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that he has the ability to fly—if he believes he can. His parents, through scolding and beatings, discourage him from ever showing the ability to others, and he literally blots it out of his mind. He proceeds through a terminally ordinary life as a figure on the fringes of failure, an invisible nerd barely scraping by, whose greatest achievement is a promotion to night watchman at a bank. The bank is burglarized and Shnobble is fired, reinforcing his feelings of isolation and uselessness. Thoroughly defeated, he walks the streets of New York until, through the wall of his depression, he remembers his unique ability. Determined to prove to the world that he is indeed special, he takes an elevator to the rooftop of a skyscraper, from which he proposes to drop and then soar over the people on the street below. Instead, he becomes the ultimate person at the wrong place at the wrong time: the bank robbers have been trapped on the roof of the same building, and the Spirit, called to the scene to apprehend them, winds up battling them just as Shnobble steps off the building and begins his flight. Shnobble is hit by stray gunfire, and rather than wow the crowd with his ability to fly, he falls to earth, another victim of senseless crime. In the story’s concluding panel, a narrator drives home Eisner’s point: “Do not weep for Shnobble … Rather shed a tear for all mankind … For not one person in the entire crowd that watched his body being carted away … knew or even suspected that on this day Gerhard Shnobble had flown.”

For all its fantastic drama, this Everyman’s fable was deeply personal for Eisner, traipsing back to the tenements of the Bronx, to Sam Eisner’s need (and failure) to prove his own artistic talent, to Will Eisner’s discouragement and eventual faith in his ability, to his inextricable obsession with struggle and with spiritual and physical triumph. The ghosts of the past hovered over this tale and informed it in subtle but important ways.

To add realism to his sequential art, Eisner inserted actual photographs of New York’s cityscape as backgrounds in two of the panels—a bold, experimental move that had engravers screaming and Eisner’s readers applauding. Once again, solving a problem had led to a memorable innovation.

The final page of “The Story of Gerhard Shnobble,” Eisner’s favorite Spirit story. (© Will Eisner Studios, Inc., courtesy of Denis Kitchen)

“I had been wanting to do something like that for a long time,” he said. “I wanted action against a real landscape, and this was a splendid opportunity for it because I needed city buildings. I simply got the photos from a file somewhere and put a screen on them, and just inserted them in the story.”

Eisner was especially pleased that he’d been able to tell the story with only minimal involvement of the Spirit. This was the type of story that had enthralled him as a boy, when he’d steal away and read pulp magazines on the sly or study the short stories of O. Henry, Ring Lardner, or Ambrose Bierce and marvel at how much could be said, in such an entertaining way, in so little space. The Spirit’s appearance in the story was only to satisfy the Sunday comics readers. “You didn’t need The Spirit there,” Eisner said of his presence in “Gerhard Shnobble.” “It could have been somebody else.”

Eisner could make light of the idea of his reducing his main character’s role to that of a walk-on in “Gerhard Shnobble” and other Spirit stories.

“I guess I could be classified as having created the world’s first useless hero.”

Never content to settle in with a single feature in the late forties, Eisner began to look for other comics options to explore. He was creatively restless, ready to pounce on the next idea. The Spirit had its own boundaries and audience, which was fine on a week-to-week basis; the fast pace of producing new episodes satisfied both the feature’s readers and its artists’ creative drives. But it wasn’t enough. Eisner stayed busy developing new projects and pitching ideas, most not advancing beyond the preliminaries of an idea and some rough pencils. Eisner