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an appraisal of the character as Eisner could muster, a straight-on summation explaining his reasons for Ebony’s continuing adventures with the Spirit. Whenever confronted with the Ebony issue in interviews—and there were many such occasions—Eisner would insist, first and foremost, that he felt no regrets for creating Ebony, that Ebony had been brought into The Spirit as a means of infusing humor into the stories. Ebony was a creation of his times, much the way Shylock—himself in a play its writer called a comedy—was the product of Shakespeare’s times, Li’l Abner was a reflection of Al Capp’s times, or Rochester was used as a foil in the classic Jack Benny comedy skits. No malice had been intended. Humor, Eisner insisted, often depended on the stereotypes and clichés of the day, and stereotypes, in and of themselves, were not necessarily harmful. To Eisner, it all boiled down to intent: if caricatures were drawn for evil purposes, such as Nazi propagandists’ caricatures of the stereotypical hook-nosed, dark, curly-haired European Jews, there was no doubting the artist’s intentions to injure. Ebony, Eisner submitted, was entirely different. He was the featured character in any number of Spirit stories; his actions were always positive, even heroic. In his early appearances in The Spirit, Ebony had been an older man, but Eisner fine-tuned the character over the years, first by making him younger in an effort to bolster the humor and then by giving him more to do.

“When the feature began in 1940, Ebony was perhaps more viable and valid than he is today,” Eisner conceded to an interviewer, adding, “I would imagine that Shakespeare would have one hell of a time defending Shylock in The Merchant of Venice to today’s socially conscious people. It doesn’t make an author any less culpable for what he does, but it does indicate how difficult it is for an author to divorce himself from current norms, especially if he’s being entertaining.”

According to Eisner, his perceptions began to change during World War II, when he witnessed troop segregation, and his views continued to change over the following two decades, when national consciousness turned to the civil rights movement. By then, the Spirit and Ebony had been retired and Eisner had moved on. The reprints kindled new disputes. Not only did Eisner have to address the criticism, he was also saddled with a position that younger readers, steeped in the conflicts of the 1960s, weren’t inclined to accept. Nor did it matter that as The Spirit evolved, Eisner had introduced other African-American characters more in step with the times.

One of Eisner’s most common defenses focused on two letters he had received at about the same time, one from an old DeWitt Clinton classmate who accused him of abandoning his youthful, liberal ideals, the other from an African-American newspaperman from Baltimore who praised him for his compassionate treatment of Ebony. Such was the nature of the conflict.

The debate would continue for decades, first with the Spirit and Ebony and later when Eisner published Fagin the Jew, his graphic novel addressing stereotypes and anti-Semitism in Charles Dickens’s classic novel Oliver Twist. Eisner labored, sometimes awkwardly, to explain his position, but he was never able to fully resolve the issue.

The Eisner-Kitchen Spirit reprint deal was short-lived. The first Underground Spirit sold out, proving that there was still a market for the Spirit stories. Kitchen went back to press to produce another batch of the first Underground Spirit while Eisner prepared a second issue. Eisner was pleased with the results of the first issue, and he might have stayed with Kitchen indefinitely had he not received a phone call from a bigger publisher with a better offer.

It might have been expected. Eisner’s reappearance in the comics world after such a long hiatus was big news.

At Marvel, Stan Lee, always on the lookout for emerging trends, heard about the sales figures for Underground Spirit #1. He loved the idea of having Will Eisner in the Marvel stable, but he wasn’t interested