To answer that we must first go back to the late 1940s when Will Eisner tried to start a syndicated strip called Nubbin - "a kind of male Orphan Annie" (Eisner - Art of Will Eisner, 1982). After several attempts at the strip, Eisner tried to inco rporate some of his material into a comic book devoted to the character, along with some new material which would feature Nubbin's friend, John Law. During 1948, Eisner decided to swap the title of the book around and produced the first (and only) issue o f John Law Detective. The comic featured three stories of John Law, two of which included Nubbin. Indeed, one of the stories, "Affair of the Half Dead Mr. Lox" predominantly features Nubbin and Law only appears in a few panels. Intended to be the fourth ti tle in Eisner's line of self-published comics - it never made it to the news stands after the failure of Eisner's first two titles: Baseball Comics and Kewpies. Along with Pirate Comics, John Law was shelved away... not quite!

The images above show The Spirit splash pages which were adapted from the John Law book.

For Eisner was able to incorporate much of the material in that first issue of John Law into his Spirit sections during 1950. Law was redrawn as The Spirit, Nubbin as Willum Waif or Sammy and Police Commissioner Bunyan as Police Commissioner Dolan.

These two images show the orginal first John Law page and The Spirit adaptation.

The story "Meet John Law" was tran sformed into the two part "Sand Saref" story published on January 8 and 15, 1950 - it included three new pages as well as much of the dialogue being rewritten to fit in with The Spirit. The Spirit story is today regarded as a classic, although as cat yron wode laments in Will Eisner's John Law Detective #1 (published some 35 years later by Eclipse Comics in 1983) "it cannot compare to the beauty of the original version".

Eventually seeing print by Eclipse Comics in 1983, "John Law Detective"#1 hits the stands.

The character is being revived by Gary Chaloner, and a preview can be found here