The Spirit Archives, Vol. 12 marks Will Eisner’s return to the strip. To be fair, the writer and artist had returned for the last two entries in the previous volume, but this is the first book entirely composed of Eisner’s post-war Spirit stories. While I don’t think Eisner had quite found his groove yet – the best was still yet to come – it’s amazing how dynamic the comic feels after reading the non-Eisner material. It’s easy enough to point to the Eisner-esque tropes and tricks, the techniques and the plot devices and the philosophy that faded from the strip in has absence, but there’s also something much less tangible here. There’s certain energy, a je ne sais que, that had been absent for the previous couple of years, returning in force.
Eisner is back. And, in a way, so is The Spirit.
It’s like he was never gone…
Filed under: Comics | Tagged: American Vampire, Eisner, history, holocaust, Mike Richardson, Post-war, Scott Snyder, Spirit, The Spirit: Femmes Fatale, Twentieth Century, United States, Wars and Conflicts, Will Eisner, World War I, world war ii | Leave a comment »
