SwanShadow Thinks Out Loud

Last week on Comic Art Friday, we debuted the first of artist Darryl Banks’s four Bombshells! pinups featuring the women of The Spirit, Will Eisner’s groundbreaking comic series from the 1940s and ’50s.

Here’s the second of The Spirit’s Bombshells, Sylvia “Silk” Satin.

Before we get to Satin’s story, though, let’s talk a little about why Eisner is such an important figure in the history of comic art. So important, in fact, that the comics industry’s annual awards — as well as its Hall of Fame — are named for him.

Eisner brought a new aesthetic to comic art: the cinematic. He was one of the earliest artists — if not indeed the very first — to see the comic panel in the same way that a film director or cinematographer looks through the movie camera’s viewfinder. In The Spirit, Eisner created a visual language for comics that launched the medium into a brave new world of crazy angles, dramatic interplay of light and shadow, and powerful closeups. The Spirit’s universe bore a striking resemblance to frames clipped from a ’40s noir detective film.

Post-Spirit, Eisner pioneered another format that has become ubiquitous today — the graphic novel. His landmark 1978 work, A Contract with God, is widely recognized as the first published comic to be identified with that descriptive phrase (although it was not the first long-form comic).

Not content simply to create these innovations, late in his career Eisner took another giant step — he told the world how he did it. His books Comics and Sequential Art (1985) and Graphic Storytelling (1996), explained how comics work as both an art form and a narrative vehicle. These two texts are essential reads for those who want to create their own comics, and those who desire a more informed appreciation of the medium.

As for Silk Satin, she enters The Spirit’s storyline in the March 1941 tale, “Introducing Silk Satin.” She presents an imposing figure — a tall, statuesque woman who generally wears her black hair cropped short, and dresses in man-tailored suits as often as she wears evening gowns. A jewel thief when she first appears, Satin (the character is generally addressed by her surname) later changes her criminal ways. Over the next decade, she would spend time as a British secret agent, a United Nations operative, and eventually an insurance investigator. Sometimes she and The Spirit were friendly collaborators; on other occasions, they worked against one another.

The Silk Satin stories generated some of the most personal moments in The Spirit’s career. In a pair of 1946 stories (“Hildie and the Kid Gang” and “Hildie and Satin”), The Spirit would help reunite Satin with her lost-lost daughter, Hildie. There were frequent hints of possible romance between The Spirit and Satin, making her the “bad girl” counterpart to “good girl” Ellen Dolan.

Next week, we’ll look at the third of these Eisner-inspired Bombshells! drawings. I’ll talk then about how I came to discover Will Eisner’s work, and how The Spirit helped me mature as a connoisseur of comics. Drop back in seven for that conversation.

And that’s your Comic Art Friday.

The blonde on the bomb is Ellen Dolan. She’s the daughter of the police commissioner of Central City. One day, she’ll be the mayor of that dark and dangerous metropolis. And she’s sweet on a masked vigilante known only as The Spirit.

And therein lies a tale.

Ask any group of knowledgeable comics historians, “Who was the single most influential artist in mainstream comics?” and you’ll get one unanimous answer: Jack Kirby, co-creator of Captain America, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and the original X-Men, and sole auteur of the Fourth World cycle, among hundreds of others.

Ask the same historians, “Who was Number Two?” and the answer will be nearly as unanimous: Will Eisner.

Whereas Kirby’s creative genius ranged broadly over six decades in comics, Eisner is best known for a single creation: the long-running Sunday newspaper feature The Spirit. That’s not to say that Eisner didn’t create numerous other worthwhile projects — he certainly did; Eisner’s 1978 graphic novel A Contract with God rewrote critical thinking about comics as both literature and high art. But there’s no question that, from a pop culture perspective, The Spirit remains his most familiar brainchild.

Briefly, The Spirit revolves around the adventures of a young police detective named Denny Colt, who, after surviving a near-death encounter with some underworld types, permanently buries his former identity (literally; he takes up residence in a subterranean sanctuary hidden beneath his own tombstone) and assumes a new one — that of the masked crimefighter known only as The Spirit.

The business-suit-clad Spirit isn’t a superhero in the traditional sense. His only disguise is a domino mask; he possesses no superhuman ability (except perhaps for a remarkable knack for withstanding physical abuse); and he functions more like a consulting detective a la Sherlock Holmes than like, say, Batman. Sometimes, The Spirit serves merely as a background character in the stories in his own strip — stories which range far beyond swashbuckling derring-do to intimate, twisty, eccentric tales about the odd folks whose actions (sometimes nefarious, sometimes innocent) bring them into contact with The Spirit.

Over the course of The Spirit’s 13-year career, he encountered numerous beautiful, exotic women. In fact, most of the memorable characters in the strip — aside from The Spirit, and his police contact, irascible Commissioner Eustace P. Dolan — were female. Some appeared only for one story, and vanished as quickly as they had arrived. Four, however, recurred often enough to make a permanent mark on the series, and on The Spirit himself.

Soon after I conceived my Bombshells! theme — pinups in the style of World War II-era bomber nose art, featuring comic book heroines who debuted in the 1940s and ’50s — I hit on the idea of a special subset of Bombshells! dedicated to these four legendary women. I knew immediately the perfect artist for the project: Darryl Banks. Darryl’s most prominent contributions to comics history are his co-creation (with writer Ron Marz) of the Kyle Rayner version of Green Lantern, and his recasting (also with Marz) of the Hal Jordan version of Green Lantern as the cosmic supervillain Parallax, during an eight-year run as illustrator of the Green Lantern series.

