Darwyn Cooke's Will Eisner's The Spirit (Craig Replies)

Trying to review Darwyn Cooke's Spirit after Charles' post is impossible, since I find myself in agreement with just about everything Charles says, including:

1.) That reviving The Spirit was probably a bad idea, but since Eisner himself treated the character as an "empty vessel" and vestigial appendage to the stories he really wanted to tell, it doesn't bother me very much;

2.) That Cooke is an extraordinary cartoonist whose previous big-profile project, The New Frontier, had me drooling over the images even while I was completely befuddled by the story; and

3.) That Cooke's writing and art on Will Eisner's The Spirit is his best to date. The comic looks dynamite, and reads well too, adroitly striking a balance between self-contained stories and extended plotlines (the rise of the Octopus and the Octagon, the menace of El Morte) that unify the individual issues.

Really, the only point where Charles and I disagree is that I liked Cooke's issue of Solo more than he did; I consider it one of the highlights of that series, along with the issues by Pope, Allred, Aragones and McCarthy. Otherwise, there's not much for me to add to Charles' insightful review, so I won't try. I'll instead narrow my focus and ruminate about Eisner's magnificent splash pages--complete with their endlessly creative iterations of the Spirit logo--that introduced the weekly story. What was the purpose of these splash pages? What do they tell us about Eisner as an artist? And was Darwyn Cooke successful at doing his own variations on the Eisner splash in his Spirit?

We can start by problematizing any notion of Eisner as an ivory-tower artist.

In chapter two of Reinventing Comics, Scott McCloud cites a 1940 interview where Will Eisner made the then-outlandish claim that (in McCloud's words) "comics were a legitimate literary and artistic form." According to McCloud, this claim made the boys back at the Eisner-Iger shop laugh out loud, since everyone knew that comics were just pulps with pictures, subliterate trash aimed at children and mentally-deficient adults. Then McCloud leaps forward twenty years, and chronicles a 1960 encounter between Eisner and comic strip legend Rube Goldberg (click the thumbnails, left and right, to read McCloud's version of their exchange):

       

McCloud defines Eisner as a visionary here, a guru who, in contrast to Goldberg, looked beyond comics' tawdry past (its "vaudeville" roots) to see the potential for comics as capital-A Art. Of course, McCloud's not alone in seeing Eisner as such a guru. Most fans read Eisner's career as a steady shift from low culture to Art, as a progression from his journeyman work in the early Golden Age to his innovative Spirit sections ("Hey, maybe comics can be art!") to his run of mature graphic novels.

I'd like to complicate this, and argue that the shape of Eisner's achievement is less a direct progression towards Art than a sequence of delicate balancing acts between Art and commerce. Eisner-the-Artist always lived side-by-side with Eisner-the-Businessman. Early in his career, Eisner was the entrepreneur who raked in money applying the assembly-line division of labor to comics production--and stunted the artistic growth of the American mainstream comic book by popularizing a production model that emphasized quantity over personal expression. (It could be convincingly argued that the assembly-line was inevitable--Hollywood was too strong a model for the fledgling comics publishers and creators--but Eisner-as-Businessman was the trailblazer here, a fact he brags about in The Dreamer.) Even in the last twenty years of his career, as Eisner-the-Artist crafted books like A Contract with God, To the Heart of the Storm and The Plot, and gave speeches and interviews that consolidated his status as the medium's elder statesman and aesthetic role model, Eisner-the Businessman stayed active, making sure (as Charles points out) that The Spirit stories remained in print, and working on other exclusively commercial projects. Eisner's book of corny movie gags, Star Jaws (1978), and an unpublished collection of golf cartoons shopped around to various publishers in the last decade of his life, were more about the dough than the greater glory of the comics medium. Eisner did what he had to do to survive under blind, lumbering, indiscriminate capitalism--a guy's gotta eat--and he still managed to create Art, which is a minor miracle and a tribute to his indomitable creative Will (or Spirit).

I think that Eisner was both a visionary and a vaudevillian. When I read a Spirit section, or even a longer work like A Life Force, I see an artist eager to please his audience who is both remarkably adept at his tricks and excellent at "selling the sizzle, not the steak." This phrase was used in the lower strata of popular culture (by vaudevillians, circus carnies, and exploitation filmmakers) to describe the importance of advertising in attracting an audience; once you hooked the rubes with your sizzle (with your posters and ads, with the pitchman on the midway) and got their cash, the content, the "steak," that you dished out didn't matter. Eisner's sizzling Spirit splash pages can help us understand both Eisner-the-Artist and Eisner-the-Vaudevillian, so let's look at a few specific examples, and compare them to the double-page splashes characteristic of Cooke's contemporary Spirit run.

