For almost two years, this blog had a huge post buffer thanks to its origins as a Twitter thread. At it's height, the buffer was almost two months long, but for most of its life there were somewhere between two weeks and a month of pre-written posts sitting at my fingertips, and that meant that I could establish certain habits, like trying to make sure that a Minor Super-Hero Round-Up containing the relevant protagonist was published before talking about the villains that they had faced off against, stuff like that. But over time the buffer eroded, as do all things, to the point that now I'm posting about comics that I just finished reading, like some sort of animal.
All this is to say that I don't have the usual four super-heroes required for a proper Minor Super-Hero Round-Up but the villains are piling up in my now days-long buffer so here's a special one-hero one-shot:
the Spirit:
Yeah, yeah, I hear you: we all know who the Spirit is. Why, he's got to be a median super-hero at least, right? Well, tough. I have too many categorizations to keep track of as it is, and as influential as the Spirit is odds are that your parents don't have a clue about him, so he fits the brief as specified by yours truly.
The Spirit is ambitious young private detective Denny Colt, who attempts to bring in criminal scientist Dr Cobra and is doused in suspended animation fluid for his trouble. Believed dead, Colt is buried in Wildwood Cemetery and upon waking decides to become a spooky vigilante, with a lot more emphasis on the "spooky" in the early days.
"The Spirit" might just be the perfect synthesis of the nascent super-hero genre and the established newspaper adventure comics. It also has a large barrier to entry for the modern reader in the form of Ebony White, the Spirit's driver/sidekick/ethnic stereotype African American comic relief character. Frankly, I don't really want to spend a lot of time talking about Ebony, so here's his weirdly positive Wikipedia article that kind of deemphasizes the fact that Will Eisner removed Ebony from the comic after repeated complaints about him in 1946. And also completely omits the fact that Ebony was instantly replaced by Blubber, a sidekick/ethnic stereotype comic relief Inuit character, in what I personally have always seen as a fit of creative pique on Eisner's part.
Aside from Ebony, the Spirit's supporting cast consisted of Police Commissioner Dolan, friend of Denny Colt and initially the only one to know the Spirit's secret identity, and the Commissioner's daughter Ellen, the Spirit's primary love interest and thorn in his side. Over time, the Spirit would also collect a galaxy of femmes fatale occupying basically every square on the D&D alignment chart, but they're a bit thin on the ground in the 1940 comics.
The Spirit is a two-fisted criminologist, probably the best to ever wear the "suit + domino mask" costume, and embodies the pulp detective technique of Getting the Tar Beat Out of You Until You Get to the Bottom of Things. And of course you probably already knew all of that.
The Spirit also handed out little tombstone calling cards/messages for his first few appearances, which I think is neat. (The Spirit, "The Origin of the Spirit", June 2, 1940)
ADDENDUM:
However could I have forgotten that the Spirit also had a flying car, and one of the goofiest-looking ones in comics, to boot.
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