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Hark, the Herald Tribune Sings!
Hark, the Herald Tribune Sings! A Look at a Very Special Issue of New York Sunday Magazine by Roy Thomas [An Informational Addendum to What Has Gone Before]
B
y the start of 1966, the New York Herald Tribune was nearing the end of a long and colorful career as a daily newspaper, but it was still a force to be reckoned with.
The so-called New Journalism, for example, was represented in its pages by the irrepressible Tom Wolfe, whose 1965 article about Hugh Hefner’s life style and revolving round bed had made a strong impres-
sion on neo-Manhattanite R.T. (not to mention a lot of other people). The paper’s Sunday supplement magazine New York, in fact, would—after the Herald Trib itself folded its U.S. tents a few years later, leaving only its famed International edition— spin off into a separate and influential monthly magazine. But on Sunday, January 9, 1966, as documented earlier by Michael T. Gilbert, New York discovered comic books in general… and The Spirit in particular.
Will Eisner—“reasonably young and still reasonably grand,” in Marilyn Mercer’s pithy phrase—in 1965.
“The Great Comics Revival,” heralded the Trib’s cover, although the photo there was merely of a New York skyline. There were six comics-oriented pieces in that landmark issue, and all but three of them—articles on the campy Batman TV show set to debut the very next night, and on the upcoming Broadway musical It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s SUPERMAN, set for a March 29 opening, and the infamous Lee-Kirby interview reprinted in The Jack Kirby Collector #18—had at least a tangential connection with Will Eisner’s quirky plainclothes super-hero, who had been out of the public limelight for a decade and a half. The magazine’s lead article, accompanied by a photo of “Batman” reading a newspaper on the subway, was written by cartoonist/satirist Jules Feiffer, whose groundbreaking 1965 book The Great Comic Book Heroes had made writing about old comics almost respectable in some circles. His “Pop-Sociology” listed Jerry Siegel, Bob Kane, Jack Cole, and Will Eisner (“authors” of Superman, Batman, Plastic Man, and The Spirit, respectively), as “the writers who influenced me,” in contrast to the usual list of respectable men of letters such as “Blake, Lawrence, Emerson, and Whitman.” Simply stated, Feiffer’s theme was: “To know the true temper of a nation’s people, turn not to its sociologists, but to its junk.” He maintains that “there is room, important room, for junk in our culture… But good Lord, let’s not make it respectable!” Nowhere in Feiffer’s article, however, does the playwright of Little Murders and the future screenwriter of Carnal Knowledge bother to mention that he was once Eisner’s assistant on the weekly Spirit strip. The Spirit just goes on… and on… and on. Roy Thomas’ wife Dann bought this cover for him because of his own love-hate relationship with his aracari toucan, Gonzo. [1990 Kitchen Sink Spirit #67 comics cover ©1999 Will Eisner; from the collection of R.T.]
That was left to his and Eisner’s onetime colleague, Marilyn Mercer, who may well have been the catalyst for getting the old