Silken Scarlett

According to the Hollywood Reporter (link via Blog@Newsarama), Scarlett Johansson is being cast in Frank Miller’s film of The Spirit as Silken Floss, “a sexy and intelligent secretary with a vindictive instinct that makes her the perfect accomplice to the Octopus”.

Will Eisner had a character called Silken Floss too - Dr Silken Floss, who was both a nuclear physicist and a brilliant surgeon.


I’ve no wish to denigrate secretaries, but it is notable that Eisner was able to envisage women in prestigious non-traditional careers in 1947, whereas Miller, in 2007, isn’t able to do the same.

Still, it’s a change from the two professions into which Miller usually fits his female characters: whoredom and assassination. Those of Miller’s fans who resent this step may take comfort from the thought that, the last time he had to write about a secretary, Karen Page from Daredevil, he immediately turned her into a junkie porn performer instead.


Panel
The Spirit “Silken Floss MD”, Comic Book Section, 9 March 1947, reprinted in The Spirit Archives Volume 14, DC Comics, 2004

Eisner’s Army

We were chatting about the instructional comics Will Eisner drew for the US Army, when one of the guys at Forbidden Planet in Newcastle told me that Eisner’s booklet on maintaining the M16 rifle was still available in the UK from Soldier of Fortune. So I ordered a copy, thus, no doubt, ensuring my place on MI5’s database of potentially dangerous nutters.


It’s a little thing, 32 pages, about 7 inches by 5. It was one of the last bits of work Will Eisner did himself for the US Army, though other hands are apparent in the art throughout, and the cover is recyled from a 1966 edition of PS: The Preventive Maintenance Monthly.

I’m sure it’s an efficient piece of instructional literature, but, though interesting as a curio, it is disappointing for anyone hoping for sequential art (to use the Eisnerism). For the most part, we just get individual gag drawings, and some close up, diagrammatic sequences, like those on the left of the sample pages below.


Rather more satisfactory, from the point of view of comics fans, are the posters and comic strips that Eisner did for Army Motors in the Second World War and for PS Magazine after he left The Spirit in the 1950s.


There are some good examples at Mike Lynch’s blog and at Comicartville. Savour them. We are unlikely to get a series of reprint volumes.

Pictures, pages and panels
The M16A1 Rifle: Operation and Preventive Maintenance, US Department of the Army, July 1969

Joe Dope “How Free-Turn-In Works/Hairnet” by Will Eisner. PS: The Preventive Maintenance Monthly, US Department of Defense, date unknown, reprinted in Will Eisner’s The Spirit issue 33, Kitchen Sink Comix, February 1982

Miller’s Spirit, Take One

Frank Miller: When you’re dealing with something you’ve created, be very protective. If you love it, if it’s still an alive and ongoing thing …
Will Eisner: Well, you have to resist the temptation of having a movie made.

(from Eisner/Miller: A One-on-One Interview Conducted by Charles Brownstein, Dark Horse Books, 2005)


So far as Frank Miller goes, I’m in the camp that feels that his hard-boiled macho self-parody stopped being funny around the time of his second or third Sin City story. So, despite his friendship with Will Eisner, the news that he was to direct a Spirit movie was not altogether welcome.

And yes, this is old news. But I’ve just reminded myself that Miller has done creative work on The Spirit before. Back in 1981, when he was still the hot young writer/artist on Daredevil, he took part in “The Spirit Jam” that I mentioned yesterday, pencilling two pages to a Denny O’Neil script.


Just as Miller borrowed from Eisner’s Spirit for Daredevil, he has here borrowed what looks a lot like Josie’s bar from Daredevil and put it in The Spirit. The big plate glass window is doomed, of course.


“The Spirit Jam” pages were basically just a brief bit of slapstick done for the fun of it. But I still prefer them to the brutal mess used to promote the movie as if it was part of the Sin City franchise.




Panels and pictures
Panels by Denny O’Neil (writer), Frank Miller (penciller) and Terry Austin (inker) from “The Spirit Jam”, Will Eisner’s The Spirit issue 30 by Will Eisner, Kitchen Sink Comix, July 1981

Promotional poster by Frank Miller for the film Will Eisner’s The Spirit, 2006

Eisnshpritz

More inconsistency from your humble blogger.

