Greg Goldstein's Comic Art Gallery

Tag: Will Eisner

Will Conrad — A Spirited Tribute

Original Art and The Artists

Spirit Commission, Tribute to Will Eisner, 2003

Celebrating “Will Eisner Week” and the 85th anniversary of The Spirit, with a repost of an early blog (2020). I finally framed this gorgeous piece a few weeks ago — and it’s even more stunning.

The very talented (and underrated) Brazilian artist Will Conrad is a self-professed Will Eisner geek. When he heard that Eisner would be attending a local convention, he labored over an over-sized Spirit piece to show Will, who was flattered and supportive.

Will held on to the piece for some time and tweaked it a bit to the point where he considered it “finished.” He knew how much I loved it, and after some unusual patience on my part, he ultimately let it go. (Thanks, Will!) 

“Sometimes Eisner used an empty street as part of the story. When he drew fog, the page was damp.

And the rain, always the rain, dripping off everything including the Spirit logo. He lingered over environments until you could almost smell the cheap hotel rooms, taste the tension, or feel on your flesh the chilly pall of a rain swept street.”

— Jim Steranko, History of The Comics, Volume 2

Raining on his parade — Eisner’s Spirit page from 1996 and Darwyn Cooke’s cover from 2009.

Darwin Cooke — Getting In The Spirit

Original Art and The Artists

Batman / The Spirit #1, January 2007

Batman /The Spirit Cover #1 Original Art by Darwin Cooke from the collection of Greg Goldstein.

Darwyn Cooke welcomes The Spirit into the DC Universe with this outstanding cover featuring Will Eisner’s legendary creation, facing off against… well another pretty well-known comic book legend.

Cooke’s take on The Spirit is one of my favorites, and this entire double issue, with inks by J Bone and colors by Dave Stewart is simply wonderful. It definitely deserved its Eisner award (so appropriate) for best single issue of 2007. 

This cover is the only Spirit art that Darwyn penciled and inked himself, since this issue, and the subsequent ongoing, was inked on separate blue-line by Bone.

Fun fact: The cover was solicited for sale in its original version, and then ultimately flipped for actual publication. Makes sense, since the title is Batman/The Spirit, not the other way around.

Happy Will Eisner Week!

Chip Kidd & Dave Bullock — You Can’t Kill The Spirit (Part One)

Original Art and The Artists

“Bombshell, ” Spirt Vol. 2, #18 (Unpublished) DC Comics, December 2011

The first week of March is “Will Eisner Week,” an annual event celebrating the life and works of one of the fathers of graphic storytelling.

And that means… it’s time for our own contribution to Will Eisner Week as well.

This year, we feature a terrific unpublished Spirit story by Chip Kidd and Dave Bullock featuring Bombshell. Unpublished… because DC cancelled its First Wave version of The Spirit before the story saw the light of day. (And shortly thereafter, the Spirit moved to Dynamite.) 

Great storytelling along with beautiful wash tones by Bullock make this an especially unfortunate casualty of commercial considerations.

Part one of this great story appears today, part two on Thursday, and the conclusion on Saturday.

As for the dialogue? 

Let your imagination soar.

I see a possible theme here — Bullock contributed this great Deadman story to DC’s Wednesday Comics in 2009.

Darwyn Cooke — Pulp Friction

Original Art and The Artists

Rocketeer Spirit #1 and #2, (Cover Preliminary Art) July/August 2013

Continuing our celebration of “Will Eisner Week,” with other creators’ takes on the beloved and influential character, The Spirit.

As noted last year, the late Darwyn Cooke was likely the closest modern creator to fully realize Will Eisner’s legacy.  Darwyn was an astonishing storyteller, designer illustrator, letterer and more. (Among dozens of awards and nominations, he also received an Emmy nomination for his work on the 2008 animated film Justice League: New Frontier.)

DC launched its ongoing Cooke Spirit series with a Batman / Sprit crossover, and this Spirit / Rocketeer crossover (covers only) brings some closure to that brief run.

The covers are designed to form one single unit, and a limited variant wraparound cover might exist, although I can’t find it in my collection — or on-line. ( I can’t recall if we ended up printing it or not.)

As for these prelims? They are oversize on real art board… and they are spectacular.

“I can remember it was one of those days when I was thirteen, and I was in a comic store, and there was nothing that I wanted to get. On the wall was a copy of Warren’s Spirit magazine. I think it’s number three, where he is running down the elevated track straight at you, and the train is behind him. It’s just one of the most exciting images I have ever seen…”

-Darwyn Cooke interview From Will Eisner: A Spirited Life by Bob Andelman

Will Eisner — Cheering The Bronx

Original Art and The Artists

Dropsie Avenue, June 1995

Dropsie Avenue is the third (and final) graphic novel in the Contract With God Trilogy.

