Getting Into The Spirit

In late 1939, 22 year old artist Will Eisner was asked to create a comic book for the Sunday papers. Newspapers wanted to get in on the comic book boom and thought a weekly, tabloid-sized supplement might do the trick. Eisner was interested in reaching a wider, more mature audience than just kids and so the idea intrigued him.

He created a character called The Spirit, a masked crime-fighter who was once a young criminologist named Denny Colt. As Colt was tracking down the evil scientist Dr. Cobra, he was exposed to some chemicals that put him in a state of death-like suspended animation. Everyone thought Cobra had killed him and so they buried him in a crypt in Wildwood cemetary and went on with the search. Once Denny came out of it, he chose to keep his resurrection a secret and to keep chasing down criminals in disguise. He used Wildwood cemetery as his base of operations and he fought crime every Sunday in newspapers across the nation for the next decade and a half.



Eisner is largely seen as the father of modern comics. His approach to visual storytelling still informs artists and moviemakers today. He wrote a book about it and taught university courses on it. He was a really talented guy who stretched the boundaries of a medium that, for most of a century, was seen in America as transient, throwaway trash.



In the last couple of decades, Eisner's reputation and The Spirit's notoriety have increased. All the original stories have been reprinted and given the deluxe treatment. Various contemporary writers and artists have tried their hand at reinvisioning the character - Watchmen creator Allan Moore did a cool Spirit story called "Last Night I Dreamed of Dr. Cobra" and novelist/screenplay writer and all around media darling, Neil Gaiman, did one too.

DC Comics, publishers of Batman and Superman, made a deal with the Eisner estate and did a Batman/Spirit crossover one-shot that was a lot of fun. It was written Jeph Loeb, a very talented guy who, in addition to producing some really dynamite comics, also has worked on the tv shows Lost and Heroes. The one-shot led to an ongoing series written and drawn by Darwyn Cooke, a comic book darling of the moment. Cooke was in charge for the first twelve issues and he really, in my opinion, seemed to get it just right. The Spirit was brought into the 21st century of cell phones, the Internet, terrorists, etc. but the characters and the storylines never lost the sense of fun and charm and innocence of the original.



After the first year, Cooke left the series and it's been taken over by people who clearly have no strong sense of how to balance the contemporary with the classic. The art is lame and generic and I haven't even bothered with the stories.

Now, keep in mind, originally The Spirit was a character somewhat in the same vein as The Shadow or The Spider. He was kind of ruthless and carried a gun. He was, to use that very overused term, gritty. But sooner rather than later, the character evolved past that and the strip actually became quite sunny, fun, and humorous. It always featured heavy, film noir-like shadows and rain-choked streets, but there was always a streak of optimism throughout.

So now here's the problem and the whole point of this post. Frank Miller has directed a film version of The Spirit that is coming out on Christmas day. If you're not a nerd, you probably don't know who Miller is.



Frank Miller is a comic book artist and writer who has been in the industry since the 70s. He did some good, interesting work in the early 80s but really made his reputation in 1986 when he revamped the character of Batman in The Dark Knight Returns. Miller imagined Batman as an old man, retired from fighting crime, in a corrupt, overrun Gotham City. It was huge - it took the character from the silly, uninteresting creative ghetto it had been in since the 1960s and made it dark, dangerous, and really compelling. No one had ever made a comic book quite like it at that point. Since then, of course, it's been ripped off, borrowed from, and all but cloned many times over. But at the time, it was amazing.



Miller could write his own check after that and he pretty much did. He took on characters he was interested in, did his little projects, and moved on. Eventually, he left mainstream comics altogether and started creating comics he owned outright - Hard Boiled, Martha Washington, and Sin City. He had created enough of a fan base that, like Picasso in the classic SNL skit with Jon Lovitz, he could sneeze on a napkin, sign it, and sell it for a million dollars to an adoring admirer.



Miller did some work in Hollywood - much to his chagrin, he's responsible for the screenplays for Robocop 2 and 3. But it wasn't until Robert Rodriguez and digital filmmaking came along that Miller's movie life was born. He co-directed an adaptation of his series, Sin City, a very pulpy combination of Mike Hammer novels, film noir movies, and Miller's own jacked-up macho man ideas. It made 160 million dollars worldwide and made Hollywood look twice at Miller, his creations, and his slobbering fan base.

Following the success of Sin City, Zack Snyder adapted 300, Miller's version of the Battle of Thermopylae. Using the same digital technology to recreate near-exact images from the comics, Snyder rode that ultra-violent pony all the way to the bank to the tune of 450 million dollars worldwide.



Now, here's the thing about Miller and his work. Regardless of whether it's a monthly Batman comic, an epic historical graphic novel, a black and white crime story, or science fiction based a million years in the future, they all sound the same. Every character, every narration balloon, every plot twist, everything. As talented as he is and as successful as he is, artistically speaking he only has one setting: hard boiled. Robin the Boy Wonder sounds like a world-weary gumshoe. King Leonidas, Spartan warrior, sounds like a world-weary gumshoe. Wonder Woman sounds like a femme fatale who is involved with a world-weary gumshoe. Every story is violent to the extreme, every woman is highly sexualized, and every line of dialogue sounds like it was lifted directly from Mickey Spillaine himself.

Now, for what he does, Miller does it better than anyone else and that's fine. The problem is when a guy who's really good at laying bricks decides he's going to redesign a house using only bricks or when a really good base player decides to adapt a symphony using only his bass guitar. See what I'm saying?

My problem is that I really like The Spirit and have for years. I love it for Eisner's storytelling genius but also for the way it always balanced action with humor, big derring-do with real-world humanity, sexiness with innocence. I'm afraid that Frank Miller is going to wreck something that is lovely and, worse yet, that he's going to be rewarded for it and encouraged to do it again.





You know, no version of the Spirit I've ever read, heard of, or had nightmares about would ever utter the line, "I'm going to kill you all kinds of dead." Please.

I've watched a couple of trailers and looked at some production stills online. It's not looking good, people. I'm not a huge purist but I do think a few things should be left more or less intact. One of the things that really bothers me is that, in the comics, the face of the Spirit's opponent, the evil mastermind The Octopus, is never seen. He's always in the shadows, always escaping at the last minute. The mystery of his identity is pretty crucial to the mystique of the stories involving him. Mystery? Mystique? What does Frank Miller do with this idea? Behold, his version of the Octopus:



Thanks for nothing, Frank.

Will I see it? I don't know. Eight or nine bucks is a lot to spend on a movie that might not only be bad but an insult to something I like a lot. We'll have to see if there's a dollar theater somewhere in the Illinois Valley and I'll decide then.

P.S. For those of you who aren't comic book fans, I'm sure you can put this post on your own list of things you can't bring yourself to care about.