The new adventures of the Spirit

I've been waiting a few years for this one as it has periodically been on again and then off again, and finally this Wednesday, Fate willing, it will be here. I'm referring to Will Eisner's The Spirit: The New Adventures. This is entirely coincidental as I had no intention of devoting so much time to the venerable old chap as I have been doing here of late.

I've never been fond of the idea of lots of different artists taking a crack at an old comic strip. The best characters in the old days were like an artist's signature while the characters of today are well, meh. Do what you like with the modern lot, for I don't care a button or a fig. But you can't go messing with the grand old ones. When I first heard that Eisner was letting us whelps muck around with the Spirit, I thought it was a bad idea, and to an extent I still do. But then Neil Gaiman asked for me as the illustrator for the script he'd submitted, and Moore and Gibbons had turned in a real genius job for the first issue of March 1998, three connecting stories and all tipping a big fedora to the original. Gibbons has always been good at pastiches. He had elsewhere done very acceptable ones of Dick Sprang and Will Elder. Also, this was a reunion of the Watchmen guys! We were all off to Grandad's house to leave his 78s lying around.


For the second issue, April 1998, in which the 10 page Gaiman/Campbell piece appears, Eisner himself provided the cover, but it was the only issue for which he did so. (click to see all the covers). And while it was neat to see him put his mark of authority on our story, Eisner's late comic book covers always look too much like the Marvel formula to be entirely enjoyable. And also, somebody is always biting somebody else's clothes.


As for the stories, I was hoping he'd be in there messing around, fussily changing faces and stuff. I was so disappointed he was having a hands-off relationship with the series. I was looking forward to being his humble ghost. I tried so bloody hard to make my pages look like Eisner. It never works out that way of course. But I thought we should all at least be trying. My version of this book would be one in which only an expert could tell who drew what. I think we should all totally subvert our personalities and the best effort would be the one that Will would think he'd done it himself. I flatter myself to think I got close in a few of the details:


That's from a second story I drew, an eight pager that we packaged entirely here at Campbell Industries and that appeared in the seventh issue, Oct 1998. It was the first time we'd done computer colouring, apart from two Bacchus covers, and there are a few technical missteps, including making the Spirit look a bit green, which was my fault because I started interfering after Mullins and Evans had finished the colouring. Hey, maybe the technicians at Dark Horse have even fixed that problem. Fingers crossed. Or maybe they've been as hands off as Will was. This second story is titled 'The Pacifist.' The splash page shows a bullet coming straight for the Spirit, in a frozen image, as the narrator begins his story of anti-violence. We turn the page and find that it's the bullet talking. And for all we know, all of them could all be conscientious objectors. So this sentient bullet proceeds to narrate its entire life story that brought it to this fateful moment. Neil Gaiman was visiting when I mentioned this story idea away back in 1998 and he said he thought it sounded like a great Spirit yarn, as at that point it was just an idea I hadn't decided what to do with. He even suggested the name of the villain, The Black Russian, which is the name of a popular cocktail, and apt since the villain needs to get his gang, a daffy bunch drawn mostly by Pete Mullins, drunk.


Marcus Moore, who worked on the script with me, wanted to give the villain a dog named Herov, but we decided that was pushing the joke too far.

All in all I thought I did well with Commissioner Dolan:

the Spirit: The New Adventures Archives (Hardcover)
These stories have been out of print for a decade. I see Dark Horse now have them and they're lined up for a May 15 release in a single 200 page book:

In 1997, almost six decades after the character's first appearance in 1940, legendary artist and writer Will Eisner gave permission for a new series of stories to be commissioned featuring his signature creation, resurrected detective Denny Colt, also known as the Spirit, written and drawn by the most famous names in the comics industry. The call went out, and the response was nothing short of remarkable, with contributions from such creators as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (in one of their rare collaborations since Watchmen), Neil Gaiman (The Sandman), Paul Chadwick (Concrete), Eddie Campbell (From Hell), amongst others. In these pages you'll find new tales of Central City's protector versus familiar villains such as the Octopus and Sand Saref; witness his undying love for Ellen Dolan, daughter of Commissioner Dolan, the only man to know his secret identity; and glimpse what might be the Spirit's fate in an uncertain future.

Moore and Gibbons gave us three interconnected stories that are quite brilliant, and I have two stories in there, one of them a ten pager in collaboration with Neil Gaiman. Watch for it! I wonder if they've fixed our colour boob in my other story. (we made the Spirit green. it looked blue on my monitor.)


