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Of course, nothing really says “summertime!” with an exclamation point like the legion of girls-in-bikinis on the cover, storming the beach, mobbing The Spirit, and parachuting in for seashore fun. (One of the parachuting girls serving as the “Action – Mystery – Adventure” logo is a nice touch.)
In the spirit of summer, Darwyn Cooke’s gone on vacation for an issue and left an all-star team of creators to house-sit his Spirit . The result is three short stories done in the old Spirit way: eight pages long, self-contained, and entertaining as anything.
Simonson, Sprouse and Story bring us a story of fashionistas, double-crosses, and big shiny gems. The Spirit matches wits with some criminal beauty and trades fists with whatever crooks she’s feminine wiled into doing her bidding. It’s what I’d call the Basic Spirit Story, the kind most people seem to think of when they think The Spirit.
But the team’s not trying to reinvent the wheel, just spin a fun Spirit caper over eight pages. And there’s some nice touches; Simonson has the lady-in-question’s Southern accent switch on and off depending who she’s talking to.
Palmiotti and Bernet deliver the most Eisner-esque story. Here, the apartment tenets are the stars, while The Spirit acts as a sort of incidental catalyst to solving their various problems.
The hot and crowded layouts and colors, the domino rally momentum of the chase scene, that’s where Bernet and Stewart are channeling Eisner the most. Eisner wrote and drew cities the way he saw them: sometimes romantic, never pretty.
Bernet supplies the pretty; I’m fairly certain the man’s incapable of drawing women who aren’t attractive. Even the apartment’s resident cat lady is at least cute.
Finally, Baker’s story ribs Frank Miller’s Sin City by way of The Spirit (possibly due to Miller being the director of the upcoming Spirit film). The hard-bitten story and narration is weak compared to the biting sarcasm Baker slips in underneath. It’s all catfights and dirt rags and diamond studded cell-phones
The end result reads like A Dame to Kill For as directed by Mel Brooks, with Baker drawing a seamless mash-up of his springy cartooning style and Miller’s gritty inks and film noir staging.
It’ll be nice to have Cooke back with next month’s issue 8; all the same, it’s kind of a shame to see the mini-anthology approach go.
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