Will Eisner (editor, script, pencils, inks)
Joe Kubert (colors)
Sam Rosen (letters)
The Tale of the Dictator’s Reform is not Spirit’s biggest creative swing to date, but the strip is definitely the wildest. Hitler coming to the United States on a fact-finding mission—only to have a change of heart thanks to Spirit’s intervention—will forever be singular. Eisner and studio know the strip won’t age well, with the ending acknowledging certain inevitables, but it’s also a strip from summer 1941. It’s five months before Pearl Harbor, it’s years before learning the extent of the Holocaust; it’s incredibly naive, but earnestly so.
The splash page is a lengthy expository paragraph (with humorous little illustrations) explaining Hitler—who is unnamed because, remember, at this point, the United States still had diplomatic relations with Germany—wants to see what’s going on in the United States and help people see they should be on his side. Again, it’s earnestly done, so it’s not like Eisner knew the Nazis got a bunch of their ideas from the United States, its politicians, and its citizenry. Instead, Hitler’s going to find out no one here likes him, fascism, or any of the hate he’s selling.
Good thing Hitler went to Central City instead of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The strip takes its subject from a council of patriotic hoboes to a couple little kids getting the better of him. Dolan’s going to hear about the visit from the kids’ father and will sound an alarm. By that time, Hitler’s found his way to Wildwood Cemetery, where Spirit hosts him for some light exposition and lighter debating. It doesn’t take much for Hitler to see the error of his ways, just some good, plain talk from the Spirit.
The final page of the strip has Eisner resetting the stage, but there’s also some follow-up to the police’s search. Sight gags with Hitler were probably a lot funnier in summer 1941 than later, but they’re still a flex at that point. As a comic strip, The Spirit has always been produced in a world with Nazi Germany; it just took a while to acknowledge it in the story content, with Spirit only relatively recently getting into the spy game. And they’re still cagey about proper nouns—the “Dictator” comes from the country of Europe in the strip… Eisner and studio had their reasons, but those reasons might be too constraining for their ambitions here.
Technically, there’s not a lot going on with the strip’s execution. Some good composition choices, the kids in the park are funny, but the strip fails in its didactic efforts. It’s thin.
Though, right on for them running with it. Eisner and studio probably didn’t know the extent of Nazi sympathy in the United States at the time, but they knew some of it, and they delivered a definite condemnation.
Weird strip.
