This is my fifth tribute post for comic legend Will Eisner´s THE SPIRIT. As longtime readers may remember my first homage to Will Eisner was also my very post in what I believed to be a very sporadic black and white series.
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Ultimately it became the default post setting and what better way is there to kick off an endeavor like that than with an artist´s artist ?
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Since I have already done fourof these posts making another one should be a piece of cake since there is still enough material left from the last post. But as always things are never that easy. I have already mentioned it in the last post but since Will Eisner´s THE SPIRIT comic was published in newspapers, magazines and comic books finding the corresponding color pages for the original art can really be a Sisyphean task because unlike the later american comic books you don´t have a consecutive numbering. And in some cases there are no color versions for the black and white artwork.
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Which is why when I found a gallery with a plethora of original THE SPIRIT covers on COMIC VINE I just had to go through them all ( sadly not all of the covers are of good enough quality to post ) which not only delayed the writing of this post but also made me reshuffle the art in this post.
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As I went along preparing this post I also found so much good original art that the pieces I wanted to post became more and more. So that I have decided to make four Will Eisner posts this year. I know that sounds like a lot but I am trying to stick to my Only 23 pieces of art in the main post part rule. Which will make one of the posts a lot shorter than the others.
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My reasoning for doing multiple posts is that as longtime readers know I am always struggling to keep things short it almost never works out that way. And even if I manage to keep the main part short and sweet the bonus section with its cult sirens always is my undoing. Because I try to give my faithful readers that little something something extra in my posts.
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Anyways, doing more than one Will Eisner post also helps me with that particular problem since I can split up the celebrity birthdays I missed since my last post among various posts thus making the individual posts shorter. My idea going in here is writing this post and see how many posts I need to wrap up with Will Eisner´s THE SPIRIT ( and there might be even a solo post about his work outside of that series ) and wait if any topic in the bonus section can be spun off into another halfway decent spotlight.
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I already had to split this year´s Tylene Buck appreciation post in two because I could not put all of the new stuff I wanted to include into it.
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As I said, I don´t know how many Will Eisner posts I will make this year so let´s get started. This post will be your normal run of the mill BLACK AND WHITE post as it includes the best original art I could find. I also like to keep material from the same story in one post which is why I am including two complete stories, Darling and the Octopus from SPIRIT WEEKLY 3 18 from 1951 and The Fortune first published in THE SPIRIT SECTION on May the 11th of 1947. For the first story I could not find any color art, for the second one I found the first page in color at the COMIC VINE gallery.
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Now I always like to give my readers the best original art which means that I usually don´t include pictures of a certain size because you can´t really see much of the artwork. But in Will Eisner´s case there are some pages that show his incredible craftsmanship - not only of storytelling but in graphic art in general - that I have decided to keep a lot of pages that I would have normally thrown out. There are none in this post but they may appear on the blog in the future. I have also included some pages that I posted before where I did not have the colored version the first time.
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And with that we wrap up our first spotlight on Will Eisner´s THE SPIRIT and our next installment will be about one of my favorite subjects - which I sadly had to ignore for the most part of this post - the femme fatales of THE SPIRIT. Nobody does bad girls as good as Will Eisner which is why his work has inspired so many other comic women like Frank Miller´s Elektra.
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more stuff
Ultimately it became the default post setting and what better way is there to kick off an endeavor like that than with an artist´s artist ?
Since I have already done fourof these posts making another one should be a piece of cake since there is still enough material left from the last post. But as always things are never that easy. I have already mentioned it in the last post but since Will Eisner´s THE SPIRIT comic was published in newspapers, magazines and comic books finding the corresponding color pages for the original art can really be a Sisyphean task because unlike the later american comic books you don´t have a consecutive numbering. And in some cases there are no color versions for the black and white artwork.
Which is why when I found a gallery with a plethora of original THE SPIRIT covers on COMIC VINE I just had to go through them all ( sadly not all of the covers are of good enough quality to post ) which not only delayed the writing of this post but also made me reshuffle the art in this post.
As I went along preparing this post I also found so much good original art that the pieces I wanted to post became more and more. So that I have decided to make four Will Eisner posts this year. I know that sounds like a lot but I am trying to stick to my Only 23 pieces of art in the main post part rule. Which will make one of the posts a lot shorter than the others.
My reasoning for doing multiple posts is that as longtime readers know I am always struggling to keep things short it almost never works out that way. And even if I manage to keep the main part short and sweet the bonus section with its cult sirens always is my undoing. Because I try to give my faithful readers that little something something extra in my posts.
Anyways, doing more than one Will Eisner post also helps me with that particular problem since I can split up the celebrity birthdays I missed since my last post among various posts thus making the individual posts shorter. My idea going in here is writing this post and see how many posts I need to wrap up with Will Eisner´s THE SPIRIT ( and there might be even a solo post about his work outside of that series ) and wait if any topic in the bonus section can be spun off into another halfway decent spotlight.
I already had to split this year´s Tylene Buck appreciation post in two because I could not put all of the new stuff I wanted to include into it.
As I said, I don´t know how many Will Eisner posts I will make this year so let´s get started. This post will be your normal run of the mill BLACK AND WHITE post as it includes the best original art I could find. I also like to keep material from the same story in one post which is why I am including two complete stories, Darling and the Octopus from SPIRIT WEEKLY 3 18 from 1951 and The Fortune first published in THE SPIRIT SECTION on May the 11th of 1947. For the first story I could not find any color art, for the second one I found the first page in color at the COMIC VINE gallery.
Now I always like to give my readers the best original art which means that I usually don´t include pictures of a certain size because you can´t really see much of the artwork. But in Will Eisner´s case there are some pages that show his incredible craftsmanship - not only of storytelling but in graphic art in general - that I have decided to keep a lot of pages that I would have normally thrown out. There are none in this post but they may appear on the blog in the future. I have also included some pages that I posted before where I did not have the colored version the first time.
And with that we wrap up our first spotlight on Will Eisner´s THE SPIRIT and our next installment will be about one of my favorite subjects - which I sadly had to ignore for the most part of this post - the femme fatales of THE SPIRIT. Nobody does bad girls as good as Will Eisner which is why his work has inspired so many other comic women like Frank Miller´s Elektra.
more stuff