Hey! One thing that has always defeated me with regard to Blogger, is how to control the size of images on the page. I think I just accidentally figured it out.

i've been enjoying the old reruns of Maverick on Foxtel, and I seem to have gotten in early enough to catch some of season 1 from 1957. I was two when these things first aired. I loved the cowboy shows as a kid, but managed to miss this one except in an occasional repeat. It would have been my favourite, though probably would have a bit over my head for a few years. Anyway, Callum is passing through the room, catches a glimpse of James Garner as Bret Maverick and says "Hey! Wouldn't he make a good Spirit!". (Cal is currently working his way through Will Eisner's complete run of the Spirit.) Coincidentally, Eisner himself thought Garner would have been perfect in the role. He originally, in the '40s, had Cary Grant in mind, but by the '60s Grant would have been too old, so the 30 year old Garner he saw as perfect.
Of course it's all academic now as Garner is himself too old, but discussing the issue would at least leave an impression of just what the character should be like on screen, relevant as Farnk Miller's version will be coming to our screens very soon. Thus In 2002 at the Will Eisner symposium on the graphic novel in Florida, at which I was a guest, I was having breakfast with Will himself and he confirmed his liking for Garner as a theoretical Spirit. In 2006 I was having a beer with Frank Miller in San Diego and I brought the subject up. I may be wrong but I got the impression that Frank was dismissive of the choice.
Garner has great presence and has to be watched on screen, but here are a couple of stills of him as Bret Maverick




Here is Eisner's Spirit:


And here's the second Maverick photo with a mask drawn on the face:


This remark on the wikipedia page linked above,
"Garner as Bret usually wore a black cowboy hat, often changing its placement on his head from one scene to the next,"
reminds me of the expressive ways that Eisner would use the Spirit's hat, changing it from sombre to resilient to comedic to jaunty, etc. etc. from panel to panel.

update as i just realised the release of the movie is closer than I thought:
Spirit stars at abandoned warehouse (13 hours ago)

The stars of comic book film adaptation The Spirit have appeared at an abandoned warehouse. Rather than a Leicester Square premiere, Samuel L Jackson, Eva Mendes and Scarlett Johannson graced the red carpet at the Old Post Office in central London, ahead of the film's world premiere in New York next week.

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Andre Rieu earlier in Melbourne:

Saccharine touches make Rieu mildly nauseating

Alongside "light" classical and popular 19th century Viennese dance music, a Rieu performance typically features staging, costumes and coiffures based on romanticised stereotypes of 19th century Vienna, with saccharine Disney studio touches and kilometres of taffeta thrown in for good effect. Add in sing-along, clap-along, whistle-along audience participation, pantomime jokes, sensory overload (large screens, ice skaters, dancers, horses) and the production values of variety television, and you have The Wiggles for grown-ups.

(thanks to Louise for the link)

as there was quite bit of interest in Wednesday's post about the the Spirit story that Neil Gaiman and I wrote and drew (respectively) way back in '97, I've fetched out the three original art pages that are still in my possession. As is to be expected, the ones that show the Spirit himself have all gone. But these give us the best showing of the villainess, Mink Stole. Once the story starts rushing along you don't really get to see anything as clearly as you do here in the exposition. I'm tryingto recall who was the model for the femme fatale. probably Ann Sheridan when she looked like the photo at left. She was in the Cagney film, Angels with Dirty Faces, way back in '38 and had a long career in the movies. Here is a sequence made up of the protagonist ruminating in front of his laptop on the balcony of a California hotel. The mysterious woman appears on the next balcony and he can't get any sleep that night. Walking on the beach he finds himself in the middle of somebody else's story. I'm leaving out a complicated third story, which is the one happening in type on his laptop, the Tarantino spoof that Neil mentioned (see comments wednesday), not to mention a possible fourth which is the romantic liaison he imagines himself having with the lady on the balcony (beginning with the mental image ninth below). The good thing about Neil's script (alas the words can't be seen below; see yesterday's link for a rough idea of the story) is that everything was so clearly set out that you can read what is happening below without the need for the words. This left the writer free to play out a separate, ironic argument in the captions.
Another thing to notice is that I knew Will Eisner was going to be scrutinizing these pages and I wanted it to look like something that could be taking place in his established graphic universe. I worked very hard to make things precise, much more than I usually would. In places this has resulted in drawings looking overworked. Look how all my erasing has left the paper looking smudgy and smeared. But by the time the protagonist rubs his weary eyes below I was starting to loosen up. The action got underway and it included a seaplane taking off with the Spirit clinging to the mooring rope. You can see them coming out of the sea in Wednesday's final page scan.














(you can tell that the above happens in two different scenes as the protagonist has changed his Hawaiian shirt. he wore three different ones in the course of the story.)

since I'm meeting up with Neil Gaiman in Melbourne this week, here's a glimpse of the Spirit story we put together ten years ago. Someone has posted six and a half of the ten pages online. Steve Oliff did a sweet job on the colours.



Next, the above page as it looked when I'd done my part. Since I normally start with the lettering, working this way just felt all wrong to me, and to this day when I look at the printed version all I can think about is that the lettering (can't recall the name of the letterer) was put on after the art (although on page 1 you can see that I was planning it very carefully).


The story had a swarthy thug named Squith because Neil wanted to name one of the characters after Mark Asquith for some reason.

The 'New Adventures of the Spirit' set of stories (including three interrelated by Moore-Gibbons) remains out of print in spite of at least two different publishers intending to do it over the years. I did a second story in the last of the eight issues, by which time I had a better handle on the look of the thing except it was our first attempt at computer colouring in-house here at Campbell Industries and The Spirit camme out looking more like the Green Hornet.