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.

It’s another slighter strip, with the Spirit rescuing a damsel in distress from her ex (the titular Ogre Goran), a psychopath who’s just escaped prison.

The opening is the prison break and it’s relatively solid business. The line work is wanting this strip, but the moody long shots of the action are still effective. The action shifts to the damsel, Mary, discussing Ogre’s prison break with her husband. Since it’s a comic strip, Ogre appears immediately following her statement, shooting her husband dead on the spot and ready to kidnap her. Luckily, Mary dowses him in alcohol and sets him (and the apartment) on fire.

Now, we know Ogre gets away because he gets in the shower and turns on the cold water. Also, there’s a panel (maybe the least discernible in the series to date) of Ogre getting away.

Fast forward a few days to Ebony trying to get the Spirit interested in the case. After initially discounting Ebony’s thoughts on Ogre’s survival (Spirit thought the shower was only running because someone wanted a bath), the Spirit agrees with Ebony’s conclusions—Ogre’s alive!

The Spirit tries to find Mary, only to learn she’s gone away with a man entirely wrapped in bandages. Ogre, post-burns. Thanks to Commissioner Dolan giving him information about Ogre’s old hideouts, Spirit heads (by boat) to an abandoned lighthouse where Ogre’s got to be holding Mary. Dolan heads to the lighthouse, too, wanting to beat the Spirit to the punch.

Spirit’s only cleared his “name” of a murder charge in last week’s strip, so Dolan competing with him doesn’t make much sense. It also doesn’t make sense how Spirit gets to the lighthouse by boat, but then his boat disappears and he can’t take it back to shore at the end of the strip.

Also nonsensical is Ogre having a new wife, who can—presumably, more appropriately—beat up Mary.

We don’t even get to see Spirit and Ogre’s fisticuffs.

Not a lot of pay-off in the strip, though it’s nice to see Ebony developing as a sidekick.

It’s also the dottiest the art’s been in ages. The line work gains slide back here.

The splash page for this strip is a newspaper article about the Daily Press declaring its mission to uncover the Spirit’s identity. The article gives a rundown of (some of) the strip so far, including the Spirit being wanted for murder.

That murder will get discussed a few more times—and its “solving” is so simple one wonders why the Spirit waited so long to get it cleared up—and Eisner and studio clearly did not think all their readers were getting through that newspaper article. Every time it comes up, we get extra exposition on the subject. At one point, the mayor makes Commissioner Dolan tell him all about the murder charge only to remember he was in that scene so knows all the information.

Separate from the Spirit’s quest to clear his name, a gangster decides to impersonate the Spirit (all it takes is a blue suit, after all) to commit crimes and taunt the police. Oh, and the Daily Press reporter—in from the war in Europe, but this story’s bigger—gets help from a cop to uncover Spirit’s secrets.

The three subplots never quite converge—the reporter’s adventures stay mostly distinct except when the plot needs to move along a little—and then Dolan gets the ending. In some ways, it’s an entirely functional strip: the Spirit’s (false) murder charge gets resolved. Along the way there’s some humor at the reporter’s expense (Ebony’s contribution) and a variety of action. Besides the Spirit going around town, the gangster impersonating him is out causing trouble. It all leads to some glorious fisticuffs.

While the strip itself isn’t particularly ambitious, Eisner has several art flexes. The repetitive exposition usually gets some inventive panel composition. Even with the heavy-handed finish (Dolan talking about the Spirit being the dark knight the city deserves), it all works out. The art and narrative choices put the relatively slight story over.

The Spirit tries—very gently—a “whodunit,” with the reader getting as much information as Spirit or the cops; more, actually. The whodunit aspect seems half-baked, similar to the rest of the strip. While The Mastermind avoids any of Spirit’s problematic pitfalls, it’s also barely a story.

The strip opens with a mayoral candidate’s aide dying by poison gas, which the coroner can’t figure out. When the candidate visits Dolan to demand action, the Spirit shows up and the candidate remembers Spirit’s wanted for that murder from months ago. The candidate demands Dolan arrest the Spirit, but obviously the Spirit escapes.

One more murder and then the “Mastermind” is after the Spirit too, hiring a kid to deliver a bomb to him. Spirit will enlist the kid’s help, intentionally putting him in harm’s way at one point, as he unravels the case. Except he’s just operating off that early clue the reader also got, so it’s not a lot of unraveling.

The last few pages have the Spirit getting in a fight with the villain. Lots of empty backgrounds as they punch it out. Even the finish is slight, with Eisner and studio wrapping the whole thing in the last couple panels, including the villain’s motives. Given the strip starts promising a “Mastermind”—standing over a pile of skulls on the splash page—having the villain not just be a done-in-one, but also be far from devious and really just in possession of explosives and poisons the cops can’t identify.

There are some nice establishing shot panels of the city—long shots with good angles and nice line work. The action at the end is fine; it just dawdles through action and hurries through the exposition.

Even as the least impressive of Spirit so far, it’s still rock solid work, technically speaking. Eisner just seems like he’s run out of things to try this one.

Outside that gorgeous splash page, of course.