Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [101]
The first Underground Spirit presented four Spirit reprints (including stories featuring the popular P’Gell and Octopus villains), a full-color wraparound cover, several new one-page entries, and an introductory essay by Maurice Horn, all for a fifty-cent cover price. More than a quarter century separated the original appearance of the stories and the Kitchen Sink reprints, and the times and readers couldn’t have been more different. When the stories in the Kitchen Sink edition had first appeared in the Sunday supplements, World War II had ended, America felt optimistic about the future, babies were booming, and Levittownesque subdivisions were sprouting up in suburbs across America. The country was in a dramatically different mood now. The war in Vietnam was still dragging on, and the sour winds of Watergate, following on the heels of the sixties, found America mired in pessimism. Readers of the Underground Spirit books would be an entirely different breed from those who’d picked up the old Sunday comic book newspaper inserts the first time around.
Ebony, the Spirit’s African-American sidekick, was the ultimate symbol of the changes Eisner had to address. When Ebony, with his minstrel show character traits, backwoods English, and sense of servitude in his relationship with the Spirit, made his first appearance in a Spirit story, the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision was a decade away and the civil rights movement two decades in the future. This characterization wasn’t going to go unnoticed in the wake of the violence accompanying the civil rights movement, the Black Power manifestos, the fair housing and busing confrontations, more than a decade of hotly contested legislation, Cassius Clay changing his name to Muhammad Ali, and a controversial new show called All in the Family, in which a couple of white characters regularly sparred over racial bigotry. A character like Ebony White was fodder for debate—and it wasn’t always polite. Some critics went so far as to hint that Eisner himself was racist. Eisner reacted defensively or angrily, depending upon his mood. Knowing that a sizable percentage of his current readership might take exception to his depiction of Ebony, Eisner confronted the issue in the first Underground Spirit in a one-page short, in which Ebony is interviewed by a young black reporter who looks as if he just stepped off the set of Shaft. Although heavy-handed, the dialogue cuts to the point in five panels:
Reporter: Ebony White, I’m here to interview you on behalf of Spirit fans and collectors of your old adventures with the Spirit. Er, some of my questions may be quite blunt …
Ebony: No sweat … ask anything!
Reporter: It is hard for many of us to understand why you have accepted the role of a sort of “Man Friday” … a form of Uncle Tomism larded with a kind of humble servility the whites have always expected as due them from blacks in those days!! What I mean is … how can you have found pride in a secondary role … in an era of rising black identity that was emerging during those years!?
The Spirit: (entering the room) Hey, Ebony! Did you have any success tailing that pusher this morning? Dolan is howling for evidence!
Ebony: (pointing to trussed-up criminal on floor next to him) Well, Spirit … I took about 15 photos of this rat makin’ a big buy … Then I took 9 shots of him selling the stuff in a schoolyard!! Then he spotted me! So I hadda ack fast … He chased me up an alley … I rolled a trash can at him … He tripped, knocked hisself out on a fire escape ladder, then I jes’ dragged him in … You can book him with all the evidence!
The Spirit: Great!
Ebony: (turning back to the reporter) Sorry, now would you mind repeating that question?
The dialogue was as honest