Number 2371: Pappy gets into the Spirit

I have been spending time excavating in my basement, going through boxes and files.  Some parts of my collection are spread out, and I have had some fun (when not choking from the dust) finding things I thought lost. Such was a copy of Help!, Vol. 2 No. 1, dated February 1962. I bought it off the stands when I was 14, and it was my introduction to Will Eisner’s Spirit.

The episode is the second part of the Sand Saref story, but is actually repurposed from another project by Eisner, a character called John Law, Detective, drawn in 1948, but never published until the early ’80s by Eclipse. Harvey Kurtzman was the editor of Help!, and if he picked the Spirit story to use, he found one of the best examples of Eisner’s storytelling.

After 58 years most memories grow dim, but I definitely remember the effect seeing this had on me. I didn’t know the term “film noir” then, but I recognized how cinematic it is. It appeared in the weekly Spirit Section, January 15, 1950.