A cry in the night and the cold hand of death closes around the throat of another victim in Central City. Only one man can relinquish the metropolis from the terrifying grip of a criminal mastermind. They call this masked savior ‘The Spirit.’

Born from shadow and mystery, Will Eisner’s deathless hero returns in a re-creation of the The Spirit’s final two issues. Coinciding with Frank Miller’s upcoming The Spirit movie January 2009, Will Eisner’s The Spirit: a Pop-Up Graphic Novel spins a noir tale of blackmail, murder, and espionage innovatively rendered in seven full color pop-up spreads. Reborn, The Spirit breaks out of the conventional comic book frame, animating the vigor and dynamism of Eisner’s original vision. Designed by renowned paper engineer Bruce Foster, creator of The Pop-up Book of Celebrity Meltdowns and designer of the Caldecott-nominated Little Red Riding Hood, Will Eisner’s The Spirit: A Pop-Up Graphic Novel breathes vibrant new life into Eisner’s gritty narrative.

With The Spirit (1940), Will Eisner pioneered a style that instigated a historic shift in the comic book genre. Set in the rough underbelly of an American city, The Spirit follows the adventures of a vengeful detective, returned from the dead to pursue a mysterious criminal syndicate. Eisner’s visceral work departed from the melodrama of superhero serials, choosing instead to focus on the tragedy, romance, and world-weary humor of his characters. Running from 1940 to 1952, The Spirit appeared in as many as twenty newspapers, with multiple reprints and compilations throughout the years—kept alive by the lasting allure of its undying hero.

FEATURES

Will Eisner’s The Spirit: A Pop-Up Graphic Novel includes an immense array of interactive features. Each scene comes alive with expansive panoramic cityscapes, three-dimensional action sequence pop-outs, frame-by-frame expanding mini-booklets, and scene-change pullouts. Re-colored and ingeniously renovated, the novel design animates the vigorous action of The Spirit’s final exploits with an inventiveness that matches Eisner’s original imagination. From the noir aficionado to the comic book enthusiast, fans will celebrate this recasting of Eisner’s masterpiece that heralds a new interactive format for sequential art.

AUTHORS

Dubbed the “Most influential comic book artist of all time,” Will Eisner began his professional comic career at the age of nineteen. Over the next sixty-eight years he changed the world of comics, fathering the graphic novel and expanding the literary potential of the genre. Eisner’s influence extended into generations of comic book authors and artist including Marvel’s Stan Lee, Batman creator Bob Kane, and Watchmen author Alan Moore. Notably the highest award in the world of comics is aptly named the Will Eisner Award.

With the first issues of The Spirit in 1940 Eisner began to differentiate his work, creating gritty characters shaped by the vice and violence of their urban worlds. Eisner’s acclaimed work on The Spirit served as the definitive prototype for the graphic novel—a phrase he would later coin. Eisner worked relentlessly into his old age, producing a new work almost every year until his death in 2004. His notable graphic novels and work includes: Sundiata: A Legend of Africa, Moby Dick, A Contract with God, and the academic work Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative.

Bruce Foster is one of the most adept and acclaimed contemporary paper engineers. Whether turning our solar system into a tactile three-dimensional galaxy in Galileo’s Universe (2005) or recreating the indelible drama of pop culture in the Pop-Up Book of Celebrity Meltdowns, Foster has executed some of the most complex and animate pop-up designs to date. Foster currently works and lives in Houston.