Buzzboy

[Fairportfan]

Just for curiosity's sake, how many of us recognise what this page is parodying?

[Jabberwonky]

I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about...
Good Lord! (choke)

[Jabberwonky]

Oh yeah...
Thanks for another archive trawl.
(When do you have time for a life?)

[Dave]

I'm going to make a wild guess that it's a takeoff on "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet" but I'm well prepared to be wrong.

[Fairportfan]

Nope. It's actually a parody (right down to the format of The Spirit Section) of the opening page of the one of the segments of the final Spirit adventures, "The Spirit on the Moon", drawn by EC comics artist Wally Wood.

Here's the actual Wood first page of the first segment (The Spirit was distributed to newspapers as a comic-book-size Sunday colour supplement):



and here's a full version of a Spirit Section splash page (Eisner generally worked the strip title into his splash pages):



...and, just for the heck of it, here's the cover from Spirit #2 by Harvey Comics (Casper the Friendly Ghost, etc.), a twenty-five cent 1966 book reprinting eight of the Spirit Sections...