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The Mystery Of The Spirit Action Adventure Trading Cards

Christopher Irving of The Drawn Word, writes: I've done about 28 Kickstarter campaigns at this point, but this one is a doozy. A little backstory here: A few years ago, Mike Allred was kind enough to let me make a set of Madman trading cards with 3D conversions by our friend Christian LeBlanc. It did great, but was a ton of work, in everything from writing and designing to hand sorting and packing the cards for backers.

But, man, was it a blast, so much that I stuck with trading cards, creating another Madman set (the Madman 25! waxpack), a set of Jeffrey Brown's Incredible Change-Bots, cards for the Eagle Force toy line, and my very own series of comics history cards called Four Color.

I've been chatting with Denis Kitchen for the past few years about everything from comics history to publishing and, of course, trading cards.
The Spirit by Will Eisner was my great white whale. Luckily for me, Denis liked the idea and we were able to coordinate a deal with Carl and Nancy Gropper of the Eisner family.

The Mystery Of The Spirit Action Adventure Trading Cards

And here I am, weeks later, with about a week left to fund The Spirit Action Adventure Mystery trading cards. There are character cards on The Spirit, his friends, villains, and femme fatales; Mise en scene cards borrow the cinematic term to discuss Eisner's distinctive splash pages; Case Files cards highlight some of The Spirit's bigger adventures; and there are gallery cards featuring covers, original art, and some other rare surprises.

Surprises: Stacey Kitchen has sent me scans of the artwork and, every once in a while, there's a surprise I never knew existed!

At this point, the entire 50-card set is funded, with 20 of the cards upgraded to a vintage chipback stock (so they're like the old Batman movie cards of 1989, or practically anything from Topps' up until then), and more upgrades to come.

The Mystery Of The Spirit Action Adventure Trading Cards

All the cards are already written and designed, with a handful left to be recolored off original art or high resolution photostat scans.

I've never worked this much on a card set before, nor have I ever put more pressure on myself to make it perfect.

Will Eisner's The Spirit, a comic book published from 1940 to 1952 in Sunday comics sections, is where you go to see some of the earliest and best experimentation in the narrative comics form. It really picked up after Will came back from serving in World War II (he'd had a stable of ghost artists take it over while he was away), embracing a level of human interest unparalleled in comics of the time.

The Mystery Of The Spirit Action Adventure Trading Cards

I make The Spirit essential as a source of comics storytelling in my History of Visual Communication and Comic Book History classes at Virginia Commonwealth University: there's a wealth to be learned from one seven-page story.

And Will Eisner was (and still is) one of my heroes. Every chance I had to meet or interview him when starting out in this field (back in those crazy days of the late '90s) I hopped on, because he was not only always a pleasure to talk with–but beyond gracious, generous, and kind.

The Mystery Of The Spirit Action Adventure Trading Cards

So, that's the pressure I feel working on these. My goal with it is to package his stories and characters in a way that do justice to the work Eisner and company (including no one less than Jules Feiffer, Lou Fine, and Wally Wood!) created.

Since Will Eisner is no longer with us to be the judge, I'm leaving it up to the mega-Spirit fans to let me know.

This set is super-limited, as in only backers to the Kickstarter can get a set. After the campaign wraps, I won't hold any stock and will not have any for sale. I've got a week left to get the word out to the die-hard fans and interested newcomers. After that, they go to press, to backers–

And back to Wildwood Cemetery.

The Mystery Of The Spirit Action Adventure Trading CardsThe Mystery Of The Spirit Action Adventure Trading Cards  The Mystery Of The Spirit Action Adventure Trading Cards

Christopher Irving is a professor of media studies at Virginia Commonwealth University's Communication Arts department. He has prior worked as a comic book journalist for Comic Book Artist magazine and with his own Graphic NYC (with Seth Kushner). His books include Leaping Tall Buildings: The Origins of American Comics and The Blue Beetle Companion.


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Rich JohnstonAbout Rich Johnston

Founder of Bleeding Cool. The longest-serving digital news reporter in the world, since 1992. Author of The Flying Friar, Holed Up, The Avengefuls, Doctor Who: Room With A Deja Vu, The Many Murders Of Miss Cranbourne, Chase Variant. Lives in South-West London, works from Blacks on Dean Street, shops at Piranha Comics. Father of two. Political cartoonist.
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