Darwyn Cooke's Will Eisner's The Spirit

The Spirit Nos. 1-12 (Feb. 2007 to Jan. 2008). DC Comics, publisher. $2.99 per issue (monthly).
Most issues by Darwyn Cooke (story/art), J. Bone (inks), Dave Stewart (colors), & Jared Fletcher (letters).

Batman/The Spirit No. 1 (Jan. 2007). DC. $4.99.
By Jeph Loeb (script), Cooke (art), Bone (inks), Stewart (colors), & Comicraft (letters).

The Spirit, Vol. 1 (2007 hardcover collecting The Spirit #1-6 and Batman/The Spirit No. 1). DC. $24.99.

On the face of it, continuing The Spirit without his creator, Will Eisner, seems like a lousy idea. I thought so when I first heard this project announced, and I'm not sure I don't think so now. But I've enjoyed Darwyn Cooke et al. on The Spirit in spite of myself. Terrific cartooning will do that to you.

Cooke & Co.'s Spirit is a series of beautiful comics with one foot in a nostalgic timewarp. The nostalgia on view is not just for Eisner, the memory of whose passing in 2005 lends poignancy to the series, but also for a whole way of thinking about comics. Me, I like that way of thinking: I appreciate the sheer craftsman-like application of skill to a series of challenges in order to make, not just a serial, but a series of discrete and enticing objects. I like Cooke's dedication to the work, the way he, improbably, has managed one graphically inventive outing after another on a strict schedule. That certainly invokes the spirit of the Eisner shop in the late '40s. And the books are handsome. But, at the same time, I'm caught: Cooke's Spirit is a neither/nor proposition, not quite certain how to contemporize Eisner's famously 1940ish character and handicapped by the simple fact that Cooke's writing is not the equal of his handsome, design-smart artwork. His visual storytelling is aces, but, writing-wise, his Spirit seems, well, a bit backwards in spirit. Mind you, these Spirit comics are the best comics Cooke has ever done, and they're not as hobbled by nostalgia as his previous work might suggest -- but, well, they can’t help but lean on Eisner’s back fence. So I have to return to the question I asked myself when I heard about this series, Is a Spirit revival worth doing in the first place?

Eisner’s own answer to this seems to have been a firm No. Whatever its value as a brand and a mascot, Eisner apparently wasn’t interested in working on The Spirit during the latter phase (the prolonged post-retirement, post-day-job Indian summer) of his career, during which he was wholly taken up with creating literary graphic novels and stumping on the genre’s behalf. Of course The Spirit, in latter-day magazine form, was crucial to his reentry into comics in the 1970s, but, apart from cover illustrations, he did new stuff with the character only rarely, and, I imagine, grudgingly. He clearly knew the value of the Spirit as both a token of the continuity of his career and an exploitable property that he was lucky enough, or canny enough, to own; he made sure that the Spirit was available, and, always, in the process of being spruced up. This was Eisner-the-Businessman in operation: continued exploitation of the Spirit-as-property was surely part of his strategy, leading to such projects as the non-Eisner New Adventures of the Spirit (Kitchen Sink, 1998). But he didn’t want to go back to the Spirit as any kind of ongoing commitment; the fact that his final published story was a Spirit one commissioned for Michael Chabon’s Escapist comic is poignantly ironic. I gather that getting Eisner to do a fresh take on the Spirit took a lot of arm-twisting.

   

And this reveals something about The Spirit during its postwar artistic heyday as well: Eisner, it seems, didn’t care about the property as such. Oh, he cared about the Spirit gig, both because it was a gig and because it offered a ready platform for continued experimentation with genre and form. But he seems, post-military service, to have privileged the possibilities of the Spirit as a feature over the possibilities of the Spirit as a character. In the early ’40s, the Spirit had been, for Eisner, a vehicle for youthful zest, an exuberant, straight-ahead “costume” adventure character. Eisner could, and did, throw himself into those early Spirits without a whiff of condescension. Not without humor, mind you (a certain screwball comic sense), and not entirely without irony; hell, humor, glamour, and sex were The Spirit’s fuel. But he seemed to dig into the property unselfconsciously. The later Spirit, though, with its blossoming sense of irony, its O. Henry-esque takes on the travails of common and pitiful characters, its shuffling of the Spirit himself, so often, to the sidelines -- this was not quite like the earlier stuff. At its postwar peak, the Spirit feature was a series of cocky, self-aware riffs on form and genre, a constant game of keeping up Eisner’s interest in a property that, on some level, he probably felt he had outgrown. Some of his finest, fullest stories ever came out of this very problem. “The Story of Gerhard Shnobble,” for instance, sometimes referred to by Eisner as his favorite, is a Thurberesque fable built of exaggerated pathos, bitter irony, and, in its wonderful final page, real sympathy for Shnobble, the fallen little man. The Spirit is but a walk-on character in this most antiheroic of costumed hero stories (click the thumbnail for a better view):

