Eisner's Hawks of the Seas

The new film version of Will Eisner's The Spirit opened wide on Christmas Day this week, and the reviews have not been kind. Two days later, the Rotten Tomatoes review-aggregation site pegs the film as only 16% fresh. While it's too soon to gauge the film's relative box office success, the grade breakdown at BoxOfficeMojo shows an interesting phenomenon: the distribution is an inverse bell curve. Admittedly based on the site's users' self-reporting, there's a love-it-or-hate-it reaction to the film, which I would think (not that I know much about these things) isn't a good omen. I think Neil Gaiman might be right about this - Frank Miller's film version of The Spirit seems closer in tone and presentation to Miller's own Sin City than to Eisner's vision and classic Spirit stories.

Since we're talking about Eisner, here's a sample of his pre-Spirit work. In 1937, Eisner, using the pseudonym Willis B. Rensie, created a weekly newspaper strip called Hawks of the Seas, a pirate adventure set in Caribbean during the 18th century. Years later, the publishers of Jumbo Comics would re-purpose those strips to fit the standard comic book format - this is one of those re-purposed stories, from Jumbo Comics #36, published in 1942.