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Posted in response to Greg's post below: "I’ll probably buy Spirit #2 despite not liking issue #1, since it was the cover to #2 that sold me on the series against by original, better judgment. But if P’Gell is played as an outright evildoer rather than an amoral hedonist, I’ll be disappointed with Cooke for the second issue running."

I'll still buy the issue, but it sounds like I'll have the same problem with it that you had. That said, I'm not so surprised that Cooke did such a thing: the first issue had characters tossing around the word "bitch," which seemed jarring as hell in the context of both the Spirit's nostalgia factor and Cooke's cartoony art style. It also had a metahuman gang boss, and a fairly gross one at that.

It seems like a lot of what I don't like about the Cooke Spirit so far has to do with his efforts to make it into, well, a contemporary superhero comic of some kind. If he were going for lighthearted heroics, it'd work; and if he were using the book as a license for his own experiments, it'd work; but simply treating the Spirit as a genre unto himself and then updating that genre really isn't working at all for me.

I have no problems with the way the issue unfolded. If that's her crime, so be it. And it really adds to the story where he's trying to warn her off, when it's the prince who should have gotten the warning.

I also had no problem with this issue, or last issue's use of language/violence. The Spirit may seem like an old-time romp to those of us used to pantha beheadings but I'm assured that in their original context, several Spirit tales were indeed quite racy.

I'm new to the Spirit so I have no backstory knowledge or emotional investment in the characters pror to Cooke's run. I will say that after some hesitancy--I only bought Spirit/Batman because of the strength of Cooke and Loeb's past work not the characters--I am more than happy with my choices. Cooke's made the Spirit fresh and easy to undetstand and enjoy for newcomers. As for P'gell, the backstory was a nice fit. I suppose that having her an amoral femme fatale with no other motivation than because "she just is and just can" is nice, but the depth of her first husband being murdered makes her a much more defined and compelling character, even if it comes off as a stock plot or violated pre-established continuity. Cooke's used this several times and I think his strength is that he places a great deal of emphasis on simple yet fitting characterization that makes you understand and love the character to its true core. I can see how old school P'gell fans might be disturbed and I admit if I had that background I might be miffed as well. But unlike other retcons or rewrites, this isn't cynical or shock jock style to me. It fits well and makes me actually like P'gell more and interested in her story lines. I fact, I hope that Mr. Cooke will autograph my copies of spirit at Megacon this year and give me the chance to tell him how much of a wonderful surprise his work has been for me.

never read a single eisner issue but have read both of cookes and i can appreciate that he is re-introducing a popular character so it needed to be something fresh in order for the character not be stale when she hit the page, what is good about this is twofold - the origin he provided her with made me warm to a character i have no familiarity with and also this 'darkening' will affect only this issue. it's dealt with, she killed him, so the 'out-of-characterness is completely self contained, in her future appearances she will continue to behave as you knew her two and her re-introduction has been startling

That's the part I loved, honestly. It gave just a little nuance to the character, and I think it fits with the general warmth and humanity of Eisner's original series to add that kind of shading.

Loved this issue as well as the first, and I first read the Spirit in the Warren magazine reprints in the 70s (after first reading the prewar Spirit story in Feiffer’s great “Great Comic Book Heroes”--best birthday present ever!).

I’ll admit to some ambivalence to this motivational backstory to P’Gell as well. First reaction is that it undermines the “purity” of her amorality: Isn’t it enough that like Jessica Rabbit, she’s “just drawn that way?”

Second thought is that although the character doesn’t need the motivation, Cooke might think that certain modern readers might: it arguably inoculates P’Gell from accusations of being a simple stereotype.

Anyway, to echo fanboy d upthread, it is self-contained and I’ll do my best not to think about it, now that it’s done.

I haven't read a whole lot of the Spirit (pretty much just the Best of the Spirit trade DC put out a couple years ago), but I was fine with this issue. I liked the first issue a little better, but this one was still good.

P'Gell becoming an on-screen murderer (more or less) bugged me, but what bugged me even more was The Spirit spending so much of the story without his mask -- and especially with Ellen!. Yeah, I know Eisner wanted to create a more "realistic" character, but, in my memory, you can count the number of times the Spirit takes off the mask on the fingers of one hand.