In later years Eisner claimed, over and over, to have been embarrassed from the very start (1940) by The Spirit’s "costume" premise. Whether this was so or not, in the postwar years he backed away from straightforward heroics. For this reason, Jules Feiffer (who himself wrote or helped write some of the postwar classics for Eisner) preferred the roisterous, kickass intensity of the earlier adventures. What the Spirit feature became for Eisner after the War was a weekly challenge to write around the premise of a costumed crimefighter and keep himself -- somehow, through ever-changing formal stratagems -- contentedly engaged. This is not to say that the Spirit himself lost all his raffish charm; it’s just that, often, Eisner was willing to sideline his boy to get to other things.

From this POV, it looks like the postwar Spirit was nearly an empty vessel, to be filled with all sorts of experimenting. In hindsight, some of the experiments were successful, some not, but they were always interesting -- and the more impressive because Eisner and his shop cranked out a self-contained Spirit story every damn week. Since the halcyon days of McCay et al., has there ever been a better example of someone taking such a deadline-driven comic (a weekly booklet!) and running with it so far, so fast, into new aesthetic territory? The fact that many of the stories were just soufflés doesn’t matter.

So, if The Spirit is to be taken as a near-empty vessel, maybe you can see why I was so skeptical regarding the property’s revival at DC. Without Eisner & Co., without the tireless Eisner shop and its ever-driven boss, without Will’s own sure hand on the pages, and without the relentless whip of the weekly schedule, what is there to the Spirit? The character and his premise are slight, and his supporting cast and milieu are, at the best, the stuff of comedy, of gentle, tongue-poking-in-cheek irony, far from what tends to work in comic books today. When it comes to The Spirit, it’s all in the execution, not the mythos. Right?

From the very start, then, I assumed that Cooke et al. would be able to get nothing interesting done on The Spirit, that the project would be swamped in nostalgia and merely replay, in a wan, unconvincing way, the Spirit and Central City of yesteryear. After all, the one thing in the New Adventures I had really enjoyed was Alan Moore and Daniel Torres' "Last Night I Dreamed of Dr. Cobra," and that sort of backward-looking, metafictive stuff hardly holds the promise needed in an ongoing series.

But, of course, there is another way of looking at this, a glass-half-full way: Granted that The Spirit might be an empty pitcher; why, then, couldn’t someone else, say a Darwyn Cooke, pour something else into it, something as ingenious, as unpredictable and left-field as Eisner’s own postwar experiments? Why not? Could a new Spirit comic balance out the inevitable nostalgic pull of the property by being creatively fertile, formally outrageous, as Eisner’s had been? To be honest, I couldn't look at the prospect of a Spirit revival that way a year ago. My glass was decidedly half-empty: nothing in it but skepticism.

My skepticism, as I now see it, was a bit kneejerk, but I had other reasons. Cooke’s The New Frontier (DC, 2004), his ticket to frontrunner status among fans, was (is) a bust in my book: made of terrific, stunningly fluent cartooning, yes, but also thin, clichéd writing.

Beautiful cover, ain't it? The New Frontier has plenty of 'em. In fact the book offers an embarrassingly rich testimony to the way the beauties of linework and design may be invoked to overcome -- no, not overcome, but elevate -- under-thought and overworked story material. It remains a sweet-looking comic, of course; that the story strains credibility and undermines its own moral posturing cannot quite derail Cooke’s infectious cartooning and bowl-me-over affection for the old DC heroes. Never mind that its depiction of Hal Jordan (its central character) as a conflicted pacifist collapses in an absurd eleventh-hour turnaround, a moment of macho comeback straight out of Independence Day; never mind that the historical touches, such as references to the Civil Rights struggle, seem glib or confused. It’s still handsome. But, having bought two issues of Frontier, then waited for my local library to get the trades, I was a confirmed skeptic about Cooke’s writing (a feeling helped a bit but not enough by Cooke’s admittedly lovely issue of Solo).

Cooke's problem as I saw it -- as I see it -- is that, culturally, he would prefer to be living in an Eisenhower-50s world, but, at the same time, he has to keep throwing in sops to contemporary sensibilities. What I mean by this is that he's smart enough, or ill at ease enough, to question his own nostalgia (gee, this could be the moment when I veer off and start writing about Seth...). I believe this is why Frontier contains such bemusing and unresolved (or poorly-resolved) elements as a black vigilante hero who is never integrated with the main plot but instead summarily lynched, or Hal Jordan flying fighter jets in Korea but maintaining a pacifist refusal to actually “fight” with anyone. There’s a certain unease, not to say dishonesty, at the root of The New Frontier, a reluctance to admit that perhaps the Eisenhower era wasn’t that all-fired great. I found this off-putting. It was in that, er, spirit, that I bought the Batman/The Spirit one-shot. I ate up the pages like candy, of course, but couldn’t tell what era the book was supposed to be set in, and so I filed it away along with Frontier as nostalgia-fodder and told myself I wasn’t going to buy any more of Cooke’s Spirit. Full stop.

