Will Eisner's The Spirit

The Spirit is one of my all-time favorite comic books (along with Jack Cole's Plastic Man, Dave Sim's Cerebus and the non-superhero work of Steve Ditko). There is now the definitive version of The Spirit in hardcover (which I can't afford) but before those came out, readers had the Warren magazine reprints (later taken over by Kitchen Sink). They reprinted largely in black and white and threw in enough extra stuff to still warrant attention beside the fancy hardcovers. Here are scans of the first ten covers, dating from 1974-75. As with most images on this blog, click them to see a larger version.

#1 (April 1974) cover by Basil Gogos

#2 (June 1974) cover by Will Eisner

#3 (Aug 1974) cover by Will Eisner

#4 (Oct 1974) cover by Will Eisner

#5 (Dec 1974) cover by Will Eisner and Ken Kelly

#6 (Feb 1975) cover by Will Eisner and Ken Kelly

#7 (April 1975) cover by Will Eisner and Ken Kelly

#8 (June 1975) cover by Will Eisner and Ken Kelly

#9 (Aug 1975) cover by Will Eisner and Ken Kelly

#10 (Oct 1975) cover by Will Eisner and Ken Kelly

These are eating up a bit of webspace in their enlarged state, so I might not keep the clickable enlargements up for ages. Save them if you want them. I might later post additional issues if anybody cares to see them.

Note: I scanned these at a very low resolution for another purpose. I hope the scans look decent enough here.

Edward J. Jordan, Burglar

Here's a genuine one of a kind item, a 1912 mug shot card from the Chicago police. The subject is one Edward J. Jordan, burglar, who was 34-years old at the time of the photo. (His rugged looks would fit well in an early Hollywood crime melodrama.) The back of the card notes that he has already served time in the Mansfield, Ohio Reformatory; the Jackson, Michigan penitentiary; and the Columbus, Ohio pen.

At the top of the card (shown below) is an elaborate system of measurements now known as The Bertillon system which was something of a pre-cursor to organized fingerprint collection. Devised by Alphonse Bertillon, the measurements of the head, finger and foot would allow police departments to more easily match potential suspects and prisoners to past offenders. As it was common practice for prisoners to give false names, this would prove to be a wonderful new tool for police departments.

This is a nice item, and the only example I have. There must be thousands of such cards still floating around and if I get more, I'll likely post them here.

DISASTER

And so it begins... I'd been waiting for something extraordinary to start things off with and during this wait, and excessive twiddling of thumb, I realized it's better to just start with whatever presents itself. So I grab a paperback off a shelf and here we go.

Troy Allen, Disaster. Barclay House. 1974 Paperback Original.

This is my favorite disaster book ever, and I've never actually finished it. What makes this book stand out is the beautifully overdone prose that graces the covers. As a lover of the comically awful, this leaves me speechless. Whatever defect I possess that makes me love such things as the films of Coleman Francis as much as I do is also to blame for my love of the back cover of Disaster. Scanning this just now, I laughed out loud again, even though I've read this countless times. It's as if it was written for me. I would quote my favorite passages here, but that would pretty much be the entire text of the back cover. So, to avoid further typing, here is the back cover which I will let speak for itself.



Sadly, the prose within is much more tame. I've read small portions of it now and again, scanned through it more often, looking for something that might jump out at me with its awfulness but it just sits there in its mediocrity. My guess is an overzealous copywriter composed the cover text. And I applaud him with a retyping of the first stanza of his now-poem, "Disaster".

DISASTER

killer winds that swoop down without warning

into crowded streets,

tearing heads and arms from twisting bodies

and leaving torn human trunks

streaming blood...

winds strong enough to dash a man

against a brick wall and

leave nothing but a bloody blob

of pressed flesh

and crumbled

bones!

The publisher Barclay House evidently published some interesting titles back in the day: Orality by the science fiction publisher Richard E. Geis; Oral Sex and the Teenager by H. Hadley Williams; and Black Sex by Aaron J. Abelard. Other titles are Savvy Secrets of a Teen Sex Swinger, Teen Sex '69, Cycle Sex, The Mattress Girls, and, of course, Scatology by Harvey J. Leathem, M.D. with Hugh Jones. And no, I don't have any of those (yet).