ack when I was a pre-teen, I started reading The Spirit by Will Eisner. The Spirit was a superhero whose costume was a mask and a blue suit, and whose only powers were his fists, his stamina, his constitution and his charm. And also he was clever – he could outsmart villains and bring them to justice.

But what made The Spirit so very amazing to me as a young kid were the backgrounds. Oh, it might have been “Central City” but everyone knew it was New York City. The streets were filled with litter, the brick buildings were worn and leaning, the puddles oily, and the sewers endless. This urban decay was magnificent. Only later revisionist Batman comics came close to the corruption, and it was still forced. Will Eisner’s city was truly a beautifully frightening place.

So I was in a bookstore and found a copy of Will Eisner: New York City. This was just storytelling without the Spirit, focusing on the lives of those living in this dirty monolith. Some of the stories dwelt with people getting their comeuppance. Or innocents watching their lives crumble. Or snapshots of the city, brief vignettes that told a tale about “what happened”. Most of them were quite good, and a couple of them nightmare fuel.

But yes, Eisner was the king of the comic book back in its heyday. His cities stood out in painstaking detail. For $12, I was very happy to find it and enjoyed reading it before shutting off the light and the end of my sunny Florida day. In a way, it took be back to my childhood. Who knew that Memory Lane was such a dirty worn place?

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