Here’s a great story from PW Comics Week by Sam Thielman! (I just wish it referenced the biography I wrote, Will Eisner: A Spirited Life, but you can’t have everything!)
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 full-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.
