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The Spirit is a fictional masked crimefighter created by cartoonist Will Eisner. He first appeared June 2, 1940 as the main feature of a 16-page, tabloid-sized, newsprint comic book insert distributed in the Sunday edition of Register and Tribune Syndicate newspapers; it was ultimately carried by 20 Sunday newspapers, with a combined circulation of five million copies during the 1940s. "The Spirit Section", as the insert was popularly known, continued until October 5, 1952. It generally included two other, four-page strips (initially ''Mr. Mystic'' and ''Lady Luck''), plus filler material. Eisner was the editor, but also wrote and drew most entries—after the first few months, he had the uncredited assistance of writer Jules Feiffer and artists Jack Cole and Wally Wood, though Eisner's singular vision for the character was a unifying factor. From the 1960s to 1980s, a handful of new Eisner Spirit stories appeared in Harvey Comics and elsewhere, and Warren Publishing and Kitchen Sink Press variously reprinted the newspaper feature in black-and-white comics magazines and in color comic books. In the 1990s and 2000s, Kitchen Sink Press and DC Comics also published new Spirit stories by other writers and artists. ''The Spirit'' chronicles the adventures of a masked vigilante who fights crime with the blessing of the city's police commissioner Dolan, an old friend. Despite the Spirit's origin as detective Denny Colt, his real identity was virtually unmentioned again, and for all intents and purposes he was simply "the Spirit". The stories are presented in a wide variety of styles, from straightforward crime drama and noir to lighthearted adventure, from mystery and horror to comedy and love stories, often with hybrid elements that twisted genre and reader expectations. ==Publication history== In late 1939, Everett M. "Busy" Arnold, publisher of the Quality Comics comic-book line, began exploring an expansion into newspaper Sunday supplements, aware that many newspapers felt they had to compete with the suddenly burgeoning new medium of American comic books, as exemplified by the ''Chicago Tribune Comic Book'', premiering two months before The Spirit Section. Arnold compiled a presentation piece with existing Quality Comics material. An editor of ''The Washington Star'' liked George Brenner's comic-book feature ""The Clock", but not Brenner's art, and was favorably disposed toward a Lou Fine strip. Arnold, concerned over the meticulous Fine's slowness and his ability to meet deadlines, claimed it was the work of Eisner, Fine's boss at the Eisner & Iger studio, from which Arnold bought his outsourced comics work. In "late '39, just before Christmas time," Eisner recalled in 1979,〔''Panels'' #1 (Summer 1979), "Art & Commerce: An Oral Reminiscence by Will Eisner", pp. 5–21, quoted in 〕 "Arnold came to me and said that the Sunday newspapers were looking for a way of getting into this comic book boom". In a 2004 interview, Eisner elaborated on that meeting: Eisner negotiated an agreement with the syndicate in which Arnold would copyright ''The Spirit,'' but, "Written down in the contract I had with 'Busy' Arnold — and this contract exists today as the basis for my copyright ownership — Arnold agreed that it was my property. They agreed that if we had a split-up in any way, the property would revert to me on that day that happened. My attorney went to 'Busy' Arnold and his family, and they all signed a release agreeing that they would not pursue the question of ownership."〔 This would include the eventual backup features, "Mr. Mystic" and "Lady Luck." Selling his share of their firm to Iger, who would continue to package comics as the S. M. Iger Studio and as Phoenix Features through 1955, for $20,000,〔Kitchen, Denis. "Annotations to ''The Dreamer'', in Eisner, Will, ''The Dreamer'' (W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2008), p. 52. ISBN 978-0-393-32808-0〕 Eisner left to create ''The Spirit.'' "They gave me an adult audience", Eisner said in 1997, "and I wanted to write better things than superheroes. Comic books were a ghetto. I sold my part of the enterprise to my associate and then began The Spirit. They wanted an heroic character, a costumed character. They asked me if he'd have a costume. And I put a mask on him and said, 'Yes, he has a costume!'" The character and the types of stories Eisner would tell, Eisner said in 1978, derived from his desire The character's name, he said in that interview, came from Arnold: "When 'Busy' Arnold called, he suggested a kind of ghost or some kind of metaphysical character. He said, 'How about a thing called the Ghost?' and I said, 'Naw, that's not any good,' and he said, 'Well, then, call it the Spirit; there's nothing like that around.' I said, 'Well, I don't know what you mean.,' and he said, 'Well, you can figure ''that'' out—I just like the words "the Spirit."' He was calling from a bar somewhere, I think... ()nd actually, the more I thought about it the more I realized I didn't care about the name."〔"Will Eisner Interview", ''The Comics Journal'' #46 (May 1979), p. 37. Interview conducted Oct. 13 and 17, 1978〕 ''The Spirit'', an initially eight- and later seven-page urban-crimefighter series, ran with the initial backup features "Mr. Mystic" and "Lady Luck" in a 16-page Sunday supplement (colloquially called "The Spirit Section") that was eventually distributed in 20 newspapers with a combined circulation of as many as five million copies.〔Eisner, ''The Dreamer'', "About the Author", p. 55〕 It premiered June 2, 1940, and continued through 1952.〔 Eisner was drafted into the U.S. Army in late 1941, "and then had about another half-year which the government gave me to clean up my affairs before going off" to fight in World War II.〔 In his absence, the newspaper syndicate used ghost writers and artists to continue the strip, including Manly Wade Wellman, William Woolfolk, and Lou Fine. Eisner's rumpled, masked hero (with his headquarters under the tombstone of his supposedly deceased true identity, Denny Colt) and his gritty, detailed view of big-city life (based on Eisner's Jewish upbringing in New York City) both reflected and influenced the ''noir'' outlook of movies and fiction in the 1940s. Eisner said in 2001 that he created the strip as a vehicle to explore various genres: "When I created The Spirit, I never had any intention of creating a superhero. I never felt The Spirit would dominate the feature. He served as a sort of an identity for the strip. The stories were what I was interested in."〔(''Eisner Wide Open'', Hogan's Alley #11, 2001 )〕 In some episodes, the nominal hero makes a brief, almost incidental appearance while the story focuses on a real-life drama played out in streets, dilapidated tenements, and smoke-filled back rooms. Yet along with violence and pathos, ''The Spirit'' lived on humor, both subtle and overt. He was machine-gunned, knocked silly, bruised, often amazed into near immobility and constantly confused by beautiful women. The feature ended with the October 5, 1952, edition.〔 As ''The Comics Journal'' editor-publisher Gary Groth wrote, "By the late '40s, Eisner's participation in the strip had dwindled to a largely supervisory role. ... Eisner hired Jerry Grandenetti and Jim Dixon to occasionally ink his pencils. By 1950, () Feiffer was writing most of the strips, and Grandenetti, Dixon, and Al Wenzel were drawing them." — Grandenetti penciling as a ghost-artist, under Eisner's byline, said in 2005 that before the feature's demise, Eisner had "tried everything. Had me penciling 'The Spirit'. Later on it was Wally Wood", who drew the final installments. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Spirit (comics)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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