A while back, I praised Darwyn Cooke for not getting hung up on pastiching the superficial aspects of Will Eisner’s style on The Spirit.

Then I saw this cover for the hardback collection of the first six issues of Cooke’s revival. Apparently, it was used as promotional artwork before the series began, but I missed it then.


I love the way that it captures the feel of the colour covers that Eisner did for Kitchen Sink’s Spirit magazine, particularly this one.


Inside that very issue, Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman discussed Eisner’s colour technique, concluding that he still had a lot to learn, because he was essentially drawing in colour rather than modelling in paint.

Personally, I rather prefer the texture of Eisner’s colour drawing to the more painterly, fully rendered covers that Warren Magazines had sometimes used during their Spirit series, like this one (none of them featured rain, so the comparison is inexact).


Eisner’s own finished art seems to me to give a better feel for what’s inside – a virtue that many comics’ covers lack in these days of specialised cover artists.

Incidentally, the title of this post is a Kurtzman coinage, taken from his contribution to “The Spirit Jam” from issue 30 of the Kitchen Sink magazine, which featured the work of some fifty different comics writers, artists and letterers on one extended story.



Covers and Panels

Cover art for The Spirit Volume 1 hardback, by Darwyn Cooke, DC Comics, scheduled for release in September 2007

Cover art for Will Eisner’s The Spirit issue 31 by Will Eisner, Kitchen Sink Comix, October 1981 (scan taken from the Grand Comics Database)

Cover art for The Spirit issue 10 by Will Eisner (pencils) and Ken Kelley, Warren Magazines, October 1975 (scan taken from the Grand Comics Database)

Panels by Harvey Kurtzman from “The Spirit Jam”, Will Eisner’s The Spirit issue 30 by Will Eisner, Kitchen Sink Comix, July 1981

Real-Time Lord

This week’s new episode of Doctor Who has a gimmick: called “42”, it tells the events of 42 minutes on board a spaceship, unfolded in real time over the 42 minutes of the episode. Presumably, it is no coincidence that “42” is 24 backwards.

Comics’ big recent experiment with real-time storytelling was DC’s series 52, each weekly issue portraying what happened in one week in the DC Universe. The writers found that this placed them under certain constraints (no “man at the door with a gun” cliffhangers, for example) and sometimes they fluffed it (such as the police taking several weeks to turn up to arrest Lex Luthor), but they did have the advantage that readers were tied to the real-time framework too, receiving only a week’s worth of story every week.

Within a single issue, it is harder to regulate the speed at which the reader reads. There is a battery of devices comics creators can use to simulate the flow of time: the number and size of the panels on a page, for example; their proportions (wide panels seem to take more time to read – Frank Quitely uses them for this purpose in All-Star Superman); the density of the images and amount of text to read in each panel; the width of gutters; and the use of images that explicitly indicate the passage of time such as changes in the angle and intensity of daylight.

Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns gives us a clearcut example of some techniques for controlling the flow of time in comics. Most pages are built of a large number of small panels (on an underlying sixteen-panel grid), each containing a simple, quickly read image, with a consistent number words. As a result, these pages tick by rapidly, but then Miller will throw in a full-page splash, and time seems to stand still.


Bullet time, right there on the comics page. But techniques like this only affect the relative speed at which time seems to pass. Is it possible for a single-issue single narrative to simulate the absolute passage of a particular amount of time, an in particular the time it takes to read?

Will Eisner had a go. In The Spirit section for September 11 1949, Eisner told the story of an attempted robbery, killing, and failed flight that took just “Ten Minutes”.



The most obvious technique that Eisner uses to try to regulate time across his seven pages is to read a watch for us at the start of each one. This is less crude than it might seem. Since we know from the start that the lead character, Freddy, will die after ten minutes, the marked passage of time also builds up the tension.



The illusion of the regular passage of time is maintained by the panel progressions. With only two exceptions, each panel follows directly on from the previous one, with no cutting away from Freddy. In general, any given area of any page contains the same amount of imagery and words for the eye to read, although Eisner does not use an identical panel grid on each page.

One of the exceptions is telling. The events of the first two-thirds of page 4, in which two customers discover the dead shop-keeper, seem to pass quickly. Then we get this panel, with no panel boundaries and lots of empty space, which works like those Frank Miller splashes, taking us out of the regular time-scheme. Unlike the Miller example, Eisner brings us back into the story not immediately, but about a minute later.



