The new adventures of Spirit revisit the character created by Will Eisner in the 1940s, extending many of its contents to today's world. In issue 18, Spirit travels to Egypt and tries to solve a case involving the theft of twelve mummies from the Cairo Museum. At the beginning of the comic, Spirit has a nightmare in which multiple mummies attack him, which demonstrates the usual role of mummies in fiction as terrifying monsters.
As early as his arrival in Cairo, the character compares the pyramids of Giza, as seen from the plane window to those of Las Vegas. This simple remark explicitly shows a perspective on the past as entertainment: Egypt as a theme park for Western tourists, in this case, Spirit himself.
Despite the initial appearance of the mummies in a nightmarish context, their intervention in the plot of the comic has little to do with this genre of fiction. In this issue of Spirit, the mummies become the subject of a detective investigation that attempts to unravel the reasons for their theft and return them before they are taken to the USA to be displayed in an exhibition at the Central City Museum of Natural History.
After being caught by the smugglers, Spirit is diminished and imprisoned. The plans of the evil Octopus, the hero's nemesis, involve mummifying Spirit's body with the help of an amateur taxidermist with macabre inclinations (he tried to mummify his own deceased grandmother).
In short, the ancient Egypt evoked in this short adventure has much to do with the popular image of this civilisation, mainly centred on mummies and pyramids.

Author: Abraham I. Fernández Pichel