From the splash page, Wanted Dead or Alive promises a lot and delivers very little. Spirit is indeed wanted, and apparently dead or alive, but the police manhunts never give him the slightest trouble. Not even when he breaks into the police station and kidnaps Dolan and the Mayor. Spirit’s very cocky this strip, and oddly self-destructive.
He’s wanted because he’s broken a murder suspect out of jail. The murdered is a foreign general who is in exile in the United States because the Nazis took over his country. The cops found the suspect going through the general’s papers. Spirit knows the general might have Nazi agents after him—the general was active in the resistance even in exile—and doesn’t think his execution by firing squad suggests a lone gunman. The reader gets all these details after Spirit has kidnapped Dolan and the Mayor (which comes after Ellen has a panel bitching out her dad for putting out the APB on Spirit). Spirit presents these details at the murder scene, which has no signs of ongoing police investigation, even though Spirit broke the suspect out before Dolan could even question him.
We find out the “not talking to Dolan yet” detail later, after the suspect slugs Ebony (who’s babysitting him) and heads out to try to get the Commissioner to believe him about the Nazi agents. But it wouldn’t matter because Dolan agrees with Spirit’s assessment after a reenactment at the crime scene, where the Spirit repeatedly humiliates the Mayor. Now, the Mayor has been a stuffed-shirt and looked the other way at significant corruption, but Spirit’s really going for it this strip. The Mayor tells Dolan to up the manhunt and charges because of the whole humiliation thing. For the first third of Wanted, it seems significant.
It is not significant. It goes away entirely because the suspect runs into Ellen at the police station before he can talk to Dolan, so they can go off trying to find the Spirit. Except the Nazis have captured the Spirit, who came up with a plan to get captured and tortured until they felt comfortable enough talking in front of him, all so he could discover their actual hideout.
Certainly this actual hideout will be important to the narrative and host a fantastic finale showdown between Spirit and the Nazi scum.
Or not.
Lots of “or nots” this strip. Eisner and studio get ideas every page or two, but they burn through them quickly and need something else. Nothing goes anywhere. And while I’ve been mentioning the Nazi angle a bunch, it’s kind of not important enough. Dolan and the Mayor certainly haven’t been paying attention to the Spirit comic strip each week, which would have warned them about the various dangers from the Axis powers, even in the relative security of Central City. Except, of course, Ellen went to Occupied France on an adventure, and the Mayor and Dolan literally just had bad guys take advantage of the city during air raid drills.
Eisner and studio keep it together—there’s some solid fisticuffs and Spirit’s patriotic swagger (even during torture) is affable—but there’s some warping in the verisimilitude. Wanted’s too full of hot air, narratively speaking, and Eisner never finds anything substantial. Never even tries.