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?

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.

Otherwise, it was excellent.

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

I'm loving this series, but . . .

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 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'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.