The Participation of Will Eisner's the Spirit in World War II
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Nicola Paladin The Participation of Will Eisner’s The Spirit in World War II Abstract: This article considers one of the first models for the superhero tradition in American comics. Among his most distinctive traits, the Spirit’s patriotic aura tends to move against the background of his persona. However, openly or not, from the first few publications of The Spirit, Will Eisner often alludes to the his- torical context of the time, in particular the possibility that the US might intervene in World War II. As the article discusses, although the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor can be identified as the turning point in Will Eisner’s attitude to World War II, it is arguable that a strong anti-Nazi feeling, as well as pro-American inter- vention propaganda, constitutes a recurrent subtext throughout the adventures of the Spirit. The article highlights the significant metaphorical and factual ref- erences, characters, and settings related to World War II in the adventures of the Spirit. Thus, the Spirit can be considered as the connecting element between the imaginary Central City and the battlegrounds of World War II: a concrete enemy and an evil personification of Nazism were transposed into comics in order to better shape the fictional enemies of the vigilante hero. Keywords: comic strips, propaganda comics, The Spirit, war comics, Will Eisner, World War II One of the most controversial, provocative, and ambiguous elements of Frank Mill- er’s poorly rated 2008 film version of Will Eisner’s The Spirit is the representation of the protagonist’s nemesis. Miller chose Samuel L. Jackson to play the Octopus, proposing a double reinterpretation of Eisner’s original villain. First, in the film, unlike the comic strip, the Octopus is visible; second, he is also an overt Nazi sym- pathizer. This latter aspect constitutes the peak of Miller’s provocation, because it places an Afro-American Nazi in defense of Aryan white supremacy. There were several negative reviews of the film (Lovece 2008; Sergi 2014), and Miller strug- gled to interpret some of the ambiguities that his mentor had left unresolved in the original text, in particular the Octopus’s invisible face and his ambiguous relationship with Nazism. Although implicit, the Nazi element is a fundamental aspect throughout the adventures of the Spirit and often closely intertwined with the narratives in which the protagonist is involved. Interestingly enough, on a superficial level of reading, one might think that The Spirit strips generally avoid representing war and the political ideologies Open Access. © 2021 Nicola Paladin, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110642056-005 34 Nicola Paladin of their times. Indeed, patriotism constitutes one of the most marginal features of the Spirit, and it tends to move to the background of his persona. However, be it covertly or overtly, since the first publication of The Spirit in 1940, Eisner often alluded to the historical context of his time: in his introduction to The Spirit Archives #1, he declares that “many stories were related to and triggered by current events” (Eisner 2000, 9). Although hidden in plain sight, World War II is signifi- cant in Eisner’s strips, a choice which may possibly trigger several implications, including an authorial plea for US intervention in the conflict against the Axis powers, and certainly showing, by extension, traces of how Eisner was deeply “imbued with a sense of patriotism” (Andelman 2005, 75). In this sense, Eisner’s personal trajectory is strongly interlaced with his authorial one. On the one hand, being a second-generation Jewish American immigrant, he had personally experienced anti-Semitism in the US, and was rel- egated to menial jobs along with several of his fellow cartoonists (for example, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby). On the other hand, as some of his subsequent graphic narratives would show,1 he was empathetically, culturally, and genetically com- mitted to the destiny of Jews in a Europe that was being washed away by the Fascist wave. No wonder that he enlisted,2 along with the majority of the Jewish American cartoonists, as an expression of support firstly for the Jews, and only secondly for the US. In this way, the Nazi component functions as a device which defines both the good and the evil characters, confirming John E. Moser’s words when he maintains that in any genre of literature, the antagonist plays as important a role as the protagonist. Not only does the villain provide the tension that fuels the story, but, by way of contrast, he illustrates the characteristics that make the leading character heroic. The world of comics is no exception; where would Spider-man be without the Green Goblin, the Fantastic Four without Doctor Doom, or Thor without Loki? (Moser 2009, 24) 1 Eisner’s preoccupation with the Shoah is particularly evident in A Contract with God, A Life Force, and To the Heart of the Storm. 