After the dramatic events of killing, discovery and flight, Eisner reminds us of how short a period of time has passed by bringing back the little girl from page 1, still working through her chant.



Only after this does Eisner bring in the Spirit himself, bringing his story to its tragic denouement, as Freddy is killed by a subway train.



Does it work? Not entirely. It took me four-and-a-half minutes to read this story through, not ten. Some of the pacing also seems a cheat. On page 6, Freddy is hailed by Dolan from a police car (Dolan is asking for directions, unaware of Freddy’s role in the crime that he has been called to); Freddy then walks – casually, hands in pocket – into a subway station, asks for a ticket, drops his change, has it picked up by the Spirit and passes through a turnstile. According the page-top watch, this is all supposed to take just a minute. It doesn’t match.

But I only noticed that when I went back to work out what Eisner was doing. And no-one in their right mind (unless preparing a blog entry, of course) sits down with a stopwatch to time how long it takes to read a comic strip. While reading it, Eisner’s story successfully maintains the illusion of the sustained passage of events in real time. It also tells an effective story pitched somewhere between film noir and O Henry. So, yes, it works.

Let’s see how Doctor Who does, in a rather easier medium for this sort of thing.


Panels

Batman “Hunt the Dark Knight” by Frank Miller (story, pencils, inks), Klaus Janson (inks), Lynn Varley (colours and visual effects), John Constanza (letters), DC Comics, 1986, reprinted in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Titan Books, 1986

The Spirit “Ten Minutes” by Will Eisner and his studio, The Spirit Section, September 11 1949, reprinted in The Spirit Archives Volume 19, DC Comics, 2006

Review: The Spirit 1-4

The Spirit issue 1: “Ice Ginger Coffee” by Darwyn Cooke with J Bone (inks), Dave Stewart (colour), Jared Fletcher (letters), Scott Dunbier (editor), 22 pages of strip, DC Comics, February 2007, US$2.99

The Spirit issue 2: “The Maneater” by Darwyn Cooke with J Bone (inks), Dave Stewart (colour), Jared Fletcher (letters), Scott Dunbier (editor), 22 pages of strip, DC Comics, March 2007, US$2.99

The Spirit issue 3: “Resurrection” by Darwyn Cooke with J Bone (inks), Dave Stewart (colour), Jared Fletcher (letters), Scott Dunbier (editor), 22 pages of strip, DC Comics, April 2007, US$2.99

The Spirit issue 4: “Hard Like Satin” by Darwyn Cooke with J Bone (inks), Dave Stewart (colour), Jared Fletcher (letters), Scott Dunbier (editor), 22 pages of strip, DC Comics, May 2007, US$2.99


If it wasn’t called The Spirit, I’d like it even more.



Qualms about Hussein Hussein apart, Darwyn Cooke’s revived version of The Spirit is an expertly crafted series of light adventure stories, mixing humour, thrills and quirky characterisation. Its writing is surefooted, amusing and well-paced, and its artwork serves the stories perfectly: technically competent, expressive and smoothly-flowing. More comics should be like this.

But The Spirit was a strange candidate for revival for any reason other than protecting a trademark. There is nothing compelling or striking about the lead character. As the script for Cooke’s first issue put it, he is “a big blue average”, brave, handsome, affable – but not very interesting. To be sure, well-adjusted heroes are a rarity in American comics, but there is nothing here to make an author declare, “I must make stories about this character”.

The same is true of the other elements of the strip. Central City is an undistinguished urban space. The supporting characters are colourful, but Cooke has chosen to change them significantly. P’Gell has lost her casual amorality to become a woman with a committed and tragic past; Silk Satin has lost her criminal background, family complications and British nationality to become a professional CIA agent. They might as well be new characters – well-drawn, entertaining characters, but in no need of those old names.

What was unique and compelling about The Spirit was not its component parts, but the way that Will Eisner used them. It may seem strange to emphasise the importance of Eisner personally, when The Spirit was the product of a whole studio. But look at how the strip read when Eisner was not paying attention – while he was away on military service in World War 2, or when he left the writing to Jules Feiffer and the art to Wallace Wood in 1952. It is almost a different series altogether. Even if he was just overseeing scripts and polishing art, Eisner’s influence completely dominated The Spirit in its heyday.

