"the only real middle-class crime-fighter"

As usual in almost any Will Eisner SPIRIT tale there is humor, there is innuendo, there is implied BDSM and Denny Colt (The Spirit) winds up in some kind of version of male bondage. He is constantly beaten, battered, abused and often by some of the most beautifully rendered women and "dames" as ever graced a comic strip. He was such a great stoic emblem of what a "real man" was, once upon a time- a lunkhead, powerful and always lovable.

The Spirit is a fictional masked crime-fighter created by cartoonist Will Eisner. He first appeared June 2, 1940 in "The Spirit Section", the colloquial name given to a 16-page Sunday supplement, distributed to 20 newspapers by the Register and Tribune Syndicate and reaching five million readers during the 1940s. From the 1960s to 1980s, a handful of new Eisner Spirit stories appeared in Harvey Comics and elsewhere, and Warren Publishing and Kitchen Sink Press variously reprinted the feature in black-and-white comics magazines and in color comic books. In the 1990s and 2000s, Kitchen Sink Press and DC Comics also published new Spirit stories by other writers and artists.