Comics Fondle

In Cologne, three orphaned children decide they’re sick of living in a burnt-out city. They’re going to America. Two months later, a youth gang plagues Central City, with all the kids joining. It’s so bad, there’s only one kid left in school. Commissioner Dolan sends an officer to escort the kid home and the two are ambushed on the way. One of the orphans from Cologne, Hildie delays the officer while her cohorts make off with the kid. At the youth gang’s base, the leader (also from Cologne) informs the school-boy he’s going to be murdered for squealing. Hildie and an American boy protest and are thrown in a pit. They escape, on their way to the Spirit, who Hildie realizes is the officer she’d attacked earlier. In Dolan’s office, Dolan teases the Spirit about losing to a bunch of kids, but they quickly come up with a plan to get the city’s youth back on track. The kids, they reason, are upset they were neglected during the war, so a visit from a veteran might turn them around. Hildie interrupts them with the location of the gang’s headquarters. The Spirit and Dolan arrive just in time to save the youth gang from a real gang, headed by “Fence Fingan.” The city’s youth are reoriented, thanks to the Spirit and Dolan’s plan, and Ellen takes care of Hildie, getting her ready for her entrance exams, much to the chagrin of her American boyfriend.

Exactly what I’m looking for in a Spirit comic. Eisner gets the social commentary–Hildie’s one of the few pieces of fiction I’ve come across really dealing with the youth problems during World War II (there was that RKO Picture, Youth Runs Wild, which got cut, rather infamously, because the censors were worried about showing the enemy the state of things). Eisner also finds time for humor and real human regard. The bad kids from Cologne aren’t exactly bad–even the main one–the war’s just broken him. Hildie’s a wonderful look at the effects of modern warfare on children… I mean, what Eisner can infer with a panel, really puts Hildie over the top.

He also manages to keep the story from being too preachy. The scene with the soldier at the end is as close as it gets, but even that scene’s rather mellow. The ending, with the two men, the Spirit and Hildie’s American boyfriend, bewildered by women, snaps Hildie right out of that preachy atmosphere too. Eisner normalizes the reality after breaking it in the first pages of the story (the youth gang in America being the break, not the bombed out city of Cologne–which is kind of the point, that one is more unimaginable and should not be).

But Eisner does resolve the problems rather quickly–at least for Hildie and the American kids–the other German kids are left hanging. On one hand, Eisner’s just doing what’s needed to make the story manageable, but it’s also a band-aid on a torn jugular.

collected in “The Spirit Archives: Volume 12” (Will Eisner)

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