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Will Eisner’s The Spirit For Sale

Published: January 29, 2026 1 minute 5 comments

The estate of Will Eisner is putting the entire output of Will Eisner that they control through copyright and trademark up for sale, including The Spirit and all of Eisner’s graphic novels and comics.

opening panel of the first daily The Spirit comic strip from October 13, 1941 by Will Eisner

George Gene Gustines for The New York Times reports (or here):

Up for grabs are Eisner’s graphic novels, children’s books and instruction manuals for creating comics. Also included in the sale are the many characters he created, most notably the Spirit, the influential masked crime fighter who debuted in 1940 and featured in stories that are noteworthy for their moral realism, mature themes, genre fluidity and inventive page design.

Eisner’s last work featuring the Spirit, a 72-page story from 1996 called “The Spirit Returns,” was never published. It, too, is up for sale.

The Spirit by Will Eisner – June 2, 1940 (via Major Spoilers)

Calculating the value of an artist’s archive is not an exact science. “Basically, there’s three different methods that are commonly used to value intellectual property,” said Lori E. Lesser, who leads the intellectual property practice at the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. “And they’re called, in shorthand, the income, market and cost method.”

Applying the first two methods, she explained, “you can price the asset based on your own estimated future income stream from products and licensing fees, or you can analyze data of other similar characters that were sold.”

The hitch in a high bid for control of is that the most famous of the properties, The Spirit, has been published in its entirety in a number formats, most recently in the DC Comics hardcover The Spirit Archives. Also complicating the sale for any buyers is that the copyright renewal was never registered so all the original Spirit comics from 1940 to 1952 are in public domain and available on the world wide web. There is also a question of trademark.

The Spirit by Will Eisner, The News of Boca Raton

The only Will Eisner Spirit comics never collected, and still under copyright as I would assume every other Spirit story since the 1960s, is the short run of the daily comic strip he did for The News of Boca Raton in 1991/92.

But that does leave a wealth of Will Eisner material in the form of graphic novels and historical writings, including The Spirit from the 1960s until his death. Well, except for…

His decades in the employ of the U.S. Government on PS: The Preventive Maintenance Monthly and Eisner’s other projects for the Armed Forces belongs to the public as the government cannot copyright materials.

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Comments 5

  1. Well, I know what to add to my wishlist if/when I ever won the powerball…

  2. I’m curious to see what’ll go for. BTW, the Newark Star Ledger, I miss you.

  3. I’d imagine that the SPIRIT movie secured the trademark for the character pretty well, but yes, Eisner chose not to renew any of his copyrights, because, it’s reputed, he couldn’t afford the weekly fees it would have cost him to renew each weekly SPIRIT section in the years 1968 through 1980; full-scale reprinting by Denis Kitchen began in 1973, followed by Jim Warren in in 1974-76, then back to Kitchen in ’77-92, and most recently, DC in 2000-09, so he really wasn’t getting a great deal of income from those reprints till well after the copyrights had expired. Instead, he depended purely on his trademark rights to protect his character rights. No reputable comics publishers would ever have reprinted his work without paying him while he was alive despite them all being p.d., and his reputation as a comics icon via the Eisner Awards has pretty well also protected his work to date. My guess is that the purchaser of the SPIRIT i.p. will be a publisher who intends to create new SPIRIT comics rather than someone who wants to re-reprint the SPIRIT ARCHIVES books. As such, it would likely be a toss-up between DC, Marvel, or Image, or one of the better-funded indie publishers, i.e. Dynamite, I.D.W., or Dark Horse. DC did new material from 2009-2011, Dynamite from 2015-18, and Dark Horse in 2016. None sold well enough to be profitable because they were licensed; had any of them owned the character outright, it may well have changed their status as ongoing titles. Kitchen and DC printed Eisner’s original non-Spirit ’70s-’90s material, and DC could consider those volumes as valuable properties for its in-print library of books. Apparently, original SPIRIT publisher Everett Arnold, who copyrighted all of them in their first printings, gave Eisner full or partial rights prior to Fiction House’s 1952 five-issue series of reprints; in ’66-’67, Leon Harvey reprinted two issues worth of reprints, including a new story by Eisner, and both were copyrighted under Eisner’s name. If Arnold retained any rights in the ’50s, and there’s no way to know for sure, DC may well have bought partial rights to the original stories when they bought out all of Arnold’s comics in 1956, even if they were unaware of it. It will be interesting to see which of these publishers–or even some (uneducated) entrepreneur with lots of cash decides to throw a lot of money at trademark rights to an esteemed property with very limited commercial prospects as reprint collections, since all of the golden-age material is easily obtainable in 26 hardcover volumes of THE SPIRIT ARCHIVES on the secondary market. The most comparable library of licensed works are Bill Gaines’ E.C. LIBRARY, which have been reprinted virtually in its entirety several times by several publishers and remains in print.

  4. That’s Preventive Maintenance Monthly, not Preventable Maintenance Monthly. Sergeant Half-Track will now see you in his office.

    1. The SNAFU has been corrected, no need to get Sarge involved.

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