Denny Colt? I've Heard Of You! I Thought You Were Dead!

You know all those disappointing action movies/thrillers, the ones that have seven to ten minutes of interesting plot revelations and character development and ninety to a hundred and ten minutes of crap filler?

Now, pick one of those same movies, and imagine it without all the crap filler, and you have an approximate idea of Will Eisner's landmark comic serial, The Spirit.

Premiering in the early fourties as a Sunday comic newspaper insert, The Spirit is unbelievably brilliant. I've just had my first taste of it, Corey having picked up an anthology from the library, and if it weren't for the distinctive illustration style of the time, I'd never guess how old it was. The Spirit tells the continuing story of Denny Colt, a cop who accidentally ingested a chemical that simulates death while trying to apprehend a criminal. Buried and thought gone, a short time later a cop version of Santa's little helper appeared on the streets. Police commissioner Dolan wants to know who the Spirit is, and he uses his cop skills to find out within that first story, and so we have a vigilante who is not a vigilante; a man who doesn't operate outside the law because he doesn't break it, who is known to and liked by police, because he's one of them (the Spirit hangs out at the police station all the time)...he's more of a classic private investigator, but with added hero panache of a mysterious existence, and the fact that everyone thinks he's dead.

Here are a few reasons why The Spirit is so awesome. For one thing, the premise: there are many things that can simulate death, and right away we have a character backstory that's so much cooler (and more plausible) than the typical "radioactive goo/gamma-/x-ray" premise of the time it was written. For another, I am now in full understanding and agreement with the statement that anyone who calls Will Eisner a genius is not being nostalgic, or using hyperbole. The average Spirit story unfolds within five to seven pages of panels, and yet the pace never feels hurried, the revelations never feel rushed, everything feels just right - an exciting story with a solid conclusion that leaves me nodding and thinking, "that makes perfect sense!". I think The Spirit can be most accurately compared to that psychology experiment involving a broken circle. You've probably seen it before: show someone a picture of a circle that has been broken, or has various parts of it missing, and ask them what it is, and as long as it doesn't look like a "C" or Pac-Man, the response will always be, "it's a circle". Your brain automatically provides missing information, as long as there's enough for it to go on - a half-circle, or quarter-circle, won't elicit that response. That's basically how Will Eisner told these stories, with enough information and atmosphere to let the reader fill in the blanks without even realizing there were any blanks present. And the atmosphere...I wish my scanner was working, because I would love to show you a page or two, or even some of the story covers, like the one from "Down Below". Just incredible stuff.

On top of all that, The Spirit has strong, memorable characters, like former criminal Satin, and a host of femme fatales that rival any superheroes rogues gallery. It has a great sense of humour - if someone showed me the "Children's Primer" story about Rat-Tat the toy tommy gun, I'd never have guessed it was three time as old as I am. But, to my reading, The Spirit is mostly a tragedy, as it explores what desperate people do when forced into corners, and the seemingly random attrocities that just don't make sense. As I've said many times in this space, retro doesn't automatically equal naive or fluffy, and The Spirit is certainly neither. It's perhaps the best noir I've ever seen on paper.

Of course, The Spirit has one or two things that make it very obviously a product of its time, like an early-on black chauffeur who bears a striking resemblance to a monkey. But I don't think that character lasted too long, because in the anthology I read, the Spirit later has a white kid as his helper.

I can't wait to get my hands on the complete Spirit collection, and read all the storylines from start to finish - the "best of" snippets just left me clamouring for more. Of course, Frank Miller's turned it into a film, premiering next week. I think there's a level on which The Spirit and Frank Miller will actually mix well, because of the former's tales of desperation and incomprehensible evil, and the latter's worldview that this is just what's normal. I also think that there's a very good chance Denny Colt's character has been bastardized into a creation of Miller's perennially dark mind; from what I know of Miller's work, he doesn't believe in goodness. For example, his Jim Gordon (Batman: Year One) is a man with a sketchy record, who may have committed attrocities in 'Nam and who actually cheats on Barbara while she's pregnant with Jim Jr. What I'm trying to say it, I have yet to see any evidence that Frank Miller believes in the existence of heroes, and the problem here is that Denny Colt is a straight-shooting, genuine hero.

Of course, this is all conjecture, and I'm sure I'll watch The Spitit when it's cheap or free, and really enjoy it visually, at the very least.

For now, though, should someone like to buy me the complete Spirit collection, every single strip hard-bound in chronological order, for Christmas, I would certainly send them a very nice thank-you card.

See how I wrote all that without even one bad pun involving the words "holiday", "Christmas", or "Spirit"? If you didn't get a real gift from me this year, consider this it.