THE SPIRIT "Vietnam '50"

Before America took a direct hand...

...Vietnam was, to pop culture fans, just another exotic locale for high adventure!

Written by Will Eisner (with Jules Feiffer assisting), penciled and inked by Eisner and his studio, this tale published in November 5, 1950 Sunday newspapers uses the then-current Indo-China War as the nominal location for a story about a criminal who tries to evade justice, only to be done in by his own avarice!
Eisner would revisit the locale decades later in the Dark Horse graphic novel Last Day in Vietnam.(2000)

Please Support Crime and Punishment

Visit Amazon and Order...

Last Day In Vietnam

by Will Eisner

and/or

The Spirit Archives

Volume 21

(which contains the tale re-presented here!)

SPIRIT "League of Liars"

Of all comic strip/book detectives, none was as complex as The Spirit...

...even when multi-award* winning creator/writer/illustrator Will Eisner wasn't the man behind the story, as in this case, where future Oscar/Obie/Pulitzer/Writers' Guild award winner Jules Feiffer scripted and laid out the tale...

The Spirit was unique among comic heroes since he had not only his own feature in an anthology comic (Police Comics), his own monthly/bi-monthly comic book (from Quality, and later Fiction House), and a weekly comic book (distributed with Sunday newspapers throughout the country) from 1940 to 1952!

The newspaper weekly comic contained new stories which were then reprinted in the other comic books.

It also didn't have slick covers, using the same newsprint stock as the inside of the booklet, making them extremely fragile and hard to find in good condition today despite having a circulation of several million (you read that right) per issue!

This particular story initially appeared in November 25, 1951 newspapers before being reprinted in Fiction House's Spirit #3 (1952), where this version is taken from.

Written and laid-out by Feiffer (who started as an art assistant in Eisner's studio), the penciling and inking was done by Jim Dixon with Eisner himself editing, art directing, and occasionally retouching to keep characters "on-model".

*Today, the comic book industry equivalent of the Emmy/Oscar/Tony/Grammy is known as "The Eisner".