As noted previously All Contract With God did was change the face of comic book storytelling and popularize the concept, and phrase, “graphic novel.”

Eisner’s career remains fascinating. He had all but given up on comic book work after he discontinued the Spirit in 1952, but the growth of comics’ fandom convinced him to return in the 70s. He did indeed revisit The Spirit, but more importantly, he realized his personal literary aspiration of creating something completely unique and personal with COG, its sequels, and other graphic novels he produced until his death in 2005.

Dropsie Avenue (1995) tells the evolution of a fictional street and its residents in New York’s Bronx Borough — spanning more than 100 years, beginning about 1870 One of the many reasons I enjoy this page is that it features a street pole with the name of the street, and hence the title of the graphic novel.

Eisner owned outright nearly all the comic book material he created in his lifetime. He had great foresight to retain his intellectual property, and remain a true independent until his passing.

Welcome to Will Eisner week, 2021.

Will Eisner — Second Act

Original Art and The Artists

Will Eisner’s Quarterly #2, Spring 1984 and A Life Force, 1988

We continue with our month long celebration of the “Independents” — Independent creators and projects that continue to impact the comic book medium.

A Life Force is the second graphic novel in the Contract With God Trilogy.

Contract with God? All that did was change the face of comic book storytelling and popularize the concept, and phrase, “graphic novel.”

Autobiographical and journalistic. Sometimes harsh, sometimes uplifting. Mature, and in places, unflinching. Eisner described his narrative, an “exercise in personal agony,” a way of dealing with the death of his daughter Alice (from Leukemia) years earlier.

Eisner’s career is fascinating. He had all but given up on comic book work after he discontinued the Spirit in 1952, but the growth of comics’ fandom convinced him to return in the 70s. He did indeed revisit The Spirit, but more importantly, he realized his personal literary aspiration of creating something completely unique and personal with COG, its sequels, and other graphic novels he produced until his death in 2005.

A Life Force was first serialized in Will Eisner’s Quarterly starting in 1984. The innovative storytelling and artistic detail on this page (i.e the classic line cross-hatching) makes it a keeper.

Eisner owned outright nearly all the comic book material he created in his lifetime. He had great foresight to retain his intellectual property, and remain a true independent until his passing.

Tim Bradstreet — Hard Boiled

Original Art and The Artists

The Spirit New Adventures #6, 1998

Continuing our celebration of the 80th anniversary of The Spirit, with additional creators’ takes on the beloved and influential character.

Tim Bradstreet — with Eisner’s blessing — redraws some of the Spirit’s backstory in Will’s style for the cover of  The Spirit New Adventures #6.

The foreground? Bradstreet reimagines The Spirit a bit more hardboiled, a bit darker, less whimsical version of the character. And he sports possibly the greatest comic book trench coat ever.

(As you can see from the original vs. published cover, The Kitchen Sink trade design cropped much of the background.)

The complete collection of the New Adventures, which includes contributions by Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and others is available from Dark Horse Comics.

On June 2, 1940, Denny Colt made his debut… and promptly died.

Eisner introduced his detective with jaunty body language, lots of attitude and over-confidence, and a close relationship with Police Commissioner Dolan (and that was all in the first half dozen panels.) The cartoonist already knew his character well. Colt went off to capture the villainous Dr. Cobra and was found dead, drowned in a flood of toxic chemicals. After his funeral, Colt woke from suspended animation, dug himself out and assumed a new role as the Spirit, haunting Wildwood cemetery and keeping his city safe with Dolan’s connivance.

— Paul Levitz, summarizing the Spirit’s origin in his book, Will Eisner: Champion of the Graphic Novel

The classic film noir trench-coated detective: Alan Ladd with Veronica Lake in This Gun For Hire; Robert Mitchum (with Jane Greer) in Out of The Past; and Humphrey Bogart — in pretty much everything. (Ladd would have made an excellent Spirit back in the day.)

John Paul Leon — Spirit In The Sky

Original Art and The Artists

Spirit #16, September 2011

Continuing our celebration of the 80th anniversary of The Spirit, with additional creators’ takes on the beloved and influential character.

David Hine (Spider-Man Noir) authors a clever tale where pretty much every page is a splash — with the Spirit title included as part of the art. John Paul Leon hits the concept out of the park successfully homaging Will Eisner’s original brilliant splash pages with innovations of his own.

On this page, the final one of the story, Leon perhaps finds inspiration for the logo from 1946 — from the classic tale, “The Man Who Killed The Spirit” AKA “The Last Trolley.”

Fun fact: This issue — and this entire series — was edited by the ultra-talented Joey Cavalieri, a pal of mine for nearly 50 years. Joey and I first met as kids hunting down comics in the candy stores, newsstands and luncheonettes of the lovely seaside town of Long Beach, New York.

Variations on a theme: The original 1946 Spirit strip with the blowing letters — and two later (and slightly different) reprint versions.