The Stop Button

It’s a good thing Spirit cleared his name since he needs Dolan’s official recommendation this strip.

FDR has just signed the Selective Training and Service Act—a peacetime draft—and, being a good jingoist, the Spirit wants to sign up. He’s got some conditions, however. He doesn’t want to reveal his identity and he wants to be put to good use (based on his skills).

The Army thinks he’ll make a good espionage agent, especially when the Spirit immediately uncovers a spy in the Army recruitment office. As a try-out for the Army, he roots out the rest of the spies, who call him “Americano” but also have guys named Adolf. Spirit still isn’t willing to be specific about which foreign powers are the baddies.

The action’s pretty straightforward, with Spirit tracking the bad guys back to their hideout and taking them out. He’s got Ebony along for backup, so there’s some comedy action involving Ebony flying the autoplane and seeing trouble on the ground.

Dolan’s particularly pissy about Spirit this strip. Dolan’s jealous about Spirit breaking all the big cases, a bit of character development Eisner’s had on a slow boil for a while now, though it never made sense when Dolan was lowkey protecting the Spirit from the rest of the police force.

The jealousy just leads to banter—and whining—as the Army comes to realize having the Spirit on the payroll will work out, after all.

While it’s an interesting attempt at being timely—though the draft was for twenty-one to forty-five and the Spirit says it’s just until thirty-five, so they needed some copy-editing—it’s also just propaganda. At times well-illustrated propaganda, to be sure, but there’s no oompf to the story.

And Spirit mansplaining the United States being the only place on Earth where a man can live in freedom and peace to Ebony (thankfully in long shot in one of those pretty propaganda panels) is one hell of a flex.