The entire strip seems to be just a way to do a panel of Spirit with a Tommy gun taking out the mob. It’s a striking visual, and the strip itself is solid, but Gang Warfare is more like Gang Meddling.

The strip opens with the Spirit saving a gangster from getting rubbed out. Spirit helps him get away—to meet later in Wildwood Cemetery—and deals with the other crooks, then running himself to escape the police because he’s a wanted man (something the strip doesn’t exactly remember as much as not address).

The crook meeting the Spirit in Wildwood is just a way for the Spirit to meet the crime boss, who will then turn out to be the head of an anti-crime society organization. So, eventually, it’ll all be about Spirit trying to take out a corrupt businessman.

One with friends in city hall, which means Commissioner Dolan’s working both sides of the street. The mayor is sure his pal isn’t a crook, Dolan’s sure the Spirit wouldn’t steer them wrong.

Eventually, it leads to limited gang-busting action sequences, with more emphasis on Spirit (and Dolan) uncovering the boss’s guilt.

Ebony will have a fairly significant role in the resolution, since he’s the only friend the Spirit’s got (as Dolan can’t take too active a part; Spirit’s still wanted for murder, after all). It’s another of those strange “Ebony’s a cute character but looks like Confederate propaganda” vibes. The racism hurts the comedic sidekick potential.

There’s also a very strange sequence—entirely done in extreme long shot—where the Spirit pulls a gun on the crime boss in public, presumably to force a confession, only to immediately give it up when someone tells him such behavior’s illegal. For a thin strip, strung together between set pieces, Warfare does all right.

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.

Despite the immediate follow-up to last strip, we still don’t get a big Spirit versus Orang scene. Spirit will track Orang to the ends of the Earth (well, Sumatra), but they never have a real, intellectual or physical showdown. Instead, they’re still in slightly different stories; ships passing in the night.

The strip opens with Spirit recounting last week’s conclusion—Orang is apparently dead, at his own hand. No real mention of him killing his creator, which is important since after Orang drags himself out of the river and to a doctor, he’s ready to be released on his own recognizance. His suicide attempt last strip came after he killed his creator, but he’s forgotten that guilt. And no one’s looking for the mad scientist.

Or at least not Commissioner Dolan, who goes to the doctor’s to see the talking ape. Dolan can’t come up with a reason to hold Orang, so instead, he offers him a place to crash while Dolan tries to find a law Orang’s existence violates.

Bored of waiting and seeing an opportunity after Ellen Dolan comes in and passes out at the sight of him, Orang kidnaps her and heads back to the jungle to rule among the lower apes.

All of these events occur in the first four pages of the strip (including the splash page); the remainder is the Spirit tracking Ellen and Orang through the Sumatran jungle and getting involved in the politics of Orang’s found tribe. Now, those politics involve fights to the death and the Spirit tied to a stake, but they’re just political squabbles. Spirit and Ellen are in a riff on a Tarzan story, complete with swinging on vines and (unlikely) punch outs with orangutans.

Then the finale—weeks and weeks after the start of the strip—gives Ellen and Spirit their first private moment (despite implying, you know, weeks and weeks of them).

Orang remains a very sympathetic villain and shirtless Spirit hacking through the jungle is definitely a vibe, so it all works out quite well. It’s just too bad Orang and Spirit never got to talk philosophy.