From February through April, DC's The Spirit series will have a guest writing team: Michael Uslan and F.J. DeSanto, the producers of the Frank Miller-directed Spirit movie that's opening this month. Uslan hasn't written many comics since he became the producer of the Batman movies (aside from the Batman graphic novel Detective No. 27 a few years ago), but he wrote stories for The Shadow, Beowulf, Detective Comics and other series back in the early '70s, when, as he put it at a recent interview in New York, "I was a Junior Woodchuck at DC Comics. They didn't have the term 'intern' then, but it was me and that skinny kid—what was his name?—Paul... Levitz! Levitz! I don't know what happened to him, but he was a Woodchuck too."
The difficulty with creating new Spirit comics, DeSanto noted, is that the character is so closely identified with Eisner: "It's not like Batman, where you have 70 years of Batman stories by so many different creators that you can do The Dark Knight or you can do the Brave and the Bold cartoon—it's Eisner, and that's it." So, before they started writing, he and Uslan made a list of elements of Eisner's work they had to incorporate into every Spirit story.
"They had to have cinematic storytelling, influenced heavily by Hitchcock," Uslan said. "In terms of the heart of the story, they had to be influenced by Frank Capra. There had to be humanity in these stories. They had to be character-driven. Eisner's humor had to be there. Eisner's violence quotient had to be there. Eisner's over-the-top villains had to be there, and Eisner's femme fatales"—the three issues Uslan and DeSanto have written are built around Plaster of Paris, Silken Floss and Lorelei, all of whom also appear in the movie, and they're connected by a plot involving Eisner's foremost villain, the Octopus. Drawn by the former Shadowpact team of Justiniano and Walden Wong, they're full of other little nods to Eisner's work; the first page of their first issue echoes the first page of the classic Spirit story "Ten Minutes."
"If there was something that pissed off Will Eisner," Uslan continued, "he made sure some commentary on it was in his Spirit stories. So in the background of our first story is our commentary on the Starbucks phenomenon; in the second one, it's about a generation of people who walk around holding water bottles, hydrating themselves; in the third one, it's about the inconvenience and frustration of flying in this day and age,. And one other thing: Will almost took my head off, early on in our conversations, when we were talking about the film, and I said 'Will, do you think this film should be a period piece, set in the 1940s?' He said 'I never wrote The Spirit as a period piece. It's always contemporary.'"
"That was a big concern for me," DeSanto added, "not making it retro. How do you push Eisner's work forward and make it accessible and interesting to the guys who go to Midtown Comics every week? There's nothing I'd love more than for someone to read these issues and then go back and discover the Eisner stuff. That would be the dream." DeSanto has thrown in a few details to update the tone of The Spirit, too: "You'll see the Spirit and Ebony playing with a Wii."
In one particular way, though, Uslan didn't want to modernize his Spirit stories: "There are a lot of comics being made now where there are approximately six to twelve words on a page. The entire $3 comic book experience is two or two and a half minutes. I don't believe that's the true definition of what comics are supposed to be, and I don't think Will would've believed that. He was a writer as well as a cartoonist, and we wanted to maintain that balance."
So might Uslan and DeSanto be planning any more Spirit comics? "That's the question that we're going to cross momentarily," Uslan said. "We'll see which way the wind blows. At this stage in life, I don't need to write comic books. But I love them. It's what I do at three o'clock in the morning."
