PopSyndicate.com

You start with the hero, square jawed and fighting the good fight.  He may not be the best person in the whole world but he’s trying.  You throw in the long, lost love.  They started from the same place but their paths have lead them to the opposite sides of the law.  If only they could get past the fact that she’s a criminal.  Add in a bit of a tragic past for both of them (their father’s were killed in the same robbery attempt) and you have the beginnings of a bittersweet crime/love tale.

In The Spirit, Darwyn Cooke has attempted to pay homage to the Spirit’s creator Will Eisner without specifically referencing Eisner’s style or writing.  Cooke has adapted the Spirit and brought the character into his narrative style while tweaking, updating and disguising some of Eisner’s traditional touches to the character.  Take a look at Cooke’s title pages, the gorgeous two page spreads that owe as much to television and film opening credits as they do to Eisner’s tradmarked Spirit splash pages.  But with this issue, Cooke’s farewell issue to the title, he embraces his inner Eisner, updating two stories that Eisner originally wrote and drawing half the book in an Eisnerish style with loose ink work and experimental and graphic layouts.

Cooke is telling one story in two different time frames.  One frame is the past covering the Spirit and Sand Saref’s shared childhood and blooming but cut short love.  The second time frame is the present day as the Spirit and Sand find themselves on opposite sides of the law with him trying to stop her from using or selling a biological weapon.  The modern tale is told very straightforward; Cooke pencils this part of the story in a very regimented, six-panel layout.  For the flashback sequences, he borrows heavily from Eisner’s layout style, abandoning any obvious grid format to produce more free-flowing pages and they are much more interesting pages to look at.

The book reaches beyond Eisner for its influences.  Cooke’s tale borrows heavily from noir detective tales as well; the Spirit is only a few steps removed from a hard-knocks gumshoe waiting around in his office for the next case to come in.  And Sand Saref has always been one of comics greatest femme fatales.  These elements have always existed in The Spirit but Cooke emphasizes them with this issue.  There’s also striking reference to The Great Gatsby, particularly the famous cover to the novel featuring a pair of female eyes gazing over a city scape.  Cooke’s two-page splash title page features Sand’s eyes similarly imposed over the city while the Spirit walks away in the rain.  This one image is a perfect summary/introduction to the Spirit and Sand’s relationship, they can be so close to each other but never really together.

The Spirit #12
“Sand”
Written & Penciled by: Darwyn Cooke
Inked by: J. Bone
Colored by: Dave Stewart
Lettered by: Jared K. Fletcher

4