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In Media Madness, Matt. Murray reviews, revisits and rambles about comics, cartoons and their interactions in and with related media.

Poor Frank Miller.

Twenty some odd years ago, after being at the forefront of a revolution in the comics industry with his legendary run on Daredevil and his seminal take on Batman (Dark Knight Returns and Year One) he turned his sites to Hollywood and was completely crushed by the film making machine when he was hired to write the Robocop sequels. Misunderstood and re-written to the point of barely being recognized as his work, Robocop 2 and Robocop 3 literally sent Miller back to the drawing board, where he would cook up Sin City and 300… which of course would become hot Hollywood properties which would revolutionize comic book movies to an extent.

Poor Frank Miller.

Although he was rightfully billed as “co-director” of Sin City and would get the reverential treatment he deserved from the actors, producers, directors and critics that he definitely deserved in the wake of the direct translation of City and the less literal adaptation of 300 (which was filtered through the directorial sense of Zack Snyder), anyone with a sense of history and an understanding of Mr. Miller’s ambitions could see that he was chomping at the bit to get the training wheels off… to take a shot at writing and directing his own movie.

Poor Frank Miller.

For the better part of two decades he watched as his versions of Batman and Daredevil were plundered for their good parts and put on screen to varying degrees of success.  How he must have grit his teeth as he waited, worked and prayed for the opportunity to get his crack at bringing his dark vision of the superhero type to the silver screen.  Then finally, the opportunity came.  At the memorial service for his mentor and idol Will Eisner, Miller was approached by producer Michael E. Uslan with the opportunity to bring Eisner’s The Spirit to the cinemas.   The story goes that he turned down the job immediately, but then no less than five minutes later decided that no one else but he should do it.

Poor Frank Miller.

As a property, The Spirit is a tough nut to crack.  The original strip, which circulated as 8-page supplements in Sunday newspapers during the 1940s and 1950s,  is a tongue-in-cheek blend of adventure, humor, sexism and racism wrapped up in the cover of a cop/detective milieu.  Eisner’s Spirit, Denny Colt is kind of acknowledged as a superhero, though he lacks a few key components that define the genre type – powers and a costume.  Yet, the placement of a few small accessories such as a fedora,  gloves and a domino mask gave him an iconic appearance and concealed his identity to the extent that they counted as a costume, and his powers were his wits and his ability to get out of any situation with his bare knuckles.  Of course there was also  an almost super human attraction he had to and for the ladies.  That’s power, if not a power.  At least that’s how Eisner sold the concept to the publisher, who was looking for a conventional Superman knockoff but settled for what could be perceived as a Batman clone.

Like Batman, the Spirit had an underground lair which he used as a crime-fighting base of operations.  In this case it wasn’t a bat’s cave,  but a mausoleum at Wildwood Cemetery where Denny Colt was allegedly buried.  Also like Batman, the Spirit  had a kid sidekick.  Instead of an acrobatic ward though, he had a pre-pubescent cab driver named Ebony White, a black street urchin that was drawn and written as a horrible “step ‘n’ fetch” African American stereotype that was just phasing out of popularity at the time.*   In all, The Spirit captured enough of the superhero genre’s trappings to pass as a superhero comic and survive a lengthy run in the papers before fading into popular obscurity.

However, the comics community and the birth of institutionalized fandom in the late 1960s would keep The Spirit alive, for the lack of a less hackneyed turn of phrase.  (I hate bad puns, but sometimes I can’t resist.  Sorry.)  Eisner, who was a favorite on the burgeoning convention circuit, would see his original strip reprinted by alternative “comix” publishers that fawned over him at the early cons and eventually new Spirit stories invaded interestingly novel retail outlets that sold just comics.  This time around,  it wasn’t just Papa Will writing and drawing Denny Colt (although the original strip itself saw its fair share of “ghosting”), brash young turks such as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, who were starting to make names for themselves in the industry were pumping out Eisner-esque tales that paid homage in both art and writing styles.

The Spirit became widely acknowledged as the thinking fan’s golden age superhero.  Creators who weren’t crafting new Spirit stories directly were openly acknowledging the strip’s and Eisner’s influence on how they made comics.  Knowledge of his adventures became a secret handshake amongst the fan community.  Despite a 1980s TV movie starring the guy who played Flash Gordon and directed by the guy who made The Last Dragon, the Spirit stayed underground for the most part, lionized and fetish-ized by the fans.

Poor Frank Miller.

In the wake of the 2008 release of The Dark Knight, a spiritual descendent of Miller’s Batman comics and itself a cultural juggernaut, his film adaptation of The Spirit hit the screens with a resounding thud.  The heavy, low range clunk of the critics and box office was rivaled only by the high-pitched shriek of the fan community that insisted that this movie was in no way The Spirit that they had loved and kept alive all these decades in their fanzine discussions and yearly gatherings in the San Diego panel rooms.

In short, The Spirit lacked the brand recognition that would bring in the general public, while the cult like devotion of the core audience ate away at the audience from the other end.  Invoking Miller’s name as the film’s auteur and likening it to Sin City and 300 just served to drive the “faithful” further away while creating somewhat inappropriate comparisons to those other highly successful films.

