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The very first exposure I had to
Will Eisner was the Harvey Comics' attempt to cash in on
the super-hero craze generated by Julie Schwartz'
initiating the Marvel Age of comics in the early 1960's
(yeah, that's what I said, Julie's resurrecting the
Justice Society of America and changing it into the
Justice League gave Stan Lee the goosing he needed to
start up the Jack Kirby creation, the Fantastic Four). The company that ran Richie Rich, Casper, Huey, the fat baby duck, etc., managed this in part by their publishing a book on Eisner's character, the Spirit, in 1968. It was an "oversized" book, as I recall --56 or 80 pages, one of the two-- and Harvey wasn't all that committed to it, as only three issues ever came out (give a book a chance to find an audience, why don't ya?). Knowing nothing of the Spirit's history (or any comics history, at that point), I was deeply impressed by such a strange book -- strange, because in those days, super-heroes were the only books a self-respecting kid could read. Harvey, Archie, and most of the Dell/Gold Key books, you see, weren't written/drawn for us kids, and we all knew that fact. Those books were done to make our parents happy, only they were even less interesting, less intellectually challenging than even the very stiff, incredibly rigid, Classics Illustrated comics .... Classics would at least print stuff that was fantastic, weird, or even gory. And, even if the art in all those books were totally unmemorable, it was still stuff that a kid could read without thinking, "Ah, this $#!+'s for my little brother!". |
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