That heyday certainly saw a lot of light-hearted adventure stories in the Cooke mould. But it also emphasised two characteristics of Eisner’s work throughout his career: a compulsion to develop new techniques and to push the boundaries of his craft; and a fascination with the lives of ordinary men in the street, and how destiny, fate or chance can bring catastrophe to them. Both characteristics are on display in these opening pages of “The Fly”:




In contrast, Cooke has so far concentrated on his lead adventurers, with little room for bystanders. Furthermore, his strip reads like the work of a master craftsman working within the limits he has already staked out for himself.

The main piece of experimentation has been Cooke’s use of double-pages splashes. For the most part, these have not been successful: neither the images themselves nor their place in the story have justified their size. An exception is the splash for issue 4, which conveys something of the environment in which Satin and the Spirit have found themselves.



Otherwise, Cooke has confined himself to the odd little trick like this multiple image of Dolan from issue 1 …



… or these flashback images from issue 2 …



..and issue 3.



The issue 3 flashbacks are a good example of Cooke working within his comfort zone. The use of full page width panels and geometric colour blocks (derived from modernist advertising graphics of the 1950s and 1960s) serves to differentiate the flashback sequences from the present day scenes. But Cooke had already used both techniques in The New Frontier and his issue of Solo.

Still, it is perhaps better that Cooke makes The Spirit his own than that he should fall victim to the self-conscious pastiche that often results when comics creators try to be Eisnerish. Take this example from Alan Moore and Rick Veitch’s Greyshirt.



It is clever and effective, but also forced and arch.

There is, of course, one other big difference between Eisner’s Spirit and Cooke’s. In four months, Cooke has produced four 22-page stories. Over the same period, Eisner would have produced seventeen or eighteen 7-page stories, giving him much more scope to play with new ideas. Perhaps, as he gets into his stride, Cooke will start stretching his muscles. I certainly intend to hang around long enough to find out.



Panels from the issues under review, plus:

The Spirit “The Fly” by Will Eisner, The Spirit section for 10 March 1946, reprinted in The Spirit Archives volume 12, DC Comics, 2003

Greyshirt “How Things Work Out”, by Alan Moore (script), Rick Veitch (art), Todd Klein (letters), David Baron (colours), Scott Dunbier (editor), Alan Moore’s Tomorrow Stories issue 2, 1999, reprinted in Alan Moore’s Tomorrow Stories Collected Edition book 1, America’s Best Comics, 2002

A Thousand Pardons, Mist’ Spirit Boss

A rightly-praised feature of Darwyn Cooke’s revival of The Spirit has been his rehabilitation of Ebony White. In his later life, Will Eisner regretted that, when he created Ebony in 1940, he conformed to the contemporary stereotypes established by Stepin Fetchit and Amos & Andy. In appearance, voice and disposition, Ebony represented the racial prejudices of his age.



Of course, Ebony had hidden depths, and frequently proved himself both resourceful and invaluable to the Spirit. But even so, when we read reprints of the original Spirit sections, we have to make embarrassed allowances for the times in which they were produced.



Cooke’s version of Ebony is drawn in the same style as the Spirit himself, with no racial caricature. His speech patterns are much the same as anyone else in Central City, and his relationship with the Spirit is one of easy familiarity, not subservience.

And so, our tolerant, inclusive society progresses. It is no longer acceptable to present members of ethnic minorities as stereotypical caricatures, as representatives of popular beliefs about their race, rather than as individuals. Comic books treat everyone as worthy of respect.

Except Arabs.

Meet Hussein Hussein …




Of course, Hussein has hidden depths, and has proved himself resourceful and … But we’ve been down this road before, haven’t we?



