Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [155]
Another project, requiring far less attention, involved Eisner’s return to his most famous character in a series of new Spirit adventures. Denis Kitchen had always favored such a project, but Eisner, fearing that it would turn The Spirit into a “mausoleum” piece, resisted creating, or allowing others to create, new stories. Kitchen persisted, arguing that Spirit fans would want to know what had happened to the Spirit after all these years, and when they finally came to an agreement, Eisner did the worst possible thing: he turned in an insipid story entitled “The Spirit: The Last Hero,” a piece guaranteed to disappoint the character’s most loyal readers. Kitchen had no choice but to reject it.
Kitchen wasn’t finished, though. The comic book industry was staggering through an economic downturn in the mid-1990s, and Kitchen Sink Press, never a corporate giant like DC or Marvel, was in trouble. Kitchen and his staff tried to keep the company afloat through innovative merchandising and reprints of classic comics, but with the exception of their tie-in with the immensely popular film The Crow, sales figures lagged far behind expectations. New Spirit stories, Kitchen reasoned, could only help prop up his business. If Eisner, now totally focused on his graphic novels, wasn’t up to producing new stories, maybe others could. It would be a way of showcasing the talents of the top comic creators of the day while simultaneously paying tribute to the artist who had influenced them.
When Eisner finally relented, it was under two conditions: He would not be responsible for creating or editing the new material; and he had to approve all material that others produced, “to be sure that they would not warp or defame, or otherwise alter the basic concept of The Spirit’s character.” He wasn’t about to allow other artists, regardless of their talent, to kill or marry off the Spirit, turn him into a tormented street character hooked on drugs or alcohol, or otherwise tarnish the standard set half a century earlier.
“It was a little like putting your child up for adoption,” Eisner said of his allowing others to create stories for his character. He was relieved when the new stories in The Spirit: The New Adventures were assigned to some of the best writers and artists in the comics business, including Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, and Dave Sim. “I was astounded at what some of them were doing with him,” he admitted. “Clearly, I would never have done stories the way these guys did. Guys like Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman are very much in touch with today’s reader, and they were talking to them in that vein. I had no sense of violation or concern; they just saw The Spirit from their perspectives.”
He was especially pleased by the focus on story. Moore (Watchmen), Gaiman (The Sandman), and Sim (Cerebus) were master craftsmen known for elevating the level of storytelling in their work, and they clearly had an understanding of Eisner’s character before they began their work on The New Adventures. This was evident in the series’ first issue, when Moore wrote and Dave Gibbons illustrated three Spirit origin stories, including a retelling of Eisner’s own account of how The Spirit came to be: there was a familiarity to the work, but it was obviously not Eisner’s. The same was true of Neil Gaiman’s entry, illustrated by Eddie Campbell, an account of a frustrated screenwriter who suddenly finds himself caught up in a Spirit story.
“I did not try writing a Spirit story,” Gaiman explained. “I tried writing a story about the Spirit, which is rather different. What I felt was fun was just sort of going, ‘Okay, what would happen in somebody’s life if he keeps bumping into a Spirit story?’”
Gaiman had to be talked into writing the story. When Denis Kitchen called and