Admittedly, I was one of those who stayed away from the initial release of the film as a result of the venom-filled spews of my friends, who like myself, are pretty die hard comic fans.  After purchasing the film on DVD however, I regret not seeing it in the theaters, because I actually liked it and I probably would have enjoyed it more in a “big screen” format.   It certainly has its faults, but it wasn’t the complete “rape of my senses” that I was warned about.

A big point of contention amongst my friends, was that it wasn’t “Will Eisner’s Spirit.”  That it was too violent, too silly and too over the top to be anything like the character or the strip that they read and revered.  While I do have a number of the Spirit Archive hardcovers that DC published in order to preserve and perpetuate the Eisner legacy, I don’t necessarily feel qualified to defend the fideltity of the film to the originals.  Kyle Baker, however, took it upon himself  to handle that issue on his blog when he saw the film, and did so deftly.  Baker actually goes line-by-line, toe-to-toe with a number of complaints from the fanbase and shows exactly what original Eisner strips and panels Miller got his ideas from, proving that indeed the film can be viewed as a mostly faithful adaptation of Eisner’s work. (ed: Mr. Baker’s review seems to have been pulled from his own blog, although you can read fragments of it and reactions to it in Heidi MacDonald’s The Beat Archives, and get the gist of what he wrote.)

Even if he hadn’t strayed from Eisner with certain key plot elements (like he does by revealing the Octopus at all, let alone giving both the villain and the Spirit accelerated healing powers), Miller still would have suffered the slings and arrows of the die hard fan base, in that there is no possible way he could bring “Will Eisner’s The Spirit” to cinematic life. When a fan says that Frank Miller’s The Spirit is not Eisner’s, what they’re really saying is that it’s not their Spirit.  Even with Macht speaking Eisner’s dialogue or standing in the exact same mise-en-scene as an Eisner panel, he still cannot compare to the way the Spirit speaks and moves in the limitless and specific imagination of a reader taking in the comic strip and the all important spaces in between.  There’s no one director that can compete with that.  Not even a director who has been waiting for decades to bring his unique and stylish vision to the world on his own terms.

Poor Frank Miller.

As a longtime fan and admirer of Frank Miller, I can support the claim that some made that itat least felt like it was more of a Miller work than an Eisner.  In fact I would go as far as to say that The Spirit is essentially Frank Miller 101, a great primer for anyone who wants to know what Miller’s about.  All of his fetishes are on full display and given free reign: Film Noir style lighting effects; city rooftops populated by archaic water towers; beautiful, buxom femme fatales; Converse Chuck Taylor sneakers; Japanese Manga conventions (the Octopus’s samurai scene actually breaks into manga effects); blissfully stupid, nigh indestructible minions (all played by Louis Lombardi); anachronistic Nazi outfits and symbology; and sarcastic, self-referential humor (Scarlett Johansson’s Silk N. Floss at one point proclaims “I just think you’re taking this way too seriously…”).

Visually, the film looks like Sin City with a touch more color, but unlike the detractors I really didn’t have a problem with that.  Like the Sin City books, the original Spirit comics also drew their look and style from Film Noir and 40’s detective movies, so it makes perfect sense to me that they would have similar photo-visual bents.  Frank Miller has a definite understanding of how to convey a dark mood through shadow and lighting, and here I believe it is a benefit.

The faults, and there are some major ones to acknowledge, come from how Miller treats Eisner’s and his own dramatic ideas in bringing them off the comics page into cinematic life.  His direction of the actors, especially Gabriel Macht as the titular hero, is uneven at best.  Overall, Miller depicts the Spirit as if he were the Daredevil he darkened or the grizzled Batman that he popularized, which would be fine, if he didn’t also capture the light hearted, grinning, cad that’s seemingly the hero of the original strip.  The juxtaposition of the two Spirits is never really reconciled in the film’s script or the performance, making the overall story feel like a pastiche of disparate scenes from different genres of film cobbled together and given “unity” by a stylized digital backdrop.  Another hiccup is how Samuel L. Jackson’s penchant for scenery chewing is never reigned in, and while the broad range of costumes that he wears as the Octopus, allows Miller to play with different forms (like using manga effects out of nowhere), again there’s no cohesive through line to tie it all together.

In all, it reminded me of what a friend said about the noble failure of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow:  “It wasn’t directed, as much as it was art directed.”  A back handed compliment at best, but the film is,  in my opinion, definitely and completely worth a viewing or two as long as you can check your own willful Spirit at the door, and get caught up Miller’s.

Well, there goes another bad pun.  Poor Matt. Murray.

* Whenever someone feels the need to preach ad nauseum about how Will Eisner was godlike in his battle against racism, I always feel the need to throw up the subject of Ebony White, which normally will shut them down.  Eisner, like most of us in the human race,  was acutely sensitive to the persecution of his own people, namely the Jews, which he chronicled numerous times in his later works such as To The Heart of the Storm and The Plot, but was rather cavalier in his treatment of other races and stereotypes.  It was a dirty fact of life that even he acknowledged in later interviews.

Matt. Murray earned his BFA in film, television and radio production from NYU. He has curated exhibits focusing on the art and commerce of Saturday Morning cartoons and the adaptation of illustrated media into live actions films and animation. Murray is the country’s leading (if not only) Smurfologist. His personal blog, It’s Time for Some Action, can be found at http://actnmatt.blogspot.com/