Panels from:
The Spirit “The Black Queen” by Will Eisner, The Spirit section for 16 June 1940, reprinted in The Spirit Archives Volume 1, DC Comics, 2000

The Spirit “The Maneater” by Darwyn Cooke with J Bone (inks), Dave Stewart (colour), Jared Fletcher (letters) and Scott Dunbier (editor), The Spirit issue 2, DC Comics, March 2007

The Spirit “Hard Like Satin” by Darwyn Cooke with J Bone (inks), Dave Stewart (colour), Jared Fletcher (letters) and Scott Dunbier (editor), The Spirit issue 4, DC Comics, May 2007

Semi-comics

In their quest to retain viewers’ interest, producers of historical documentaries have increasingly turned to the bastard genre of the drama-doc. Neither full-fledged historical drama, which viewers know to treat as possible fiction, nor sober account of the sifting, weighing and analysis of evidence, drama-docs’ third person voice-overs and talking heads sequences lend unjustified authority to the passages of dramatised reconstruction. Combined with a traditional realistic, mimetic style of dramatic presentation, this creates a spurious impression of accuracy and precision and a false sense of confidence in what is, in fact, at least partly speculative.

Comics can have the same effect. Will Eisner’s last book was The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which traces the depressing story of how the repeated unmasking of the Protocols as fraud and forgery has failed to prevent their continued acceptance by fanatics. Eisner’s book is sincere, and seems thoroughly researched. But take a look at a typical page (click to enlarge this and other images):



Here the reader might reasonably assume that Eisner has combined a real clipping from The Times with a speculative reconstruction of a conversation between two journalists. But, in 1921, the front page of The Times was still given over to small ads. The story cannot have appeared below the masthead like that. Eisner has presumably combined the text from an interior page with the masthead, so that the story can be clearly identified as having run in what was, at the time, widely seen as the world’s most authoritative newspaper. Given the subject he is discussing, this sort of mixture of artifice and truth seems ironically unsatisfactory.

Combining text and comic-strip narrative can, however, have quite the opposite effect. Terry Deary’s enormously successful series of children’s books, Horrible Histories, combines text with comic-strip sequences and single cartoons drawn by Martin Brown. Here is a sample page from The Vicious Vikings:



Here, the cartoony style and jocular tone make it very clear to the reader that what he sees should not be taken as literally true and accurate. But he learns something, too, about the stories Vikings told about themselves.

This mix of text and cartoon isn't confied to non-fiction. Before he hit the big time with His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman used it in two of his books for children: Count Karlstein, or The Ride of the Demon Huntsman and Spring-Heeled Jack, a Story of Bravery and Evil. Both were based on school plays he had written, presumably while he was a teacher rather than a schoolboy.

Of the two, Count Karlstein presents the more interesting comic strip elements. The story is a cross between Northhanger Abbey and Hammer horror – two young orphan girls see the world through the filter of gothic romance, but their uncle really has sold his soul to the Demon Huntsman. The tale takes in long-lost heirs, Italian conjurers-cum-conmen-cum-spies, and indomitable English schoolmistresses. The artwork, by Patrice Aggs, is reminiscent of period prints by the likes of Gillray and Rowlandson in its cross-hatching, style of lettering and balloon placement. It is not always clear why Pullman makes the choices he does about which parts to present in prose and which in comic-strip, but he does use the latter to pull off some tricks which would otherwise be difficult to achieve, such as the running commentary on events by assorted inanimate objects.



Occasionally, Pullman and Aggs create some interesting effects, such as the double-page spread below. The left-hand page recounts Miss Davenport’s arrival at the Jolly Huntsman inn. The right-hand page describes Sergeant Snitsch’s investigation there. A single panel running across the bottom of both pages draws events together.



Spring-Heeled Jack is less interesting. Jack was a genuine Victorian adventure character, and you can read about him in Jess Nevins’ magnificent Encyclopaedia of Fantastic Victoriana. Here, he helps a group of children escape from a wicked orphanage superintendent and find their long-lost father. But the comic strip parts, draw by David Mostyn, have little period flavour, and contain few interesting storytelling devices.









All the same, both books are great fun, and the mix of prose and picture-strips can hardly fail to interest anyone who reads illustrated blog entries like this one.



Picture sources (from top):

Will Eisner The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, WW Norton, 2005

Terry Deary Horrible Histories: The Vicious Vikings, illustrated by Martin Brown, Scholastic Children’s Books, 1994

Philip Pullman Count Karlstein, or The Ride of the Demon Huntsman, illustrated by Partice Aggs, cover by Peter Bailey, Corgi Yearling, 1991

Philip Pullman Spring-Heeled Jack, a Story of Bravery and Evil, illustrated by David Mostyn, cover by Peter Bailey, Corgi Yearling, 1989