Whoops there are two more super-heroes in the Spirit Section. Should have included them with the Spirit himself, tsk tsk.
Lady Luck:
The Spirit's home, the "Spirit Section" of newspaper comics also included two other Will Eisner-created but not -written or -drawn characters, the first of whom is Lady Luck. In actuality wealthy socialite Brenda Banks, Lady Luck is a costumed vigilante out of boredom with the day-to-day of high society. She is wanted by the law and specifically by her civilian life love interest Police Chief Hardy Moore, a cop so dumb that not only is he about to send a woman to the electric chair for the murder of her still-living husband in the above set of panels but he also is unable to recognize the object of his affections under the brim of a big hat (in fairness to him he does mention that Brenda and Lady Luck are very similar looking but then turns out to be cartoonishly easy to fool). Lady Luck does a bit of globetrotting here and there, but her focus is mainly on high society crimes. Her adventures are a bit lighter than the Spirit's, but not by too much. (The Spirit Section, 2 June, 1940)
Mr Mystic:
The thing about the Spirit Section is that people love the Spirit and so his two companions tend to be overshadowed, particularly when it comes to widely-available archival work: the Spirit was reprinted while Lady Luck and our new friend here Mr Mystic languished in obscurity, and while Lady Luck's adventures were eventually reprinted in Smash Comics, the archival record of Mr Mystic is much spottier.
Mr Mystic is supposedly a retooling of Eisner's prior effort Yarko the Great, and I can see it - luckily for him he got the look of Yarko rather than the terrible naming sensibility. Mystic is (or was, presumably) an American diplomat who, like so many characters before and after him, acquired great mystical powers from the mysterious and spiritual residents of Tibet, specifically a "council of seven Lamas," and brought them back to the US to be put to use in beating up ne'er-do-wells.
Mr Mystic is a magic-using super-hero, which means that he is a nigh-omnipotent force of nature only occasionally slowed down by a lucky bop on the bean from a crook. His major mark of distinction from his peers is a literal one: a mystic tattoo on his forehead, which would mean that he's almost certainly the first person to have to field a lot of well-meaning concern over the effect that that sort of thing would have on his employability. (The Spirit Section, 2 June, 1940)
ADDENDUM:
After all my talk about how a lot of the non-Spirit related parts of the Spirit Section were unavailable I thought to double check, and I had forgot that yes, they are. Granted, it's as medium-quality photocopies, but that's better than nothing, right?
Having rediscovered that fact, I went back and read the first Mr Mystic story, and was shocked and surprised to learn that rather than being a student of the occult who spent long years studying in Tibet, our unnamed hero is a cultural attache serving somewhere in presumably-Eastern Europe when he is blown very off-course while fleeing an Axis invasion force. He crashes in Tibet and is given the forehead brand/tattoo that I did not realize was the sole source of his power while still unconscious. The whole thing is a pretty far cry from what I had imagined his origin to be!
No comments:
Post a Comment