Something broke my will two or three months later. I think it was the sheer handsomeness of Cooke's approach -- that and, as I discovered, an effusiveness, an eagerness to please, that made the book charming. I started buying the book on an every-second-or-third issue basis, checking in as it were, and enjoying it. The main reason I kept checking in was that Cooke et al.'s Spirit was overpoweringly art-smart: a series of graphic performances involving the concerted input of that rarest of things in mainstream comics, a cohesive artistic team that seems jazzed about its shared work.

The "et al." isn't just incidental. Inker J. Bone is ideally matched with Cooke, preserving the minimalist, Toth-like elegance of Cooke's line, his streamlining, Pop Art design sense, and the cartoon effervescence of his characters. (Cooke himself inks the melancholy flashbacks in #12 with an evocatively Eisnerian roughness, and the difference is noticeable; still, the total package is seamless.) Colorist Dave Stewart takes up a deliberately stylized approach, balancing atmospheric color modeling (you've seen his work in Hellboy?) with flat, angular patches of color befitting Cooke's cartoon modernism. A favored technique of Stewart's is applying shadow in straight lines across the faces of the characters, as is well demonstrated on, for instance, the cover of #8 (click the thumbnail for a better view):

This sort of abstracted color fairly blossoms in #3's flashback sequence, where the color escapes Cooke's intentionally sketchy lines and leaps out, hedging and highlighting the action with bold, expressionistic swaths:

Stewart deserves a lot of credit here. Responding to Cooke's design sense and narrative aims, he makes The Spirit a showcase of expressive color, whether in #5's satiric riff on cartoon advertising or #4's sun-bleached cover and opening sequence in a burning desert, which I'm pretty sure got me to buy that issue (click it):

Perhaps not surprisingly, one story (#6, a fable of addiction) depends entirely on what Stewart can do with a single signature color, blue. Stewart and Cooke are a hell of a team.

What's more, letterer Jared Fletcher, while at times reliant on obviously software-generated effects, does a bang-up job with display lettering, particularly in the requisite opening splash panels (tasty nods to Eisner: see what Craig has to say about this!). In addition, he is called on to use multiple fonts in some issues -- particularly #3 and #9, chapters from the "El Morte" storyline -- so as to evoke the different voices of multiple first-person narrators. This use of marked text elicits a more active reading and lends a semblance of narrative complexity to the proceedings.

My point is, every aesthetic element in The Spirit contributes intentionally to a total design effect. I don't see this often in mainstream comics, where breakneck scheduling tends to demand a certain generic sameness when it comes to the fine details (we can of course list exceptions: for me, Promethea comes to mind right away, one of those projects that blurs the putative distinction between "mainstream" and "alternative"). There's a sense of spirited teamwork here, even though the book is so clearly Cooke's baby.

It helps that Cooke is a designer as well as a cartoonist. He understands that comic art is about turning graphic design to narrative ends, and he understands that experimenting with design is part of The Spirit's brief. Yes, his Spirit is inventive and, on occasion, formally outrageous, in keeping with the Eisner tradition. Formal gamesmanship is a constant. Cooke incorporates allusive design elements, sometimes for the sake of parody (dig #5's riff on TV commercials); also, thanks to Stewart, he uses unusual color cues to signal shifts in time and mood. And of course Cooke's decorative splashes, tipping the fedora to Eisner, do ingenious things with the Spirit logo (again, see Craig's post!). In short, design is central to Cooke's storytelling. Especially good examples can be found in #10, a spoof of cable news punditry, which mockingly uses panels designed to resemble YouTube screen shots (click it):

This kind of formal exquisiteness has got to count for something, even in the face of tired generic ingredients and uneven writing. And the writing is uneven. For all his progressive gestures, Cooke leans on stereotypes and often has trouble making characters act in believable ways. For example, Cooke's reinvention of the sidekick character Ebony White, whose overtly racist origins made Eisner himself cringe in hindsight, wins points in my book for acknowledging Ebony's agency and sex drive (see #9); that's a welcome rejoinder to Eisner's version. Cooke's Ebony is an unabashedly pro-teen teenage character. On the other hand, Ebony is a fourteen-year-old driving a cab, and I want to hear more about that. He has no background to speak of, and simply shows up at the Spirit's convenience, an idealized example of boyhood pluck and independence. Consider too the inclusion of a thinly-written gay character, Argo, in #11. In an interesting move, Argo turns out to be Ellen Dolan's ex-fiance, but he is (SPOILER) offed before issue's end, after a none-too-credibly motivated act of last-ditch heroism. Props to Cooke for bringing such a character into The Spirit, but, ouch, Argo is, again, a too-obvious idealization. If Cooke is unquestioningly comfortable with Ebony as a exemplar of rootless young manhood, he is uncomfortable and unconvincing with Argo, trying in one frantic rush to introduce the character, prime him with backstory and motivation, give him some stirringly heroic dialogue, and sacrifice him. Mind you, Argo is the hero of #11, but he gets swept by the boards pretty damn quick, in a welter of violence.

