Will Eisner (writer, inker), Bob Palmer (penciller, inker), John Spranger (penciller)
The Spirit #304: The Last Trolley (1944)
Distributed by the Register and Tribune Syndicate
‘The Last Trolley’ was a collaboration between Will Eisner, The Spirit’s creator, and his two assistants, Bob Palmer and John Spranger […]. Palmer’s greatest single achievement in is his breath-taking splash page showing the Lilliputian trolley trekking through a waterside neighbourhood of towering and imposing factories, deserted warehouses, empty scabby lots and rickety wooden piers. […] There’s not a sign to be seen of a single human being. The lights of Central City are there in the background, but they, and the people who inhabit the terrain lit by them, are a very long way away indeed. It is as if Palmer had taken the first few seconds of the film noir ‘Lady On A Train,’ with its brief depiction of a similar scene, and decided to show how comics could approach the same brief with a far greater measure of ambition and audacity.
Palmer’s dazzling high-angle depiction spells out with merciless clarity a landscape that’s almost as bereft of light as it is of activity. Hemmed in by two immense industrial buildings and clanking forwards on tramlines that lead without chance of digression into even-more desolate territory, the trolley’s journey is immediately marked out as one characterised by vulnerability and drudgery. But despite the static nature of the drawing, the sense of a considerable incline created by the point-of-view adopted by Palmer also insists that the trolley will trundle onwards until it leaves the scene behind […].
—Colin Smith, The Radical Noirish Style of ‘The Last Trolley’, in Shelfdust