Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [100]
Denis Kitchen, delighted to be publishing Will Eisner in any capacity, was fine with this arrangement. He was already publishing Robert Crumb and, through such publications as Bijou and Bizarre Sex, the work of Harvey Kurtzman, Art Spiegelman, Bill Griffith, and a host of other popular artists. Adding Will Eisner to the roster meant more diversity in content and style. No one in the business could boast of a cast of characters as diverse as Angelfood McSpade, Zippy the Pinhead, and the Spirit.
Eisner was having the time of his life. After more than twenty years of working in other sequential art adventures, producing to order for the army and corporate clients, he had returned to his first love, and he couldn’t hide the pleasure he was getting from it. “This is fun—after all these years!” he wrote Kitchen.
Selecting Spirit installments for the Kitchen Sink books presented a problem. Eisner had piles of old Spirit comics, from original artwork to published Sunday supplements to photostats, but none it was cataloged. Worse yet, only a handful of pre–World War II Spirit original artwork was still in existence. Zinc had been a precious commodity during the war years, rationed out as parsimoniously as the paper upon which comics were printed, and Busy Arnold had protected his zinc plates by stacking them carefully with a sheet of original art sandwiched between each plate. When Eisner returned from Washington, D.C., after the war and tried to get his artwork returned, he learned that almost all his original art had been destroyed. He’d saved the Sunday supplements of his early work, but much of that wasn’t in the best condition—certainly not good enough for Denis Kitchen to reproduce for the new magazine.
The approach to selecting Spirit reprints was scattershot, based entirely on originals most readily available and which of those Eisner preferred to publish. In addition, Kitchen Sink was in no position to reprint The Spirit in color—not that Eisner looked askance at this turn of events. If offered the choice, he would have preferred to see The Spirit published in black and white all along. He could never rely on printers to get his colors right, plus he felt that black and white added a cinematic film noir element to The Spirit.
“The Spirit seemed to look better to me in black and white than it did in color,” he said, adding that even though fans and collectors preferred color, the black-and-white Spirits helped preserve the accent on story. “The Spirit was originally designed for color, but I found myself liking the work better in black and white. It seemed to have more of a mood and expression, everything I wanted to convey.”
As soon as he’d signed on with Kitchen Sink, Eisner busied himself with major projects: designing a cover for the forthcoming Kitchen Sink comic book Snarf #3, choosing the entries for Spirit #1 (informally marketed as the Underground Spirit), and coming up with the magazine’s cover. The covers would place the Spirit in sexier, more violent settings, enough to prompt Kitchen to note on the covers that the contents of these comics were “adults only.” The caveat, of course, all but guaranteed head shop browsing.
The Snarf cover, appearing in early 1973, combined the type of cover work seen on previous Spirit magazines with the more mature artwork common in the undergrounds. The Spirit is shown breaking through the door of a seedy, waterlogged basement comix studio, where long-haired artists are preparing an underground book. A thoroughly disgusted Commissioner Dolan follows the Spirit through the doorway, snarling, “I’m gonna arrest them, Spirit,” to which the world-weary detective responds, “For what, Dolan?” The cover served as Eisner’s commentary on his entrance into the undergrounds.
It also acted as a preemptive strike against the proponents of a new run on comic book censorship. The popularity of the undergrounds had stirred up talk of new regulations and obscenity