Monday, March 2, 2009
The DC Comics Spirit; Bolland Cover art
The Spirit #26 "Silken's Choice"
Written by Michael Uslan and FJ DeSanto
Artwork by Justiniano
Inks by Walden Wong
Colors by Trish Mulvihill
Cover artwork by Brian Bolland
DC Comics, 36 pages (22 pages of story)
Cover Date April 2009
Cover price retail $2.99 USD
Click to enlarge Cover by Brian Bolland to see drawing detail
The Shifting Tones of the un-Eisner Spirit
Too much "Plop"
The most recent issues of the Spirit coming from DC Comics were helmed by long-time comic book veterans Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier. Though the team kept up the goofy humor of Eisner's golden-age hero nicely, they didn't likewise manage to balance this with the action and the hints of darkness the character contains. With Aragonés, the series had been devolving badly into something more akin to the old DC Plop comic book (which Aragonés worked in back in the 1970s) instead of anything like Eisner or the Darwyn Cooke version which brought the series back to life in 2006. Probably the worst of it was the completely tone-deaf handing of Ellen Dolan who was presented as simply a very stupid person.
So here is a new team and the series has shifted back strongly in the direction of the Darwyn Cooke issues, with an examination of why longtime villainess Silken Floss is such a bad lady. Like Cooke, though, she isn't really all that bad and the usual extenuating circumstances are available to produce sympathy for the character despite the heinous deeds.
The Octopus is on hand manipulating things, and The Spirit gets his chances at a few heroics, but it is the ladies Silken and Ellen who settle the matter. Uslan and DeSanto's story is straight-forward and follows in Cooke's mold up to a point, but where Darywn Cooke could take the matter (biological weapons threatening the city) seriously, Uslan and DeSanto simply do not.
Justiniano's artwork is the well designed stuff he is known for, and his careful delineations of the human head, particularly female heads, is on hand. The weakness of over stylizing some of the figure work is also here, but no matter: Justiniano's graceful motion work and page design makes up for it. I'm glad his work appears in mainstream comics, as frenzied as he sometimes gets and as surreal and elastic his figure work, it is still a welcome respite from the standard overheated superhero visuals that come from DC Comics. As well drawn as his human heads are, though, there is a humor to his work that seems to meet the Eisner criteria for leavening the Spirit.
The colors by Mulvihill are well done and steer away from the bland primer blues that seem to too easily dominate a Spirit comic book.
I hope this will be a regular team on the Spirit for awhile. With the change in tone and the addition of a Brian Bolland cover, it seems like DC Comics is at least making an effort at getting the book back into something like Eisner's conception, which thus far seems to be the only thing that really works for this character in a series.
A few pages from the 22-page story, Click thumbnails to enlarge.
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Related:
The Spirit #1 by Darwyn Cooke
The Spirit #9 by Darwyn Cooke
The Spirit #15: DC Comics art by Paul Smith
The Spirit #13: Holiday Special
Batman/The Spirit #1. By Jeph Loeb and Darwyn Cooke
The Spirit #26. Art by Justiniano
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