Number 2013: Spirit of the drawing board

Very often the Spirit made his entrance late in his own weekly comic feature. In this Spirit Section, dated Sunday, July 27, 1941, he doesn’t show up until page 4. The story is about some children and a kidnapping by a mobster...and a newspaper cartoonist who does a crime comic strip.

Unlike Pink Perkins, the writer/artist of “Gumshoe Gus,” Eisner had to have a team to produce his Sunday-only Spirit story. This story feeds into the fantasy that successful comic strips were produced by a single individual. But any crew Pink might have had to assist him would have been superfluous to the plot, and after all, Will Eisner was the only one who signed his name to the Spirit.

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