This would, naturally, be the perfect time to tell you what I thought of the issue. Except I haven’t read it yet. But even if the story bites, I can guarantee I’ll love looking at it. AND it’ll cost me a lot less than a trade.

It was pretty standard, but darned pretty./

What I liked best was that Cooke didn’t do an imitation of an Eisner splash page. He did a 2006 version of an Eisner splash page.

One thing did bug me. In an old-fashioned comic like this, things like “Son of a bitch” “Holy Crap” and “God damn” really jumped out at me, and not in a good way. I know that’s very mild cursing by today’s standards, but they really jarred. And they were totally un-needed. They added nothing to the story or characters and their absence wouldn’t have changed a thing. In a world with so few comics that I can give to my 8-year-old nephew, would it have hurt to keep the language safe for my nephew’s mom?

These reviews look nice. One of them looks way cool.
I didn’t have time to read them now. Just time enough to tell you I clicked on them.

Plus — unlike a lot of heroes, the Spirit had a bit of a blue collar feel to him. He often turned up his nose at high society, his taste in music and theatre was shown to run more to the common than the classical, and he did essentially “work” as the Spirit — he claimed the rewards for bringing in bad guys and solving crimes and used the money to support himself. The Spirit was no rich-boy Bruce Wayne.

That being said — I think this was a solid first issue but it felt tentative. I don’t blame Cooke for being daunted at the prospect of filling Eisner’s shoes and it would be only natural for him to play things safer in this first issue. I only hope that, as Cooke grows more comfortable he choses to become more bold with the character.

Cooke has produced a light, entertaining, but ultiamtely fairly middling generic superhero comic. All right for what it is, I guess, but not what I was hoping for when I picked up a comic with the names “Spirit” and “Will Eisner’s” emblazoned across the masthead. I wonder how much can really be done with the Spirit character himself, precisely because he’s ultimately sort of generic. Eisner wrote in broad archetypes, of course, but the secret was to keep varying the archetypes and to let the formal experiments — tales told entirely in rhyme, issues taking place in the dark that used panel shape and sequence to convey action, etc. — be the real “stars” of the book.

I wonder if thinking in terms of 8-pagers or 7-pagers is the way to generate those sorts of mad ideas, since the brevity forces a degree of innovation on any sort of halfway developed or clever story and prevents the reader from seeing the basic idea stretched too far. This story, despite having 22 pages to work with, really isn’t all that developed or that clever. It doesn’t need 22 pages, frankly, to get over the sense that Ginger Coffee is a calculating, tunnel-visioned careerist. The bits about Mr. Wang and The Pill were rather throwaway too, for that matter, space-filling gimmickry that didn’t really add much to the theme and, in the case of Wang, not much to the plot besides establishing that the pustule-ridden Pill is dangerous indeed.

This would’ve made a fine 8-page story. It makes a poor 22 page story, and it doesn’t have the formal play that the better Spirit stories have. Based on this issue, I think DC would’ve been better off marketing this under some different name, and letting Cooke come up with his own inventions for the hero and the cast. ‘Cause whatever this new Spirit book is supposed to be doing, it doesn’t seem all that interesting.