Kurtzman fell in love with comic strips and the newly emerging comic books in the late 1930s. Unsatisfied with what he found in his parents' newspapers, he searched through garbage cans for the Sunday comics sections of his neighbors' newspapers. He admired a wide variety of strips, including Hamlin's "Alley Oop", Caniff's "Terry and the Pirates", Gould's "Dick Tracy", Foster's "Prince Valiant", Raymond's "Flash Gordon", and Capp's "Li'l Abner". He found Will Eisner's comic book "The Spirit" a "standard by which other comic books would be measured", and called Eisner ""the" greatest ... a virtuoso cartoonist of a kind who had never been seen before". Eisner's page layouts had considerable influence on Kurtzman's work.