The Stop Button

Ebony’s X-Ray Eyes show the problem with caricature, racist and otherwise. At the start of the strip, Ebony gets some of the Spirit’s x-ray juice in his eyes and can see through things. He quickly happens across some crooks who’ve decided to go into the crooked optometry racket. Once they meet Ebony and get a load of his peepers, however, they decide to become bank robbers.

Spirit discovers the lair in a mess (assuming Ebony’s been kidnapped and didn’t just have a damaging reaction to the x-ray juice) and starts tracking Ebony down. Now, Spirit’s not going to learn exactly what happened until the last page or so—and it might be more implied than explicit—so he’s just going to luck into conclusions and discoveries. He’s assuming Ebony’s been kidnapped along with the x-ray juice—the x-ray juice being the prize here.

Ebony will have some ups and downs with the first set of crooks, who will pass him off to a second set pretty quickly. It’s about young Ebony being moved from one traumatizing situation or another. Eisner and studio address that situation in the writing, albeit with more humor than angst, but the reader’s clearly supposed to be sympathetic to Ebony’s plight. Except then he’s rendered as usual, in a racist caricature one wouldn’t want to describe objectively in polite company.

Once Ebony realizes the Spirit is trying to stop the crooks, he takes (some) matters into his own hands, with the rest working out in payroll (i.e. criminals being a superstitious and cowardly lot and not ready for the Spirit). Ebony’s got agency, eventually, even though his clumsiness is a principal characteristic.

Outside being horrifically visually racist, it’s a good strip. It’s well-paced and the comic relief (one of the crooks) is good; Spirit is proving it can scale big action to small and stay nimble with its genres.