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.

Orang is a Frankenstein story from the monster’s perspective. The Spirit is still around, but he doesn’t have anything to do with the actual action of the strip. Instead, it’s the sad tale of Orang, an orangutan, turned into a being with human-level intelligence thanks to a mad scientist.

Eisner and studio do a fabulous job setting up the story. There’s a scientist arriving from war-torn Europe, escaped and ready to reunite with his daughter, Elsa, in his friend’s care. Little does Elsa’s father know his friend is a fiend and has used parts of Elsa’s brain to make Orang smarter. He has left Elsa a savage.

So we get a cave girl and an orangutan in a suit for the action here. There ought to be more tripping on tropes, but somehow there isn’t. Eisner avoids sentimentality, even as horrifying tragedies unfold, even as Orang comes to the realization he does not want the burden of reason, and begs his creator for mercy.

There’s some excellent art. Lots of establishing panels this strip, setting the stage, but also giving Eisner a chance to summarize in long shot. The strip’s rapidly paced; once Orang decides he wants to devolve, it’s pretty much all action. Fight, chase, fight, tragic finish, with the Spirit only arriving to provide commentary on the sad situation.

Without ever having met Orang himself.

The Spirit’s subplot is very moody. He gets drawn into Elsa’s father’s troubles, having gone to meet the scientist to ask about some experiments. Long shadows as he enters and exits through balconies and so on. The father’s anguish gets some attention, too. Not verbalized like Orang’s will be, but very carefully visualized. Orang’s got its Frankenstein ambitions and whatnot, but the strip excels because of the craft on display, where Eisner and studio flex, where they do not. It’s tragic. And lovely. Just excellent work all around.