Comics Fondle

A man wearing a sign proclaiming the end of the world wanders the streets, informing a man it’ll all be over in a week–three scientists are planning on using an independently-crated atom bomb. The man collapses and the attending physician sends for Commissioner Dolan–the man is suffering from radiation poisoning. News quickly spreads the end is nigh and Central City’s citizens prepare in their own ways. Two hoodlums go to collect the Spirit and he dispatches them, waiting in their hideout. The three scientists arrive and inform him they want him to plead their case to the United Nations (a billion dollars or they detonate). The Spirit disagrees, but before he can apprehend them, the thugs wake up and knock him out for a couple days, a combination of chain and sleeping drugs. The Spirit wakes just in time to follow the scientists–three hours before the bomb is going to detonate. A struggle with the Spirit onboard the escape plane causes a crash. Their papers lost, dying from injuries sustained in the crash, they reveal where the bomb’s hidden. The Spirit rushes to find a phone, trying a cabin occupied by an irate man with a shotgun and his son–and no phone for the Spirit. So the Spirit races back, arriving in Dolan’s office at a quarter till detonation and they hurry to the hiding place–under Denny Colt’s tombstone. Their car crashes with two minutes left… and the Central City bomb turns out to be a dud. However, the boy in the cabin turns out to be an isolated (by his father) genius who is now in possession of the scientists’ documents and he creates an atom bomb. A very powerful one, it destroys the planet… an event witnessed–presumably quite a bit later–by some inhabitants of an alien world, inhabitants in a prehistoric state. Luckily for the residents of Central City, it all turns out to be a comic strip.

The best part of the story is the lead-in, with the harbinger turning out to be accurate, followed by the half-page of everyone freaking out and then reconciling their possible fate. Eisner’s panels are precise and they get a week’s worth of story and emotion across in half a page. Absolutely wonderful, in terms of masterful comic book storytelling.

Unfortunately, the following Spirit-centric action is a wee bit lame. There are some nice panels, but the majority of the time is spent listening to the scientists ramble on. The father and son in the cabin are funny, a precursor to Jack B. Quick perhaps… But the rest is a bore.

The most interesting thing about the story is the second-to-last-page, with the cro-magnons on their little planet with problems much like the development of the atomic bomb. Eisner seems to have written the story to advocate the United States be the sole nuclear power until it deemed its fellow nations responsible enough to have their own. Combined with the scientists thinking they could blackmail the United Nations, it’s like a fast-forward to neo-con rants of today.

But the humanistic element more than excuses Eisner’s contemporary paranoia….

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

Technorati Tags: Comic Book, Review, The Spirit, Will Eisner