit, but, in order to keep his word to Dark Horse's Mike Richardson, that publisher would retain material from Kitchen Sink's The Spirit: The New Adventures for a 27th.
So next year, after DC publishes the catch-all vol. 26, Dark Horse will publish, with the same trade dress, all the short stories from The New Adventures by people like Moore, Gaiman, Dave Gibbons, Kurt Busiek, and Paul Pope.
It might have been an unorthodox decision for DC, but it’s turned out to be a good one. For one thing, the collector's market was starved for the reprints: the first volume sold in excess of 10,000 copies—a lot for an expensive book about a character with a comparatively low profile. Sales dipped on reprints of the war years, when Eisner was enlisted and other artists drew the strip, and saw a subsequent bump when he returned.
For another, Frank Miller's film adaptation of the strip is slated for a Christmas release, and DC can expect to see an uptick in sales on books like the upcoming "best of" collection The Spirit: Femmes Fatales, due out in October. They, too have tried a new version of the character with Darwyn Cooke (and later, creators like Sergio Aragones and Mike Ploog), but rather than retain the short story format (as Kitchen did), DC has introduced the character into the company's superhero universe, launching it with a Batman crossover.
If that sounds like a startling leap for a character so carefully curated by its creator, it makes more sense when explained by Eisner estate CEO Carl Gropper. Gropper recalls that, in 2005, DC had fewer bookstores in their distribution channel than a regular bookseller, and Eisner had always wanted to get the attention of a mainstream, adult audience with his work. Bluntly, he wanted to be judged alongside prose novels. That's when Eisner got the call from WW Norton—they wanted to publish new editions of his now-sizable library of graphic novels, but were less interested in The Spirit.
For Eisner, ever the wise businessman, the decision was obvious: in order to clear the rights to his graphic novels, he gave DC the rights to publish new episodes of The Spirit, which he felt he had outgrown, and he took books like A Life Force and Invisible People to Norton, where they are today. The decision fulfilled Eisner's decades-old ambition to see his work taken seriously by a mainstream publisher, and it left DC with Eisner's best and most accurate biography: a 12-year, 27-volume bildungsroman about his maturing skills as a writer, artist, and editor.
