So you want to get into Darwyn Cooke’s Spirit…

I recently concluded a thorough analysis of all available sales data pertaining to the North American comic book market (I, um, spent about 90 seconds googling the sales charts), and I uncovered a shocking, appalling fact: Only about 20,000 people buy an issue of The Spirit each month.

If that seems like a lot of people to you (despite the fact that I prefaced it with the world “only,”), for comparison’s sake, it’s only one-sixth the number of people who have tuned in each month for a comic book about the Justice League’s board meetings, and one-twelfth as many who have tuned in each month to watch the Incredible Hulk punch people in the face.

And while board meetings and face-punches surely have their appeal, what makes the disparity of these numbers (as I remember them…from that thorough research mentioned two paragraphs ago) mind-boggling is the fact that whatever the merits of the Justice League and Hulk comic books, The Spirit is roughly a thousand times better. Wait, let me check my math…No! I forgot some zeroes! The Spirit is roughly one million times better than both of them…combined!

So why does it sell so poorly? Is it because everyone who buys comics except me and 19,999 other people are fools?

That’s a possible explanation. But surely there are other, less obnoxious and potentially offensive explanations (Particularly in case you aren’t currently reading The Spirit because, dear reader, I know you seem like an intelligent person with great taste and that shirt? It looks great on you).

I’m thinking that maybe, just maybe everyone wants to read The Spirit, that they harbor an innate understanding of its inherent awesomeness, but find themselves a little intimidated by the fact that the character is so long-lived and so revered, and therefore they aren’t sure where to start. I mean, DC, who now owns the character, have published like 20 over-priced archive additions of his adventures, can anyone just pick up an issue of current Spirit monthly comic book and bask in its awesomeness without first steeping themselves in arcane, nerdy knowledge?

Yes! Yes, they can! One of the great virtues of Cooke’s Spirit series, now in its tenth issue (and third-to-last issue, before Cooke leaves for greener pastures, and new creators come on), is that every single issue has been a complete, easy to read, highly accessible story.

And the latest issue, which was released just last Wednesday? It was probably the most accessible story yet. But since some of you still aren’t reading The Spirit, perhaps you need a little extra push.

So get ready to feel a firm pressure from behind dear readers, because after that interminably long and meandering introduction, Every Day Is Like Wednesday is pleased to answer all your questions in tonight's feature, which we're calling...




A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO THE AWESOMENESS OF DARWYN COOKE’S THE SPIRIT, PARTICULARLY #10, WHICH IS ESPECIALLY AWESOME



1.) Who or what is "The Spirit," exactly?

The Spirit is a masked mystery-man crime-fighter who, despite the colorful name and the domino mask, eschewed the Superman model of superheroes, sticking closer to the model of detective novel and pulp fiction protagonists.

Young big city detective Denny Colt was “killed" by a mad scientist, and immediately came back to life in a cemetery, getting a new lease on life after his supposed death. Making his new spooky surroundings his base of operations, he added a mask to his fedora and blue suit ensemble, and began battling crime with his fists and wits.

As a character, he wasn’t all that inspired a creation—you’d have a hard time picking him out of a line-up of similarly garbed crime-fighters—but his creator was such a talent that the execution of The Spirit’s adventures gave the character a long, long life (Sixty-seven years and counting).

That creator was Will Eisner, who was perhaps the greatest thing that ever happened to comics. Eisner is widely credited with writing the first graphic novel, the first aesthetic study of comics and beating Paul Bunyan and Davy Crockett in a fistfight in 1956. Comics’ version of the Oscars are named the Eisners after him, and when he died in 2005, he left behind an unrivaled body of work, having worked in the comics industry as long as there was a comics industry.

The Spirit, Eisner’s most iconic creation, starred in a weekly newspaper comic strip and a special pull-out section for over a decade, as well as in comic book-comics. The strip only sort of a crime drama, as Eisner infused the stories with a sense of humor and a restless sense of experimentation. Unlike most hero-centric strips of the day and today, The Spirit never completely committed to a single genre, and thus stayed a lot fresher than even strips featuring more popular characters (many of whom wore capes).

The strip became known for its playful integration of the logo into title pages, its colorful character names (Bond girls have nothing on Spirit girls), and its regular guy hero, who might always get the girl and beat the bad guys, but often got his ass kicked pretty bad in the process.



2.) And who’s this Darwyn Cooke character?

Cooke is a Canadian comics writer/artist responsible for some of the most awesome comics of the 21st century (But it is early yet).

That his comics feature stripped-down, powerful designs and a highly cinematic feel is likely due in no small part to the time he spent in animation, having worked on Batman: The Animated Series, Superman: The Animated Series and Batman Beyond (this here’s all him), three series that together comprise a high point in American television animation (He also worked on a Men in Black cartoon I’ve never seen a single frame of, so I can’t vouch for it).

Much of his comics work can be a little hard to find, as it tends to be a single issue here, a miniseries there, and the occasional graphic novel.

In 2003, Cooke began an epic project entitled DC: The New Frontier, a sly meta-narrative about how the Golden Age superheroes gave way to post-war cynicism, with only the most popular surviving in a sea of men-of-action, post-superhero manly men heroes like The Challengers of the Unknown, The Blackhawks and their ilk, before the optimism of the 1960s gave birth to a new era of superheroics, the bright, happy, shiny Silver Age (Indisputably the company’s glory years).

In 2006 he took on monthly comics duties with The Spirit, a title he would both write and draw, with artist J. Bone lending inks, and Dave Stewart colors.



3.) Wait, wait, wait... If The Spirit’s adventures were only awesome originally because of Eisner, how could Eisner-free Spirit stories possibly awesome?

Hey, good question!

