Now THAT'S the Spirit!

The archaeological dig through my past continues as old files are sorted and full closets are emptied, yielding all sorts of wonderful and forgotten (or, in some cases, wonderfully forgotten!) treasures, personal and historic. Including an amazing and previously unknown piece of work by a seminal creator of the comics business; a Google search of said work produced zero results; I'm in touch with the creator's official biographer and we will be pursuing, at some point soon, a way to get this into publication with the family's blessing...but that's neither here nor there! We were, after all, talking about me.

Circa 1987, I apparently wrote up a hunch of ideas and sample scripts to submit to Cracked Magazine, the long-running Mad impersonator. One was a general piece, "What If Everybody Got In On The Max Headroom Craze?" (My guess is the result would have been that they too would be a forgotten pop cultural reference by now.) I also pitched a couple of ideas, "Wrestling From the Dark Side" and "The Cable-Ready World of Skeeter Kornfeld," an ongoing feature that would have allowed for all sorts of TV parodies. AND, "The Spookit," a parody of Will Eisner's The Spirit! My guess is the late-1980s TV movie had recently aired and, being an Eisner fan (although, who isn't?), I probably just went with it.

At any rate, I never did sell to Cracked, but my efforts at funny survive. Here, for you to mock and judge harshly (click on images to view them at a readable size), the unpublished script of "The Spookit":

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