Black and White Wednesday: "The Capistrano Jewels" by Will Eisner

By popular demand, here's Will Eisner's original tale for the second ish of Kitchen Sink's underground Spirit mag from the fall of '73. Would this four pager rate an "adults only" tag in today's comicbook market?

Black and White Wednesday: Will Eisner's The Spirit--as a (Sort-of) Political Cartoon

Ya know, Groove-ophiles, a lot of us--with yers trooly at the front of the line--just don't dig it when modern writers and artists put our childhood heroes in adult situations. My belief has always been, "If ya wanna do that stuff, create your own characters, bub!" I still don't like it, but I have to admit, however grudgingly, that the precedence was set way back in the Groovy Age by one of comics' Founding Fathers--perhaps the most influential creator of all, Will Eisner. When Underground Publisher Denis Kitchen got Eisner to let him reprint a couple issues' worth of classic Golden Age Spirit stories, he also managed to get Eisner to create some brand new Spirit material. Instead of brand new 7 page adventures in the classic vein, though, in the first issue (1973) we got an updated Spirit walking (or punching) through a set of single-page strips that are really political cartoons. The Spirit and Ebony are still 100% themselves, but the tone and purpose of the strips are as far removed from the 40s classics as the latest issue of Green Lantern is from the Silver Age GL. I s'pose "re-inventions" aren't always a bad thing, after all...

Eisner also did a brand-new four-page P'Gell tale for the second Kitchen Sink ish. It's also very...different. If enough of ya wanna see it, Ol' Groove just might be persuaded to oblige...