The Spirit splashes are as much a product of Eisner-the-Businessman as Eisner-the-Artist. On pages 93-95 of The Art of Will Eisner, Cat Yronwode shows how Eisner retooled an unused splash for an aborted project--a newspaper insert called Sunday Comics, featuring "John Law, Detective" and "Nubbin, the Shoeshine Boy"--into two other projects: an unproduced newsstand John Law comic and, finally, a splash page for a Spirit section ("The Jewel of Gizeh," 3/12/50). The Eisner splash, in other words, is often mutable, unconnected from the narrative that immediately follows it. Several other examples of these "non-narrative" splashes occur late in the initial Spirit run, where Eisner, quickly losing interest in the feature, would gussy up a reprint by removing an old splash and plugging in a new one. "The Case of the Double Jones" (3/11/51), for instance, attaches a new (and undistinguished) splash onto the final six pages of "Doppelganger" (11/19/47). The non-narrative splash, then, gave Eisner some flexibility to alter old material for new publishing circumstances.

Beyond their practical elasticity, Eisner's splashes also function like advertising posters for the stories they introduce. Eisner would sometimes include plot elements in the splashes, but more often they would rework the Spirit logo and/or present an image that evokes the mood, rather than the content, of the story to come. One example (click it) is the famous splash for "The Last Hand" (5/16/48):

Some of the captions set up the story by telling us that J. Rollo Dyce is a thief and murderer on the lam, but the introductory caption about "the gambling-hall of life" doesn't give us narrative information; rather, it establishes a mood of gloomy predestination, implicitly revealing that Dyce's number is up. The "gambling-hall of life" text is printed in mock typewriter-font, giving it maximum journalistic authority over the less important, more "handwritten" captions about Dyce. The typewriter text is objective, immutable Law, while the Dyce text is just one personal, insignificant instance of the Law in action. The pictures follow the same logic, with Dyce's story moving left to right in a tiny space on the lower third of the page, while predestination and death dominate the splash through the large figure of the skeleton at the cash register. This splash gives away the game: we know immediately that Dyce is fated to die, and Eisner uses the splash not to forward the story or protect its conclusion, but to pass along to the reader a frisson of sublime fear.

Darwyn Cooke, following Eisner's lead, uses his double-page splashes to likewise evoke mood through poster imagery. In Will Eisner's The Spirit #12, Cooke rewrites Eisner's classic Sand Saref tales, and uses a sparse skyline and Sand's haunting face to strike just the right note of sustained romantic longing (click it):

Eisner's mood-oriented poster aesthetic is akin to the posters that promote movies, circuses, and "low" types of live performance like vaudeville and burlesque. Posters like these are the sizzle that sells the steak, sometimes by making inflated claims about how tasty that steak really is. Eisner knew this, of course, and made fun of the inflated ballyhoo of these posters (and specifically the bloated rhetoric used to sell movie blockbusters) in his splash to "Sammy and Delilah" (3/5/50 [click]):

"Sammy and Delilah" is also an example of another common trope in Eisner's splashes: parodies of the mass media. "The Torch" (4/25/48) begins with a caption indicating that because of the "greatly increased cost of drawing materials," Eisner was forced to accept a sponsor, "Goople's Cream Hair Restorer Shampoo," for this week's story. Later in 1948 came another splash-page parody of the mass media, "The Coin" (12/5/48 [click]):

Cooke, too, takes a few well-aimed shots at the mass media (as Charles also notes). In issue #5 of Will Eisner's The Spirit, he lampoons advertising aimed at kids through the promotional campaign for "Spirit Pork and Beans"; the pitchman for this product is a version of the Spirit as a flying manga-Powerpuff character, whose giant image dominates that issue's double-splash. (I suspect that #5 was Cooke's revenge on all the advertisers who drove him crazy when he worked as an animator on the WB Batman shows.) And issue #10 of Will Eisner's The Spirit is a roman a clef of cable news and talk shows, with a double-pager where Commissioner Dolan walks out of a comic and into the "reality," so to speak, of Youtube (click):

One common character that appears in numerous Eisner splashes but not in Cooke's Spirit is the narrator  who directly addresses the audience. Eisner loves to begin his stories with ringleaders and barkers that talk up the virtues of the stories to come, just  like a master of ceremonies of a vaudeville show talks up future attractions. The earliest Eisnerian barker I've found is in "Palyachi, the Killer Clown" (7/28/40) where a ringleader introduces a circus villain (click):

In the post-war Spirits, however, Eisner doesn't bother with a circus motif to justify his use of the barker/ringleader/narrator figure. He drops them in whenever he feels like it, which is often. A butler directly introduces us to "Commissioner Dolan and the--er---er---the Spirit!!!" in "Max Scarr's Map" (4/14/46), while in the first panel of "Magnifying Glasses" (5/26/46), a toy salesman drawn as a tiny figure in long shot encourages us to "step up a little closer" and enter the story. (Appropriately, the next shot is a close-up of the salesman: we've moved closer.) My favorite narrator, though, the one that most directly references vaudeville, is the fellow who clears his throat while preparing to recite the low verse of "The Tragedy of Merry Andrew" (2/15/48 [click, already!]):