Cooke's worst offense on the stereotype front is the character Hussein Hussein, a turbaned "Middle Eastern" con man of uncertain origin. He shows up repeatedly, first in #2 (Cooke's disappointing revisionist origin story for famed Eisner femme fatale P'Gell). Hussein is clever, yes, and manages to take on new shades of character in #4, but his unctuous, ingratiating quality is the sort of thing Hollywood character actors use to roll out on demand: the devious Arab trader. There's something oily about the whole idea of the character, something not redeemed by Cooke's obvious affection for him. Dig his intro in #2 (click it):

Argh. This sort of thing was par for the course in the Spirit's heyday, but we can do better. Of course, Hussein is of a piece with the entire plot of #2, which involves, argh again, the mythical Middle Eastern country of  "Karifistan" (it might as well be called Blank-blank-istan) and its monarch, a bloodthirsty Saddam type named "Prince Farouk" (an inadvertent echo of Egyptian history?). Again, props for trying to bring a degree of contemporaneity to The Spirit, but #2 is a serious misstep: an offensive parade of received types.

This brings me back to my initial problem with the series, namely, the lure of nostalgia. Oh, it's there, for sure, and abundantly; Cooke, however, tries gamely to bring the series up to date, with references to current politics (terrorism, Homeland Security, border vigilantes) and, as Craig notes, media (television and the Net). As noted, these moves don't always work, but, to be fair, they do serve to jack The Spirit up out of the morass of nostalgic maundering (something that sets the monthly apart from the Batman/The Spirit one-shot, which simply retreads Eisner). But it's telling that Cooke's Spirit and Commissioner Dolan are both stick-in-the-mud anachronisms, grumbling or scoffing at the book's contemporary touches; they seem to represent the book's core conservatism (and, no, I don't mean this in the sense of partisan politics, which Cooke also satirizes). Dolan scorns television as "the idiot box" and rails against pretentious Starbucks-style coffee, while the Spirit has to have Ellen show him how to do research on the Net. His trademark fedora is revealed to be a willfully old-fashioned touch inherited from his father. In short, the Spirit and Dolan are comical but sympathetic exemplars of old-fashioned manly virtue. In contrast, other, more contemporary characters, such as the cable telejournalist Ginger Coffee, epitomize mendacity and opportunism. What's more, today's pop culture is typically shown in a harsh light, as in Cooke's repeated jabs at media chicanery. The book may be set in the present day, but its heart is somewhere else.

But the book has one sure hedge against nostalgia: for Cooke, The Spirit is NOT an empty vessel. It's a story. The book strikes a nice balance between self-contained, single-issue tales and the building of a larger continuity. Each issue extends the overall story gradually, further developing elements introduced in other issues. Rereading the issues in sequence reveals Cooke's patient, shaping hand as well as his affection for the characters. Clearly, he savors the romance, sexiness, glamour, and comedy of Eisner's early-40s original. And, moments of weak writing aside, he gives the series coherence by infusing the Spirit himself with a backstory, a conscience, and credible fears and misgivings. This is why Cooke is able, in his final issue (#12), to adapt and deepen Eisner's classic "Sand Saref" stories by giving the Spirit a sepia-tinted boyhood that recalls the cityscapes of Eisner's A Contract with God and subsequent graphic novels. The device doesn't feel like a simple graphic nod to the master; rather, it feels like a complete reentry into Eisner's world, renegotiated on Cooke's terms. Just as he is getting ready to leave it, Cooke makes The Spirit his own.

Pretty damn good, I've got to say (in spite of myself).

Comments

[Jed McGowan]

Hey, Charles--Jed McGowan here. Great post and great blog! I've been checking out the site regularly and always come away with new insights. This latest certainly nailed down what I find alluring and disappointing in much of Cooke's work.

Hope all is well!

[CharlesWHatfield]

Hey, Jed, great to hear from you!

How are you, and WHERE are you? I've see your name online from time to time, say at comicsreporter.com, but I'm not sure where you're at presently. Hope you're doing well and pursuing your cartooning! (Are you in Vermont?)

Thanks for the kind words re: TB. Craig and I are excited about doing this and hope to do it for a long, long time. We just like writing about comics!

Next week: Kirby. :)

[Jed McGowan]

Can't wait for Kirby!

Yep, still cartooning. I'll shoot you an email and we can catch up.

Best,
Jed