The Spirit #6/16/1940
The Spirit Section of June 16, 1940 is one of the earliest installments of Will Eisner's groundbreaking newspaper comic supplement, appearing just two weeks after the historic June 2 debut that introduced Denny Colt (The Spirit), Ebony White, Lady Luck (Brenda Banks), and Mr. Mystic to readers simultaneously — a package unlike anything the Sunday newspaper market had seen before. Eisner's approach of delivering a seven-page crime story alongside two four-page backup features in a 16-page tabloid insert challenged both the traditional newspaper comic strip and the monthly comic book on their own terms, establishing a format that reached up to five million readers weekly across twenty papers. The early 1940 Spirit Section installments are significant as the proving ground where Eisner, then just 23 years old, began developing the cinematic layouts, atmospheric shadow work, and genre-bending storytelling that would reshape the visual language of sequential art for decades.
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The Spirit Section was born from a deal brokered in late 1939 between publisher Everett M. 'Busy' Arnold of Quality Comics and the Register and Tribune Syndicate, with Arnold commissioning Eisner to produce a weekly Sunday newspaper supplement to compete with the booming standalone comic book market. Eisner dissolved his partnership with Jerry Iger to take the project, negotiating — and ultimately retaining — full ownership of all the characters he created for it, including the Spirit, Lady Luck, and Mr. Mystic. Eisner set up his Eisner Studio in Manhattan's Tudor City apartment complex, initially employing collaborators including Bob Powell, who wrote and drew the Mr. Mystic backup from Eisner's early scripts. The Spirit, Lady Luck (written by Eisner under the pseudonym 'Ford Davis' for its first two installments and drawn by Chuck Mazoujian), and Mr. Mystic all launched together on June 2, 1940; the June 16 issue is therefore the third weekly entry in this new format.
Trivia · 8 facts
- The Spirit Section debuted June 2, 1940, syndicated by the Register and Tribune Syndicate; the June 16, 1940 issue is the third weekly installment (#3) in the run.
- The Spirit (Denny Colt) first appeared in the June 2, 1940 premiere: a detective who falls into suspended animation from Dr. Cobra's chemicals, is officially declared dead, and awakens in Wildwood Cemetery to become a masked vigilante operating with Commissioner Dolan's quiet approval.
- Lady Luck (Brenda Banks) — an Irish-American socialite heiress who trains in martial arts and adopts a green-dress-and-veil costume — debuted in the same June 2 premiere, created by Will Eisner (writing as 'Ford Davis') and artist Chuck Mazoujian as a four-page backup feature.
- Mr. Mystic (alter ego Kenneth St. Germain), a magician crime-fighter with Tibetan-derived powers including shapeshifting and size manipulation, also debuted June 2, 1940, created by Eisner and initially drawn and later written by Bob Powell as a second four-page backup.
- Ebony White, the Spirit's resourceful sidekick and cab driver, made his first appearance as a one-panel cameo in the June 2 debut; he was unnamed in that installment and identified by name only in the third episode.
- The 16-page Spirit Section format gave The Spirit eight pages (later reduced to seven), Lady Luck four pages, and Mr. Mystic four pages — an unusual anthology structure that offered readers three distinct features rather than the single strip typical of newspaper comic sections.
- Will Eisner and Bob Powell signed their work on these early Spirit Section installments under the shared pseudonym 'W. Morgan Thomas,' a house-name Eisner had previously used on other features.
- The early 1940 Spirit Section stories were collected in DC Comics' Will Eisner's The Spirit Archives Volume 1 (2000), the first volume of a 26-volume hardcover series that reprinted the entire 1940–1952 run in full color; Lady Luck's adventures were separately reprinted in Quality Comics' Smash Comics beginning with issue #42 (April 1943).
Cast · 7 characters
Full credits
Full plot ⚠ may contain spoilers
▸ Reveal full plot — may contain spoilers
Lady Luck clears a young man from a murder charge.
Plot details indexed by the Grand Comics Database (CC BY-SA).