Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [37]
But Denny Colt, Eisner had to admit, was missing something. There was nothing unusual about him. As things stood, he was just another detective, which might have been great for the types of stories Eisner wanted to tell, but he also failed to distinguish himself from the pulp or comic characters of the past—characters that had made their run and disappeared. Eisner, unaccustomed to having to strain to come up with usable ideas, was stumped.
Busy Arnold’s calls to Eisner became increasingly concerned, but he didn’t offer any sage suggestions, either, until he called Eisner in the wee hours of one morning after a night in a bar.
“He suggested a kind of ghost or some kind of metaphysical character,” Eisner recalled. “He said, ‘How about a thing called The Ghost?’ and I said, ‘Naw, that’s not any good,’ and he said, ‘Well then call it The Spirit; there’s nothing like that around.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know what you mean,’ and he said, ‘Well, you can figure that out—I just like the words, ‘The Spirit.’”
Then, during another late night call, he inquired about the character’s costume. Eisner had been avoiding the topic whenever he discussed the feature with Arnold, but now he felt trapped into an answer. Fortunately, he was sitting at his drawing board when Arnold called, and he improvised while they talked.
“He’s got a mask,” he told Arnold, drawing a mask on the character’s face.
“That’s good.” Was there anything else?
“He’s got gloves and a blue suit.”
Eisner hated the idea even as he mentioned it to Busy Arnold. He didn’t want to create a character like Batman or Superman—a superhero with a secret identity—because the dual identities would shift the focus from story back to character. The Spirit’s dual lives would need to be explained. On top of that, there were bound to be credibility problems if the Spirit was seen only in his mask, as Eisner favored. “When you draw a character walking down the subway wearing a mask and a blue suit, and he’s being ignored or accepted by the people in the subway—that’s a little far-fetched.”
In the end, the Spirit’s origins, as Eisner presented them in his first installment, were more than a little far-fetched. Denny Colt, a detective friend of Police Commissioner Eustace Dolan, is seriously injured while battling Dr. Cobra, a demented scientist who’s designed a secret formula that he intends to use to poison New York’s water supply. During a struggle in Dr. Cobra’s lair, Colt is doused with the formula, which leaves him in a state of suspended animation. Everyone, including the coroner, mistakes him for dead. He’s interred in a vault in the Wildwood Cemetery on the outskirts of town. On the night after his burial, he awakens and somehow manages to dig himself out of his grave. He builds a secret underground hideout beneath his burial vault, devises his disguise, and pays Dolan a visit at the police station. Dolan sees through the disguise—for some reason, he’s the only person capable of doing so—and Colt tells him that as the Spirit, he will be able to work outside the law in his efforts to fight the bad guys.
The mysterious and unlikely origins, the mask, the very public crime fighter walking down the streets of New York, night and day, always in costume, unnoticed—all demanded a suspension of belief that worked against Eisner’s goal of writing for adults, who would have demanded something plausible. But somehow, despite his worries, he got away with it.
“It’s an interesting point to make about the medium,” he allowed. “Had this been done in film, there would have been hooting and hollering from the audience. There would be laughter. But through all the years, no one ever called me on it. No one ever wrote me a letter saying, ‘You expect me to believe this guy would do this wearing a mask?’”
Readers, Eisner learned, were not unlike audiences at a magic show: they would overlook sleight of hand if the trick was good enough. Readers were willing to suspend belief if they cared enough about the characters and the stories were strong. After a slow start, in which characters and