Will Eisner's Spirit of '76

As you might guess, the comic books and comic strips of 1976 embraced the theme of "The Spirit of '76" more than a few times.

One of the most inspired -- but also one of the worst -- examples of this came on the front cover of the famous Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide.

If you're not familiar with Overstreet, it's an annual publication that catalogs the comic books of the world. Founded by Robert Overstreet in 1970, this mighty tome employed a team of experts around the country to figure out what comics existed, what they were worth, and how that amount varied depending on their condition.

The first few Overstreet guides had pretty boring covers, but that had changed by the time this sixth edition rolled around. Overstreet hired not only one of the world's best cartoonists, but one that tied in beautifully for the year.

That cartoonist was Will Eisner, creator of the comic book "The Spirit." Hence, the Spirit of '76 tie-in.

Eisner became famous for a lot of the aspects of his "Spirit" strip, which ran as a newspaper insert from 1940 to 1952 and starred a blue-masked hero in a suit and fedora. He told utterly brilliant stories in a compact seven pages that still stand today as perfect examples of the short story form. He also took elements from the cinema and incorporated them into comic books, creating new ways of telling stories that have influenced generations of cartoonists since.

One of Eisner's classic motifs involved incorporating the name of the strip into the art. Here's a perfect example, where the word "Spirit" becomes a moody, crumbling wall behind the hero:

Eisner took a similar path with the Overstreet cover, in which he turned the logo of the book into a marvelous 3-D construct in front of which his characters reenact the iconic Revolutionary War-era fife and drum parade:

(This is my lovely, dog-eared copy of the book, which I found a few months back at Frankenstein's Comic Book Swap, a cool event held a couple of times a year by Portland's Cosmic Monkey Comics. In fact, I bought this copy at Cosmic Monkey's booth.)

Now, this cover is pretty awesome for a number of reasons. The art's cool, and whoever decided to use the Spirit to embody the Spirit of '76 was inspired. It's also timely for reasons beyond the Bicentennial. Eisner's Spirit had kind of languished for a few decades (publication of new stories ceased in 1952), but a fairly active reprint program got underway in 1972, something that has continued until pretty much now. Comics fans and collectors in 1976 were, in many ways, rediscovering Eisner, and he was also rediscovering the comics field after many years working on books, educational materials, and magazines for the U.S. military. Just two years after this Overstreet guide Eisner would go on to release his groundbreaking book, A Contract with God, the first widely recognized comic book to be marketed as a "graphic novel."

So the context of this cover is pretty cool. Where the cover art falls down, however, is one of the characters. Take a look at the drummer. That's Eisner's character Ebony from the "Spirit" strip. Ebony was a great character, at least in terms of personality. In fact, he was one of the real heroes of the strip, a truly fearless sidekick to his blue-masked superhero friend.

His face, though... that was straight out racial caricature. It was racist (if typical of the day) for 1940 and super-racist by 1976. In later years Eisner himself said that he regretted it and here's he's obviously trying to tone it down a bit, but boy he could have gone further by this point and just come up with a new face for the character. Given the racial dynamics of the era, it certainly would have made sense.

Ebony lurks large over the Spirit today, 75 years after the strip's first publication. He gives the comics the same taint as Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer" and "Huck Finn" stories, only those weren't permanently illustrated. I'd hate to be the person looking at "The Spirit" for the first time in 2015 with no inkling of its history or context.

Oh well. This is still a pretty great entry to the Bicentennial comics catalog. It's a classic example of the motifs that many cartoonists employed in 1976 to celebrate the year, but it's also a semi-painful example of how far we still had to come. And maybe of how far we still need to go today.