Saturday, July 12, 2008

The Best of the Spirit by Will Eisner

This is another book I had to return to the library before I got a chance to blog about it, so all I have now is vague memories. (And they're getting vaguer and vaguer by the day, so I'd better post something now before I forget that I ever read it.)

The earliest stories in here were more than a bit creaky with exposition, but were still solid comics. But they got much better as they went along; some of the later pieces were little gems of story. (Not all of them worked as well for me, though.)

I probably still need to read more Spirit; I found these intermittently exciting but not consistently so. Eisner had a great eye for page layout, but also a thudding fondness for the femme fatale. (And those dames start to run together after a while, to be honest.) On the other hand, those femmes fatale are very easy on the eyes...

I'm not the person to tell anyone to read The Spirit, goodness knows, but, if you're interested in comics as an artform at all, you need to at least poke your nose into it to see what it really is about. (Same thing with Krazy Kat, even if, like me, you can't quite see what all the fuss is about.)

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