I wouldn’t have expected an ongoing, Eisner-less Spirit effort to be worth a damn, personally, but, as it turns out, Cooke’s Spirit revival is going to be abbreviated, lasting only about 10-12 issues (He’s on through #12, but #7 was an anthology style fill-in by three different creative teams, and I think another such fill-in is slated shortly), which now makes it seem more like an a long tribute rather than an ongoing attempt to exploit the Spirit brand (which, to be fair, currently doesn’t have all that much juice in it anyway. The character may have lasted a long time, but he's not moving action figures and DVDs the way Spider-Man or Superman are, you know?).

But Cooke and his collaborators managed to be respectful of Eisner’s creation (Will Eisner’s signature is on every cover, dotting the “i” in “Spirit”), keeping the, um, spirit of the original strip in tact while updating the elements that didn’t age so well (like wince-inducing sidekick Ebony White), and moving the whole franchise into the 21st century. A 1940s cartoon noir figure might seem out of place in a world of satellites and cell phones, but Cooke makes it all work.



4.)What’s this crap about a Spirit move?

Yeah, they’re making a movie based on The Spirit, because apparently everything that’s ever been a comic book will be turned into a movie until films based on comics stop making money. Which is really another reason you hold-outs need to get on The Spirit now; why wait until the movie comes out and everyone's talking about The Spirit? Start reading now, and get out in front of the trend. Your friends will think you're ahead of the curve, plus you'll have the background necessarry to complain online about the casting choices with the same sense of entitlement as the rest of us.

The film is currently slated for a 2009 release, and it’s being written and directed by Frank Miller, who has extremely limited film experience, although movies based on his comics have recently made several gazillion (Sin City, 300) at the box office, and that's probably the only experience he needs to be accepted by Hollywood.

If you’ve read many of Miller’s comics, particularly his more recent totally insane ones, then you’ve probably noticed that he seems like the Anti-Eisner. And maybe he is, but the dude does have mad respect for Eisner, so maybe the film won’t totally suck. (At the very least, it will have some appropriately extremely curvy women in it).



5.) So, am I up to speed now?

Hell yeah you are! Let’s take a look then at The Spirit #10, a typically great issue of Cooke’s volume of the comic, one which accentuates his ability to make the character’s adventures completely current without sacrificing any of its attributes. Cooke’s Spirit is both timely and timeless, and this one a little more so of both.



What makes it so timely? Well, Cooke uses youtube.com as a narrative device, taking the comic book panel-like square image familiar from users of the site and importing it into his comic to introduce the victims and suspect in the murder mystery.

And it’s a murder mystery that taps into the zeitgeist, dramatizing for our escapist delight the dream of all American media consumers: The brutal murders of cable television punditry.

This being Cooke doing a Einser-inspired Spirit however, these familiar faces have been simplified to cartoon character elegance, and their names scrambled into delightful little punning poems that retain their original sounds, only slightly out of order.

Of course, despite the fact that they look like real world pundits, and that they have names similar to those of real world pundits, and that they have personalities and schticks just like those of real world pundits, they are, in fact, totally not really based on any of those, so neither Cooke nor DC can be sued by the likes of Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh.

To make sure of that, The Spirit’s girlfriend Ellen Dolan and sidekick Ebony White (who no longer resembles the hideous, lawn jockey-looking caricature he did when Eisner first drew him in the ‘40s) visit a lawyer in the first scene to get him to sign off on the adventure...



And what does this adventure entail?

Well, Central City Police Commissioner Eustace Dolan (that's him above cajoling the supporting cast to join him in the rest of the story), TV reporter Ginger Coffee and The Spirit are investigating the spectacular murder of Dandy O'Lyon, "the left wing lesbian day-time chat monster." Upon leaving posh restaurant Fugli, O'Lyon, who can't possibly be based on Rosie O'Donnell since Rosie has brown hair and Dandy's blonde, was apparently burned to death in her car.

Who could have killed her?



Perhaps Trust Wimbag, the overweight, far-right talk radio gas bag who had recently launched into an on-air diatribe against O'Lyon?




Or perhaps Mare Nolty, a skinny blonde with an incredible temper who's prone to act like a maniac in public to cynically exploit self-created controversy to boost her own Q-rating? After all, she apparnetly attempted to throttle Dandy in public recently.

Now, when you heard the words "skinny," "blonde" and "prone to act like a maniac in public to cynically exploit self-created controversy to boost her own Q-rating," you probably thought of Ann Coulter, right? Well, that can't possibly be Coulter. I mean, not only did the lawyer on page one say that any similarities between the characters and real people are completely coincidental but, well, Mare Nolty is pretty hot, and, well, Ann Coulter is, you know, Ann Coulter.

Anyway, The Spirit thinks she's a good lead, and he sneaks into her apartment to question her. He doesn't find her quite as hot as I do, though....



Hmm, maybe it is Coulter after all...




What about "The King of Cable News," the host of Wally's Report, Wally O'Bellows?




Or Stewart Flober, a pretend pundit who "pokes fun at cable news" by pretending to be an O'Bellows-like blowhard and has a habit of referring to his audiene as "Nation?"




Soon, some of these supsects begin getting bumped off, leading to a scene where familiar looking and sounding cable news personalities report on "The Cable Killer," often times just before they themselves fall victim to him (or her or them).

By the way, Mustachio Hernandez? I'm totally naming my first son that.

Cooke's not just having fun caricaturing the human caricatures that populate cable news, of course. There's also a Very Serious Message, which Rush Limb--, er, Trust Wimbag vocalizes during a car chase with the killer...





And Ginger summarizes thusly:




There, I think we all learned something from that. Not only about the corrosive effect of the punditocracy on our mediascape, but also about how awesome Darwyn Cooke's Spirit is.