The new adventures of the Spirit (Eddie Campbell's blog)

Commissioner Dolan
Drawn by Eddie Campell

By Eddie Campbell
The Fate of the Artist

I've been waiting a few years for this one as it has periodically been on again and then off again, and finally this Wednesday, Fate willing, it will be here. I'm referring to Will Eisner's The Spirit: The New Adventures. This is entirely coincidental as I had no intention of devoting so much time to the venerable old chap as I have been doing here of late.

I've never been fond of the idea of lots of different artists taking a crack at an old comic strip. The best characters in the old days were like an artist's signature while the characters of today are well, meh. Do what you like with the modern lot, for I don't care a button or a fig. But you can't go messing with the grand old ones. When I first heard that Eisner was letting us whelps muck around with the Spirit, I thought it was a bad idea, and to an extent I still do. But then Neil Gaiman asked for me as the illustrator for the script he'd submitted, and Moore and Gibbons had turned in a real genius job for the first issue of March 1998, three connecting stories and all tipping a big fedora to the original. Gibbons has always been good at pastiches. He had elsewhere done very acceptable ones of Dick Sprang and Will Elder. Also, this was a reunion of the Watchmen guys! We were all off to Grandad's house to leave his 78s lying around.

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Will Eisner's The Spirit Archives--The New Adventures (Final Volume)

In 1997, almost six decades after the character's first appearance in 1940, legendary artist and writer Will Eisner gave permission for a new series of stories to be commissioned featuring his signature creation, resurrected detective Denny Colt, also known as the Spirit, written and drawn by the most famous names in the comics industry. The call went out, and the response was nothing short of remarkable, with contributions from such creators as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (in one of their rare collaborations since Watchmen), Neil Gaiman (The Sandman), Paul Chadwick (Concrete), Eddie Campbell (From Hell), amongst others. With characters featured in Frank Miller's highly anticipated movie The Spirit, you will find in these pages new tales of Central City's protector versus familiar villains such as the Octopus and Sand Saref; witness his undying love for Ellen Dolan, daughter of Commissioner Dolan, the only man to know his secret identity; and glimpse what might be the Spirit's fate in an uncertain future.

• Hardcover: 200 pages
• Publisher: Dark Horse; 1st edition (September 2, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 156971732X
• ISBN-13: 978-1569717325

Here's my favorite page in the book!

DVD Review: Will Eisner: Profession: Cartoonist (Newsarama.com)

Image via WikipediaBy Steve Fritz
22 December 2008

WILL EISNER: PROFESSION: CARTOONIST
(Image Entertainment)

With the arrival of The Spirit movie in theaters this week, no one should be surprised that a documentary about Will Eisner just hit the market. After all, the same thing already happened with Alan Moore (Mindscape of...). Can Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, you-name-‘em, be far behind?

The good news is this selection is well worth the effort. An American/Brazilian collaboration, this doc is divided into three key parts; Eisner’s roots and his work on The Spirit, his middle career and move into graphic novels and, finally, a solid analysis of his distinctive graphic style and importance to the industry/artform. Among those heavily interviewed are his wife Anne, Denis Kitchen, Stan Lee, Art Spiegelman and many, many other important colleagues he made through his long career.

The real “star” is Eisner himself, who apparently was quite generous with the documentarians, providing a number of interviews, a tour of his Ft. Lauderdale home and a generous sampling of the work he did over his 70 year career.

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Neil Gaiman Plans to Skip Frank Miller's "The Spirit" Movie

Neil Gaiman via Wikipedia

"A nice article from MTV about Amanda Palmer & me, and then I clicked on the next link, read what Frank Miller said about his Spirit movie, and decided that given his description of it, I'd probably skip it, but am still happy that it will get a lot of people reading collections of The Spirit who would never have picked up or heard of Will Eisner's wonderful comic otherwise. (You can read about how I first encountered The Spirit in http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2005/01/spirit-of-seventy-five.asp)."
— Neil Gaiman writing in his online blog.

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• mostly written yesterday actually