The Spirit (1973) #1-2 by Will Eisner

Despite lasting only two issues, this is a significant series in the Kitchen Sink saga: It was the start of the long relationship between Will Eisner and Kitchen Sink, and Kitchen Sink ended up publishing more pages by Eisner than by anybody else. And while Kitchen didn’t publish A Contract With God, Eisner’s return to comics after taking some decades off, they did publish most of his subsequent work.

And that led to a higher profile for Kitchen Sink, and more respectability: For a time in the 80s, A Contract With God was considered (by some) to be the first graphic novel, and the start of the wave of literary comics that Eisner’s subsequent works fitted well into.

These days… I think Eisner’s 70s and 80s work has been mostly forgotten?

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Here’s where Kitchen lays the ground work: Two issues of The Spirit (also sometimes called The Underground Spirit).

Maurice Horn does the introduction, and lays it on quite thick, but that’s perhaps natural… “childish motivations and grotesque self-righteousness”, eh? I guess he doesn’t like super-hero comics much.

Anyway, we start off with a strip from 1946, and it’s a perfect as an introduction: It’s a simple little mystery, but it really does feel like reading a short story (as Horn said). Eisner achieves this by cramming so much into these seven page — and he does this by having several narratives going at once. The commissioner is talking about something in the dialogue, and The Spirit is doing other stuff in the artwork, and it’s a really pleasing little thing.

And I love that action scene.

These are 32 pages books, which means that there’s four pages to fill (since there’s four Spirit stories per issue), and Eisner here echoes Horn’s take on super-heroes from the introduction… (Or perhaps the other way around.)

The second story is from half a year later, and is all action, so we’re getting a very varied selection.

And… Li’l Ebony. Eisner’s been soundly critiqued for the racist way he’s depicted, and he is indeed more cartoonish than most of the other characters. But on the other hand, Eisner should be commended for having such a central non-white character in a mainstream publication. Like, I mean — there’s plenty of other comics from around this time that had absolutely no representation, so some of the critique I’ve read seems a bit unfair to me.

But what do I know.

The figures go a bit Bugs Bunny in some of the action scenes, but it’s fun.

Wow! I didn’t expect this — apparently the critique of Li’l Ebony was already a thing in 1972, so here Eisner responds by basically saying that Li’l Ebony is a character with agency and no simple racist side kick.

The gloating Eisner does in the last panel is pretty… er… offputting, though. He teached them good!

And I’m not quite sure what Eisner is saying here, but he’s definitely trying to get in on common underground tropes.

The second issue is all P’Gell stories, and that’s also a pretty good choice — Kitchen (I’m guessing) is picking some solid stuff to introduce a new generation to The Spirit.

The reproduction of some of these pieces is pretty horrible, though. So much ink gain.

But most of the pieces look fantastic.

And it’s this sort of thing more than anything else that endeared Eisner to a certain generation of comics artists.

It is also really charming how Eisner lets all the characters have their time and victories — The Spirit sometimes comes in to save the day, but P’Gell, for instance, takes care of herself.

Oh, yeah, the casual violence — The Spirit is a lot more brutal than comics usually are. I mean, not in horrific gore or anything, but in things like this: How casually The Spirit kicks that guy in the head. With his hands in his pocket, even.

The second issue includes a new four page story where P’Gell is apparently shacked up with a lesbian. P’Gell kills her, as she usually does with her spouses, but it’s… Eisner’s certainly adjusting stuff for this 70s audience.

These two issues were an unexpected success, so Warren made Eisner an offer, and Eisner took The Spirit over there, where The Spirit was reprinted in magazine size for 16 issues, before coming back to Kitchen Sink. Not very… er… loyal of Eisner?

And we’ll come back to the Kitchen Sink issues of that reprint magazine later in this blog series.

This is the twenty-third post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

The Pagfeek Papers (1973) #1 by Mark Morrison

Morrison had appeared in a number of Kitchen Sink anthologies, so (as with many of the other contributors), here he gets a solo title. It’s about a somewhat deranged doctor, and it’s drawn in this rather basic (and somewhat weird style). It’s very underground, I guess.

But… it’s so deranged that it’s actually funny. There’s a bunch of stuff in here that makes you go “eh? wha? heh”, which is nice.

But there’s an underlying nastiness to some of these bits that’s… a bit disturbing?

Comix Joint is not impressed:

Pagfeek Papers is one of those underground comics that slipped into the mad rush of undergrounds in 1972 and early ’73 that had tenuous cause to be published, but it certainly has its defenders. As Denis Kitchen proclaims on his website, Pagfeek “…wasn’t about sex or drugs or violence or social relevance. It was a thinking hippie’s comic, full of clever if obscure wordplay and subtlety.”

It only got a single printing, so I guess it didn’t sell, either.

This is the twenty-second post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

Sphinx Comics (1972) #2 by John Thompson

I don’t know who published the first issue of this (comics.org doesn’t have it in their database), but Print Mint published the third issue.

The main story in this issue is about… er… uhm… it had something to do with Egypt? And tantric sex? It’s very trippy, anyway.

Thompson’s artwork is quite appealing — it’s got a kind of interesting stiffness to it, paired with some cool rendering choices. I didn’t get a lot out of the story, though whatever it was.

And then the issue rounds out with eight drawings. Trippy!

Aha:

Sphinx Comics was published in 1972, beginning with issue #2. What about the first issue, you may ask? Well, it’s common knowledge to veteran underground comix aficionados that Sphinx #1 was never published.

And:

Thompson became a popular creator of psychedelic rock concert posters, many of which were distributed by the Print Mint, so he got to know the owner, Don Schenker, and became friends with other poster artists like Rick Griffin.

So that explains it.

This is the twenty-first post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

Super Soul Comix (1972) #1 by Grass Green

My copy of this book comes with a tipped-in sheet with a biography of Green, apparently written in 1979…

… and it’s signed (in 1980), to boot. But I guess this means that Green had a lot of copies lying around almost a decade after this was originally published?

Anyway, as usual with Green, we get a bunch of gags, none of which are actually all that funny, loosely strung together into a story of sorts.

And as usual, we end up with a kind of super-hero parody thing.

I get where Green is coming from — it’s got a very fanzine feeling — but this is so not my kind of thing that it was a real chore to get through it.

I’m not sure I found any of the jokes funny? But that might just be me.

The Comix Joint guy liked it:

Super Soul Comix is one of Green’s most mature works amonst his early comic books, and a bit ground breaking with a black superhero. Green provides a showcase for a positive, sympathetic black character that remained utterly true to his origins and culture, which is no small trick.

Green died in 2002:

This is the twentieth post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.