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Originally posted by Eryk Davis Ester:
Here\'s an article on the Spirit movie at Newsarama.

I'm pretty skeptical of this.

Originally posted by Fat Cramer:
I wonder what is the extent of Miller's involvement in the movie.

Newsarama [ http://forum.newsarama.com/printthread.php?t=103845 ]
This live-adaptation of Will Eisner’s classic comic will be both written and directed by Miller.

The Spirit #4
From: DC Comics
Writer: Darwyn Cooke
Art: Darwyn Cooke and J. Bone
Review by Jamie Trecker

About a year ago, a noble attempt to revitalize a beloved character bit the dust. The book, supposedly, had everything the fans wanted: A star artist, an “all-ages” feel, easy access for newcomers and nods to past continuity. But the book and the character came with baggage; past attempts to revitalize the character in its own title had flopped, and the character was best remembered by a small group of cognoscenti as the product of a comic-book auteur.

The book was Plastic Man, drawn by Kyle Baker. So-called “highbrow” folks, (most of whom weren’t even old enough to remember Jack Cole’s pioneering work) trashed Baker’s efforts, refusing to let go of their memories of the sinuous, erratic and singular character. As for the rest, most people didn’t even remember Plastic Man to begin with, and so the book died a slow death on the shelves.

I fear DC’s latest noble effort to give life to an old character, Will Eisner’s Spirit, may follow the same path. If so, that sad fate will be undeserved, for under the hands of “The New Frontier’s” Darwyn Cooke, J. Bone, and the luminous colors of Dave Stewart, the Spirit may be the best book on the shelves at the moment.

There’s no job more thankless than trying to breathe new life into a cherished memory — just ask Grant Morrison about the X-Men. But the thing is, few people actually buying comics right now remember the Spirit, the groundbreaking newspaper serial of the late 1930s. The people who know Eisner’s work today came to it via reprint, and a group of jealous, self-appointed custodians have sprung up, ready to bash any deviation from “continuity.” Unfortunately, these folks’ hatred of change conflicts with the needs of the marketplace: DC is trying to sell comic books after all, and for the Spirit to survive it needs to attract new readers, preferably ones who will sympathize with a “dead” guy running around in a mask with a curious lack of strings.

So Cooke is trying to chart a middle path, mining Eisner’s fertile library of characters while giving the book a modern feel. Take his skillful use of Ellen Dolan, P’Gell and Silk Satin, just three of the many engaged and independent women in the Spirit’s canon. In each case, Cooke has managed to imbue them not only with a sense of history, but with distinctive personalities to boot, the latter being a far more difficult task. Cooke has also done well with the now-glaring Ebony White character, stripping away the minstrel veneer that modern readers of Eisner’s period work would find offensive.

Cooke can’t match Eisner’s visual vocabulary and gracefully shambling figures, so to his credit, he doesn’t try. Instead, Cooke and Bone’s linework is confident and solid, with an economy that belies how sophisticated the underlying structure of the artwork truly is. Drawing from the visual world created by Bruce Timm, the late Mike Parobeck, and Herge’s Tintin, Cooke’s characters have life and heft magnified by Stewart’s exuberant coloring. Case in point: The splash page of the current issue uses a cunning device I won’t spoil here, but suffice it to say that it is the first of the series to capture the sense of wonder that Eisner’s original, oft-copied introductory pages did. There are quirks — modern readers will surely wonder about the Commissioner’s bizarre hair-style (and I wondered why Denny Colt had no upper lip) but the whole package sweeps you on in a whirlwind of cheesecake and good-natured fun.

Art isn’t everything, of course, and Cooke does try a bit too hard at times on the writing end. The current issue overuses a pretentious joke about portraitist Thomas Gainsborough (famous for a work called “Blue Boy”); and Satin’s personality seems to take a disturbingly clichéd turn toward the latter half of the book, with a thoroughly unbelievable romantic scene coming after our hero has behaved like a jerk.

But give credit to Cooke for having the cojones to allow Denny Colt to be a jerk. He has the confidence to allow his characters to be more than just engines for the plot, and the lives he has created in just five issues (counting the Spirit/Batman one-shot with Jeph Loeb) will give readers more sense of depth than most omnibus collections of, well, let’s say the X-Men. My gut tells me Mr. Morrison would surely agree.