Lost Horizons
I’ve been spending much of March reading Will Eisner’s The Spirit (as reprinted by DC Comics), and trying to put it in some sort of context, which involves more reading (of Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates and Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy). It hasn’t been a particularly successful project, because I haven’t the inclination to drown in the details of a story world, a habit which seems to take up so much time in comics criticism. While I can see that the post-war Spirit is technically more interesting and does a better job exploring the narrative possibilities of comics as a medium, I found myself more interested in Eisner’s short run before the war, when he was trying to sort out the characters and figure out what made them tick – in later episodes, he expects them to run like clockwork, which they obligingly do (but which I don’t find particularly interesting).