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Kyle Baker on The Spirit

January 5th, 2009 by | Tags: , ,

Kyle Baker on Frank Miller’s Will Eisner’s The Spirit:

Miller seems to think comic books are a joke. Well, Mr. Miller, just because something’s called “comic” doesn’t mean it’s humorous! Watchmen is a comic, and it’s sad!

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7 comments to “Kyle Baker on The Spirit”

  1. I thought it was interesting how Miller’s gone full circle. Originally, he brought more cinematic concepts to comics. Now he’s bringing more comic concepts to movies. The Spirit movie was still looney tunes, though. It had no internal logic and bad acting.

         by Dane January 5th, 2009 at 11:53 --replyReply to this comment

  2. Haha! So… did he like the movie, or not? I’m still not sure.

         by greyhoundbus January 5th, 2009 at 11:55 --replyReply to this comment

  3. @greyhoundbus: He liked it.

    @Dane: How was there no internal logic?

         by david brothers January 5th, 2009 at 11:57 --replyReply to this comment

  4. I haven’t seen it, but one example I’ve heard on the internal logic front is that at one point the Spirit dives off the top of a building and headbutts a criminal. Then later in the movie, he’s hanging off a ledge of another building and is afraid that if he falls, he’ll die.

         by Gavok January 5th, 2009 at 12:20 --replyReply to this comment

  5. It’s like they couldn’t decide how noirish or cartoony they wanted it to be, so they just picked and choosed as things went along. They were deliberately ambiguous to the time period for this reason. That’s not good directing or story-telling to me. The movie isn’t so fresh in my head anymore, but one exmaple I recall were seeing the characters walk along the street, talking like a Dick Tracy comic, having newsies and 1940ish style cars roll by, and then Morgan Stern’s cell phone goes off. I didn’t know if they were doing some knowing wink of a parody of the genre or what.

    Even in the movie Sin City, where the violence was bordering on the cartoonish, I could tell, okay, this is presentish day with no crazy cyborg implants or magic artifacts going to come out at me. I didn’t get that vibe in the Spirit, where they brought in mad science and mysticism until it was just some jumbled mess.

    And why the hell did Sand hate the police? Her dad got killed by the mob! Shouldn’t she hate crooks? I never got that. And mother of god, Ellen Dolan just saw the Spirit make out with Sand Saref, and she started making out with the Spirit not two minutes afterwards when the Spirit says he loves her forever or whatever. But I digress.

    I don’t care that it wasn’t frame-for-frame Will Eisner’s work. Samuel L. Jackson brought a lot of energy to the story as a revamped Octopus, and the cinematography of it was wonderful. But it’s all style and negative substance, and that made the movie a bit of a wreck in my eyes. Others’ mileage may vary.

         by Dane January 5th, 2009 at 12:51 --replyReply to this comment

  6. It’s like they couldn’t decide how noirish or cartoony they wanted it to be, so they just picked and choosed as things went along.

    ZOMG, you know what I’ve just realized about Ultimates/Ultimatum? It’s not exactly the same thing but it’s kind of connected to this, conceptually. People keep describing it as “the Marvel universe but without all that 40-odd years of continuity”, which okay, yes, that’s true – they were starting out fresh slate, instead of the ad hoc, patchwork and often dis continuity of the 616 ‘verse.

    BUT then I’ve seen that abbreviated to “without the continuity” – which then SOME people, and I am abso-bloody-lutely certain this includes Jeph Loeb – interpret to mean as “There is no continuity in the Ultimates ‘verse! Hooray, we can just go all Looney Tunes on every page, in every issue!” instead of “the Ultimates universe has its own, new, integrated-and-harmonized continuity which sometimes has diverged radically from the 616 canon”–

    Which, of course, a) doesn’t work artistically since Marvel, any version, is NOT Looney Tunes, b) doesn’t fit at all with the original Ultimates books and storylines that got readers hooked…recipe for Insta-Fiasco! (now dragged out for over 2 years.

         by bellatrys January 5th, 2009 at 18:03 --replyReply to this comment

  7. I was kinda wishing he’d have said more about how HE actually felt about it; lampooning serious-business comic ‘tards is one thing, but the movie seems to be panned pretty much across the board, which includes people who couldn’t give a fuck about comics

         by OnimaruXLR January 5th, 2009 at 20:06 --replyReply to this comment