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Commissioner Dolan

Commissioner Dolan

320 appearances · Golden Age · 1940–2018 · 4 key issues
Who is Commissioner Dolan?

Commissioner Dolan is a veteran police commissioner who operates in Central City. A longtime lawman, he becomes one of the closest allies of masked crimefighter the Spirit, first appearing alongside him in the pages of Will Eisner's celebrated newspaper comic strip in 1940.

Few supporting characters in comics history have proven as enduringly essential as Commissioner Dolan, who first strode onto the page in Will Eisner's landmark The Spirit in 1940 — a Golden Age debut that launched a nearly eight-decade presence in the catalog. A creation of the incomparable Will Eisner himself, Dolan is the kind of gruff, principled authority figure who gives a great hero's world its moral gravity and its grit, sharing adventures across 320 catalogued appearances alongside memorable company like Ellen Dolan, P'Gell, and Ebony White. With four key-issue appearances to his name and a run stretching all the way to 2018, he's living proof that Eisner built his universe to last — and any serious Spirit reader knows you don't truly know that world until you know the Commissioner.

The Spirit
#6/2/1940
★ First appearance
The Spirit #6/2/1940
Jun 1940

Trivia

  • Eisner engineered a brilliantly economical design for the character—balding crown, heavy mustache, and ever-present pipe—giving his studio assistants and every subsequent artist a visual shorthand that made the figure instantly and consistently recognizable across the page.comics.overstreetaccess.com
  • Will Eisner has written more of Commissioner Dolan's comics than any other writer in our catalog — 117 issues.

Top series

Covers through the years — 1942–2014

Police Comics #11 1942
Police Comics #11
Police Comics #55 1946
Police Comics #55
Mad #30 1956
Mad #30
The Spirit #2 1973
The Spirit #2
The Spirit Color Album #1 1981
The Spirit Color Album #1
The Spirit Casebook #[nn] 1990
The Spirit Casebook #[nn]
Cerebus #158 1992
Cerebus #158
Spirit Jam #[nn] 1998
Spirit Jam #[nn]
Will Eisner's The Spirit Archives #7 2002
Will Eisner's The Spirit Archives #7
Will Eisner's The Spirit Archives #20 2007
Will Eisner's The Spirit Archives #20
The Rocketeer / The Spirit: Pulp Friction #[nn] 2014
The Rocketeer / The Spirit: Pulp Friction #[nn]

Appearances (151–300 of 320, oldest first)

Mad (1952)
#30
The Steranko History of Comics (1970)
#2
The Menomonee Falls Gazette (1971)
Will Eisner Color Treasury (1981)
A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics (1981)
The Spirit Color Album (1981)
Visions (1979)
#4
The Outer Space Spirit: 1952 (1983)
Cerebus Jam (1985)
#1
The Spirit Casebook (1990)
Spirit: The Origin Years (1992)
Cerebus (1977)
Spirit Jam (1998)