Friday, June 20, 2008

Jules Feiffer's Superheroes Week: An unusual metaphor applied to The Spirit

"The Spirit could even suffer defeat in the end: be outfoxed by a woman foe—stand there, his tongue making a dent in his cheek—charming in his boyish, Dennis O’Keeffe way—a comment on the ultimate ineffectuality of even super-heroes. But, of course, once a hero turns that vulnerable he loses interest to both author and readers. The Spirit, through the years, became a figurehead, the chairman of the board, presiding over eight pages of other people’s stories. An inessential do-gooder, doing a walk-on on page eight, to tie up loose strings. A masked Mary Worth."

—Jules Feiffer, The Great Comic Book Heroes

5 comments:

Johnny Bacardi said...

And that's why Cooke's Spirit was a well-intentioned failure. Only Eisner wanted his lead character to take this role...

Anonymous said...

An unusual, but absolutely spot-on metaphor, for sure. I really enjoyed the handful of issues of Spider-Man's Tangled Web that took that approach to storytelling.

SallyP said...

Oh...don't get me started on Mary Worth! That two-timing floozy!

Anonymous said...

SallyP: Frank Miller's CHARTERSTONE would be AWESOME.

SallyP said...

HAW!