My favorite of Darryl’s artistic efforts, though, was Millennium Comics’ 1990 miniseries Doc Savage: The Monarch of Armageddon, considered by many Doc Savage enthusiasts (including yours truly) as the most faithful comic book adaptation of the Man of Bronze. Even more specifically, I thought about a commissioned artwork Darryl drew for me a few years ago, depicting Doc and his intrepid cousin Patricia. Darryl’s take on Pat Savage had exactly the feel I wanted for my Spirit Bombshells! portraits. I was thrilled when Darryl agreed to tackle the project.

Ellen Dolan stars in the first of Darryl’s Spirit Bombshells! pinups. Ellen is the most consistent female presence in The Spirit’s life, and the closest to a genuine love interest in the strip. She’s a compelling character who evolves over the years, from her beginnings as an impetuous college student (and something of a stock damsel-in-distress) to a sharp-witted, capable, modern woman. As noted in our introduction, toward the end of the original series Ellen becomes mayor of Central City — not only her father’s daughter, but also his boss. And every inch The Spirit’s equal. Comics historians frequently cite Ellen as one of the earliest feminist characters in the medium.

Next Friday, we’ll look at the second of Eisner’s fetching females, and we’ll talk more about what makes The Spirit such a pivotal creation in the history of comics. Be here in seven.

And that’s your Comic Art Friday.

I get a kick out of dreaming up new combinations of heroes for my Common Elements commission theme. That little inward chuckle from uncovering a heretofore untapped linkage between two unrelated comics characters? Man, I love that.

Sometimes, though, my Common Elements combinations surprise even me, in that I stumble upon a second — or even a third — layer of connection bubbling just beneath the surface, sometimes long after a piece has entered my collection.

Take this one, for example.

I titled this drawing by Christopher Ivy (best known as an inker, but a fine pencil artist as well) “A Study in Scarlet,” not because it has anything to do with the Sherlock Holmes chronicle by that name, but because it features two heroes dressed in red: The Flash, and the Crimson Avenger. The common element between these two stalwarts couldn’t be more obvious or prosaic. But they make an interesting combination anyway, so I went with it.

I’d had Chris’s piece in my gallery for more than a year before another commonality struck me. There’s a long tradition in comics of legacy heroes — that is, instances where one superhero takes up the mantle (and often, the costume and code name) of another who went before. This pairing (however inadvertently) pays homage to this tradition.

The Flash might be comics’ best-known example of a legacy hero. The Flash shown here — real name, Barry Allen — wasn’t the first super-speedster to wear that name. The original Flash — real name, Jason “Jay” Garrick — made his debut in Flash Comics #1, in January 1940. Like most of the costumed do-gooders of the World War II era, the first Flash vanished from the newsstands not long after the war ended. In 1956, DC Comics revived the Flash’s code name and superpower to create a new hero. Enter the second Flash.

Barry Allen died in 1986, during the event known as the Crisis on Infinite Earths. Barry’s sidekick, a young man named Wally West who ran really fast and battled evil using the moniker Kid Flash, assumed the nom de guerre and jumpsuit of his mentor, becoming the third Flash. Twenty years later, Barry’s hyperquick grandson Bart Allen briefly took over the reins of Flash-hood. Now Barry is back, alive and in costume, having become his own legacy.

The history of the Crimson Avenger boasts fewer twists than that of The Flash. Still, as was the case with the various Scarlet Speedsters, there was one way back when, another more recently, and a third of modern vintage. The first Crimson Avenger, Lee Travis, arrived on the scene in October 1938, in Detective Comics #20. (Note that date; it’ll be important later on.) In creative terms, the Avenger was a direct swipe of the then-popular radio hero, the Green Hornet, simply with a change in color scheme. Both characters were newspaper publishers who dressed up in costumes featuring masks, fedoras, and gas guns, and each fought crime in the company of his respective one-named Asian valet (the Hornet had Kato, while the Avenger had Wing).

Nearly 20 years after the first Crimson Avenger vanished from the comics pages, another appeared. The career of the second Avenger, Albert Elwood, lasted a single 1963 issue of World’s Finest Comics. From that point, the Crimson Avenger identity would lie fallow until the cusp of the new millennium. In 2000, a young woman (whose real name may or may not be Jill Carlyle, depending on the source you consult) would pick up the title — as well as the original Avenger’s twin Colt .45s — to continue the war against wickedness.

So, we’ve seen two common elements between The Flash and the Crimson Avenger. But I’ve thought of one other, which may have even greater significance than either of the previous.

I mentioned before that the Crimson Avenger made his comic book debut in October 1938. That early appearance marks the Avenger as the first masked crimefighter in comics history, beating the more highly renowned Batman to the punch by more than half a year. (Superman, the template for all costumed heroes, arrived a few months before the Crimson Avenger, but the Man of Steel didn’t wear a mask.) The Crimson Avenger’s significance as the seminal masked mystery man continues in the lore of the DC Comics universe to this day — both of DC’s primary superhero teams, the Justice League of America and the Justice Society of America, invoke the memory of the original Crimson Avenger when inducting new members into their ranks.

What does that have to do with The Flash? Well, Barry Allen’s 1956 debut in Showcase #4 is generally recognized as the launch of comics’ Silver Age, the return of superheroes to marquee status in the medium following the post-World War II drought. (As hardcore aficionados know, only five costumed crimefighters survived in continuous publication from their Golden Age premieres into the modern day — Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and Green Arrow.)

Thus, these scarlet-clad stars share unique stature as landmarks in history: The Crimson Avenger marks the advent of the Golden Age of costumed heroes, while The Flash marks their Silver Age comeback. Those of us who treasure the superhero genre owe a great debt to these two gentlemen, and to their creators.

And that’s your Comic Art Friday.