{"id":2472,"date":"2015-03-03T16:06:00","date_gmt":"2015-03-04T00:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.comic-con.org\/toucan\/?p=2472"},"modified":"2024-01-08T16:14:55","modified_gmt":"2024-01-09T00:14:55","slug":"maggies-world-027-thats-the-spirit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comic-con.org\/toucan\/maggies-world-027-thats-the-spirit\/","title":{"rendered":"Maggie\u2019s World 027: That\u2019s The Spirit!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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MAGGIE’S WORLD BY MAGGIE THOMPSON<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maggie\u2019s World 027: That\u2019s The Spirit!<\/h1>\n\n\n
Maggie Thompson<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\u201cIt\u2019s very hard to trace back to the first influence I had as a cartoonist,\u201d Jules Feiffer wrote in the March 1961 issue of\u00a0Playboy<\/em>, \u201cbut I think the most important in the early years\u2014for me and a number of other cartoonists\u2014was a guy named\u00a0Will Eisner,<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0who did a strip called\u00a0The Spirit<\/em>. I dare say Harvey Kurtzman would not have come up with\u00a0Mad<\/em>\u00a0magazine if Eisner hadn\u2019t preceded with\u00a0The Spirit<\/em>. The way my thinking developed, and where it finally went, in the beginning, was very largely because of Eisner.\u201d Don and I quoted his comment in the first issue of our\u00a0Comic Art<\/em>\u00a0(spring 1961).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our second issue (published in early autumn that year), others responded to the quote. Artist Steve Stiles wrote in response to receipt of that first issue, \u201cThanks for Comic Art<\/em>, I\u2019m glad to see something like this spring up\u2014I\u2019ve always wanted to have EC and The Spirit,<\/em> my two favorites, crowed over. And please, please<\/em> discuss them\u2014they\u2019re really worth going \u2018Rah, rah, rah!\u2019 about.\u201d And \u201cFeiffer was quite right in saying that without Eisner there would be no Mad<\/em>. Even without the normal sense of humor which prevailed in The Spirit<\/em>, Will always indulged in lampooning things, imitating magazines, inserting photos, running fake ads. Eisner also heavily influenced the serious<\/em> EC line.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In response, Don wrote, \u201cI plan to discuss Spirit<\/em> and EC and agree that both should be raved over. For comments on Eisner\u2019s influence on Mad<\/em>, see the next letter.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which was from then-Help!<\/em> (and earlier Mad<\/em>) creator and editor Harvey Kurtzman:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cComment on Feiffer\u2019s statement: There would have been just as much of a Mad<\/em> without Eisner as there would have been [Feiffer\u2019s cartoon collection] Sick Sick Sick<\/em> without my Hey Look<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think Jules\u2019 statement was well intentioned but neurotic. But Jules is O.K.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIncidentally, I\u2019m getting some Spirit<\/em>s to run in the upcoming Help!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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By the late 1940s, the creative team on\u00a0The Spirit<\/em>\u00a0was producing a string of tales packed with comedic satire. \u00a9 2015 Will Eisner Studios, Inc.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Back in the Day<\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

In those early days of comics fan and pro interchanges, there were two varieties of Eisner fans: readers who had seen his ground-breaking Spirit<\/em> sections as they were being published, and readers who heard about them later and were trying to find more. After all, week after week, the syndicated newspaper inserts had told stand-alone stories\u2014beginning, middle, and end\u2014in just seven pages. And many of those stories demonstrated with incredible variety the creator\u2019s yen to do more and more with the art form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Will was not just an incredible creative force on his own, but also someone who studied the job to do it better and who learned from his studies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1965, Feiffer\u2019s The Great Comic Book Heroes<\/em> concluded his pioneering collection of essays and stories with a 1941 Spirit<\/em> adventure. He had concluded his earlier text chapter on Will with the comment, \u201cI collected Eisners and studied them fastidiously. And I wasn\u2019t the only one. Alone among comic book men, Eisner was a cartoonist other cartoonists swiped from.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His book ignited a fervor of collecting and appreciation that eventually produced too many articles to count\u2014and a vast variety of books with Eisner and his work as the focus. In terms of reprints based on the Register and Tribune Syndicate\u2019s 645 inserted \u201cSpirit<\/em> section\u201d comic books destined for participating newspapers from June 2, 1940 to October 10, 1952, some of the longest-running came from:<\/p>\n\n\n\n