Are you people gourdless? The Spirit is getting some well-deserved attention and you’re bitching? It’s the pet project of an honest-to-god comics guy rather than some hack director with no love of the original material. It’s being done by Frank Miller, who ain’t shabby at all. And you’re complaining? You people would bitch about a wet dream. Listen, I sat through the TV Movie twenty years ago. Oh, I was disappointed. It wasn’t nearly as cool as the comics, but I was glad to get even that much and I’ll tell you why – comic book cinema back then was pretty much all of that caliber. This was the era of The Hulk Returns, remember. Batman raised the stakes, sure, but the high level of comic book films you get nowadays has spoiled you people. Now you want the moon all of the sudden. You should be glad the director even knows that comic books are read by adults these days.
The resistance here comes from the fact that in his recent comics work Miller has revealed himself to be a hack writer with no love of earlier material. If he treats the Spirit like he treats Batman…
Besides, Miller’s still an unknown regarding his directoral skills. Sure, Sin City was good, but it also was helmed by Robert Rodriguez.
ComingSoon blurb:
http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=15617
Brian
Yes – unless you’re willing to claim that making a movie about Howard the Duck was a great idea. Certainly got the comic a lot of attention.
Howard the Duck was a pretty good comic, but the movie completely destroyed its reputation. Now, it’s just a punchline.
Same thing with comic book movies like The Phantom and The Shadow (not strictly a comic book – though there were some – but it’s the same principle). When hacks got their hands on them, it was not just a flop movie, but destroyed the credibility of the original with the general public.
It’s all in the adaptation. With The Spirit, a bad job is going to be bad for the comic. And Miller is just too over-the-top to make me sanguine about his doing it. He’s apt to accentuate the darkness and violence and turn the entire exercise into self-parody – just more Dark Knight schtick, with little of the humanity Eisner put into him.
Can I ask a favor? Do any of the first five Spirit Halloween stories portray children trick-or-treating? I’m helping to research a monograph on the origins of trick-or-treating in America.
Absolutely yes!
Kids do Trick-or-Treat in the stories, but the implication is that mischief/vandalism levels were much higher then.
NOOoooOOOooo!
Many later stories didn’t include Ebony, but his early ones did. One of the things that attracted me to Eisner’s The Spirit stories is that I learned fairly quickly to look past his crude racial imagery and see Ebony White’s basic humanity and competence. I had no idea that there was a regular adventure comic featuring a black character back in the 1930s and 1940s outside Luther in Mandrake the Magician. Ebony deserves to be included.
Doesn’t mean it’ll ever happen, but…
I’m thinking of Craig Lamar Traylor, the actor who plays Malcolm’s friend Stevie on Malcolm in the Middle for Ebony, except that he might be too old by now (the Urkle syndrome!).
Slight hijack: Look for a comics TPB called Streetwise, published by TwoMorrows. They’re all autobiographical stories by comics pros with the common theme of “loss of innocence.” The story by Nick Cardy includes his description of Halloween in the mid-late 30s in NYC. The costumes weren’t horror-themed, and the “treats” weren’t candy (Saurkraut is one he described).