And for that matter, when did Ellen start calling him Denny? He was always "Spirit."

I'm loving this series, but . . .

I don't have a problem with P'Gell being a murderer, per se, but I did find her tragic backstory confession to be a jarring contrast to the rest of the issue, so for that, I didn't like it. It felt too clunky and shoehorned in, and I just expect better from Cooke.

Otherwise, it was excellent.

Having finally read the thing, and having an inflated sense of self-worth, I figured I'd follow up my first comment.

On the whole, this issue was infinitely more successful than the first for me; a lot of the issue really nailed a tone and style that Cooke's clearly made his own, and told a fun, 1950s noir kind of story in light fashion.

I'm still, however, finding the way in which Cooke is introducing more typical contemporary superhero comics stuff to be fairly jarring. The Spirit's maskless supporting cast scenes seem like 60s Marvel dropped into a 40s story, and Cooke hasn't quite gotten the very modern designs of things like computers or the shifts in dialogue style from noir banter to CNN-speak to work. Batman: The Animated Series got away with it by committing to a late deco design style for practically everything, but Cooke isn't doing that here.

P'Gell having the bog-standard "trauma as motivation" origin story is likewise from another kind of story than the one in which improbably slinky courtesans play femme fatale to foreign princes. Her teary confession is far too sincere in a story that's up to that point been a wonderful exercise in style. I just don't feel that the dead-on seriousness of that last scene pays off the fun of the rest of the issue; it seems like it's from a different comic, pasted in to this one to make page count or feel "real." In fact, it feels oddly obligatory, as if whimsy and image have to be bought at the price of melodramatic efforts at "psychological depth" (read: the reinsertion of sentimentality).

But you know, you can virtually ignore all of that material for most of the issue, and the last page is sheer perfection: it's the genuine payoff to the story Cooke seems to be telling, as opposed to the one he seems to feel is part of a 22-page comics format. A world in which characters cheekily pop their heads around from behind trees to spy on one another and put on screwball comedy "blind man" acts is not quite like a world in which Arab dictators are hacked to death by their victims while people mention Homeland Security and brutal state repression tactics. The cutting, literal and figurative, remains jarring and diminishes the grace notes of the former style while trivializing the impact of the latter.

These characters simply strike me, visually and, for the most part, tonally, as characters who don't need explanation, but instead run on visual shorthand and stripped-down plot conceits. The fun for me is in the illusion of effortlessness, the easy stylization. This issue does more of that than issue 1, which rather spoiled the tongue-in-cheek fun of Ginger Coffee's seeming inability to stop yammering in mediaspeak by centering plot details around it. If Ginger speaks in that way because she's wholly a creature of the tube, it's one thing; if she's doing so for rational reasons, in this case because she's contrived to be on a live feed and is simply too damned stupid or arrogant to shut up, that's another, less compelling thing.

P'Gell remains here a femme faatale of the old school despite the effort to justify her odd resort to brutal murder, because the methods she uses to reach her target seem so deliberately out of keeping with her reasons and her intent. The slow build, the treatment of the scheme as a con job rather than a murder plot, and the sheer limit to which she's willing to go in playing out the moves of seduction rather than simply buying a sniper's rifle and being done with it suggest that, even played strongly against type, she's at root a distillation of Mary Astor and Alida Valley. If she becomes a more stolid, bizarrely "sympathetic" sort of murderer at the finale, it's fine, because it;s gotten out of the way. With this ugly bit of business out of the way we can anticipate her return in a story that's willing to let her dissolve fully into the ephemeral pop tropes that make her fun to read about, that make her work.

I'll be skipping the next issue: I couldn't care less about the Spirit's origin, any more than I could about P'Gell's, because origins are to my mind strangely inadequate to these characters, an hardly integral as they'd be in, say, a Batman book. But I'll be back as of number four.

Were there a lot of complaints when Frank Miller made Catwoman a whore? I do wonder, if there were angry letters at the time, she seems the better for it now after the Bru/cooke relaunch.

I've never read any spirit before, this 'origin' wasn't so bad, it's just her previous husbands before the murder that don't quite make sense to me, like if she wanted it that badly, would she not have tried to get revenge earlier?