In making connections between Eisner's splashes and features associated with vaudeville like the barker or the handbill, I'm not being critical of Eisner's work. Frankly, I love the sizzle of so-called "low" culture, and I worry that as the comics medium moves into mainstream bookstores and The New York Times Book Review, some of that sizzle will be lost. In a review of the "Masters of American Comics" exhibit I wrote for The International Journal of Comic Art, I complained that seeing single pages of Eisner's art (and Kirby's and Crumb's and...) taken out of their original contexts (specific stories, and their reproduction in pamphlet form) didn't do much for me. I still get more of an aesthetic kick out of my mostly-coverless run of Warren Spirit magazines than I did from the "Masters of American Comics" show, and no doubt some of my feelings can be blamed on nostalgia; those yellowed Warren zines are my nerdboy madeleines, transporting me back to my early teens and to the moment when I first read Eisner's comics. But I adore 12-cent Marvels from the 1960s, and Thirteen Going on Eighteen, and the original Spirit sections because these mass-marketed comics brought art to the masses rather than the classes. Eisner's Spirit stories are vaudevillian art, sizzle and steak, generous in their multiple pleasures: their visual joys, their clever plot twists, their sex appeal, their humor, and their unforgettable protagonists like Gerhard Schnobble, Herkimer Zither and Freddy, so desperate to get on that train. Probably the best compliment I can give Darwyn Cooke is that his Spirit walks the same vibrating tightrope between high and low. Earlier this week, while simultaneously preparing to write this post and trying to be a good dad, I read Cooke's Spirits out loud to my 10-year-old son Nate. The first page of issue #1 begins as a newscaster talks about the abduction of another reporter, Cooke creation Ginger Coffee. In the final panel, the newscaster notes that "the masked vigilante known as the Spirit is also rumored to be involved." Then I turned the page, and my son and I saw Cooke's first double-page splash, a portrait of the Spirit in full motion, his form blurred from the speed of his running, his body (and the Spirit logo) abstracted like a cartoony Nude Descending a Staircase. I looked over at Nate, and he was smiling. I was smiling too. Sizzle!

Comments

[Sandy]

Great post. But you didn't point out that Cooke's splash for Sand Saref is (to my eyes, at least) a direct homage to the famous cover art for F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby."

See it here to compare: http://www.popartuk.com/g/l/lg86383-20+the-great-gatsby-f-scott-fitzgerald-poster.jpg

And you say that Cooke's version "strike[s] just the right note of sustained romantic longing" -- which is a big part of The Great Gatsby, too.

And, Gatsby is driven by an intense desire to recapture the past . . . just like Darwyn Cooke and his work in New Frontier and The Spirit . . . . Interesting connections, if you ask me. Cooke really seems to know what he is doing.

[CharlesWHatfield]

Ah, Sandy, good to hear from you again. Yes, I do see a resemblance to the Gatsby book jacket. I'm told that that jacket was commissioned by Scribner from artist Francis Cugat, brother of famed bandleader Xavier Cugar. Not much more about Francis Cugat is known, as far as I can tell. Charles Scribner III has an interesting article about the book jacket at http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/essays/eyes/eyes.html that recounts how the image was created. In fact Cugat's image preceded Fitzgerald's manuscript, and Fitzgerald claimed to have actually written the jacket image "into" the finished book!

Re: Gatsby-esque themes in Cooke's work, well, that's just the problem, isn't it? You're on to something IMO, but the difference is that Fitzgerald presents Gatsby as a tragic figure. Is Cooke trying to present his own nostalgia-themed fantasies in the same way? I doubt it. There's enough unease in The New Frontier to suggest that Cooke knows better than to simply idealize the past; however, I don't get the sense that he is problematizing his own nostalgia, which is something that I sometimes see in, for instance, Seth's or Chris Ware's work.

I don't want to dump on Cooke here, since I enjoy his work so much. And I happen to enjoy his brand of nostalgia more so than, say, Alex Ross's. But this all comes down to what you mean when you say, "Cooke really seems to know what he is doing."

[Craig Fischer]

I think you're right on the money here, Sandy. I should've made the connection between Cooke's Sand Saref image and that Fitzgerald cover.

I have an alibi: the edition of GATSBY I used in high school--and the one I still own today--didn't include Cugat's painting. Instead, there was no picture at all on the cover, just the title and a couple of shades of brown. (As I recall, my edition of THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA was pretty much the same, except the color was gray instead of brown.) I'm grateful to be living in an age where Chris Ware now does a paperback cover for CANDIDE and Charles Burns for THE JUNGLE...!

I can certainly see the romantic longing that links the two images; I agree that Cooke is doing a witty homage here.

[John Read]

Craig,
Really enjoyed your analysis of Cooke's work; I'm a BIG fan of his, too, and, like you, thought his DC Solo book was outstanding. I'm going to see if I can't convince him to let me interview him for an upcoming issue of Stay Tooned! Magazine.

[Craig Fischer]

Thanks, John. There have been a couple of nice Cooke interviews in THE COMICS JOURNAL and COMIC BOOK ARTIST, so I hope he's not all "interviewed-out."

And for those of you who don't know what STAY TOONED! is, check out the following website: http://www.staytoonedmagazine.com (I can't wait for the first issue...)