2 Eisner was drafted in 1941 and assigned to the newspaper of Aberdeen Proving Ground, where he worked on instructional comics: he was involved in the production of Army Motors and started the project PS, the Preventive Maintenance Monthly. In his Comics and Sequential Art, Eisner would later suggest a tentative definition of instructional comics, suggesting that “we can divide the functions of Sequential Art into two broad applications; instruction and entertainment. […] but there is an overlap because art in sequence tends to be expository. For instance, comic books, which generally confine themselves to stories designed exclusively for entertainment, often em- ploy instructional techniques which buttress the exaggeration and enhance the entertainment” (Eisner 1985, 139). The Participation of Will Eisner’s The Spirit in World War II 35 Brian Klotz expresses the same viewpoint and specifically addresses the narrative potential of the Nazi: “In addition to providing a perfect form of ‘evil’ to pit against their figures of ‘good,’ the war allowed Jewish-American creators to become more connected with the US as the ‘us versus them’ mentality shifted in a way that placed them, for once, into the former category” (2009, 11). In the light of such a double relation, references to the war in Europe in The Spirit constitute a political and chronological substratum that permeates the majority of the Spirit’s adventures and combines to define both protagonist and antagonist. For example, the figure of Eisner’s Octopus is never explicitly labeled, but is often supported by former Nazi officers or allies; as a consequence, the blurred nature of the Spirit’s nemesis has a Nazi connotation. In other words, the Octopus is reframed as the enemy, not only because of his own nature of villain but also because he is powered up by a tangible and historical exemplification of evil, which corroborates his vague shape and character. The implied presence of the Nazis in the Spirit’s universe functions as a booster to characterize the Octopus as the bad guy, since he is related to the bad guys of the time par excellence. Stan Lee confirms this transposition: “As comic writers, we had to have villains in our stories. And once World War II started, the Nazis gave us the greatest villains in the world to fight against” (quoted in Kaplan 2010, 58). In a sense, the Nazi threat even looms over Eisner’s fictional Central City, which is thus an additional metaphorical battleground of World War II. However, the threshold between the implicit and the explicit in Eisner’s representation of the Nazi should be identified with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. As Jeremy Dauber clarifies, the tragedy and the subsequent US declaration of war on the Japanese Empire constitute a turning point in how Eisner, and Jewish American cartoonists in general, dealt with the conflict by depicting the Nazis as political enemies of the US3 and not only as persecutors of the Jews (a practice which, in fact, was widespread in the US as well, although in different measure): “It may not be surprising, then, to see how quickly and frequently Eisner and his most popular character began to express, first guardedly and then openly, anti-Nazi and pro-war sentiments” (Dauber 2006, 285). The presence of Nazism in The Spirit strips does materialize after this shift, but it is a visible element – albeit only alluded to – even before official declarations of war; in this way, The Spirit pre- 3 Scott Cord reports that “the American people’s anger and rage after the Japanese bombing of the Pearl Harbor naval base on December 7, 1941, created a powerful desire to avenge this devious attack. The comic books, which had already shown Americans fighting the Axis in limited ways for several years, now shifted into high gear. Comics, like other popular media, now attempted to rally the populace to support the troops, conduct recycling and war bond drives, and to hate the enemy” (2011, 47). 36 Nicola Paladin sents a consistent anti-Nazi substratum which certainly tends to conform to the oscillations of US public opinion about the European situation, and never ceases to emerge recurrently. Hence, by presenting some passages in which Nazism and World War II rever- berate in The Spirit both before and after Pearl Harbor, the purpose of this essay is to demonstrate the fundamental part played by Eisner’s rendering of the war in defining and connoting his characters, both negatively and positively. In other words, my aim is to show how the transposition of the Nazis into comics in Eis- ner’s strips robustly impacts the fictional enemies of the Spirit, who can, in turn, be configured as an embryonic sentinel of liberty and one of the first “exceptional” comics characters who symbolically protects American democracy.