Another reminder why they call it the Eisner

The Post-war Spirit stories have such beautiful, fully realized quality that it's easy to forget that comics was a very young medium, still in the process of being invented by its creators, particularly Eisner, the artist who, as Jules Feiffer put it, was the artist other artists stole from.

The story of P'Gell is justly remembered for the extraordinary sexuality of the titular character, but it also shows Eisner playing with visual storytelling, using the repeated motif of translucent curtains to suggest depth and build mood and enhance the sensuality of the piece.

Great stuff.

For a character with magical powers he wasn't very lucky

But he was very good.

Out of the seemingly endless crop of Mandrake impersonators who cropped up in the Golden Age, Mr. Mystic was one of the least successful, but he was possibly the best drawn of the bunch. Bob Powell achieved what might be his personal best on this back feature for the Spirit Section (quite an accomplishment given Powell's portfolio).

Will Eisner created the character and wrote the first run of stories including this memorable tale from 1940.

Eisner's effects

Jules Feiffer famously called Eisner the artist other artists stole from. I believe he was talking about the late Thirties and early Forties when Eisner was spewing out art and scripts and characters at an astounding rate and advancing the medium on an almost daily basis.

But as amazing as that work was, it still had a callow quality. The Spirit was, for me, the first fully mature, fully realized comic. There had certainly been entertaining, even great comics before but I don't think anyone before had used the medium to this extent before. Here's an example in a clever story involving an evil spymaster, a wind-up Spirit doll and two pairs of similar looking glasses

Here are the last two pages (I think you can piece together the plot up to this point). Pay close attention to the top of the final page.

Look at how the path of the bullet both connects the panels and conveys a distinct sense of time. Eisner came up with an entire library of methods for depicting the passage of time and, true to Feiffer's words, you can find artists stealing them to this day.