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It’s been out on DVD for a while now, but I finally got around to seeing Frank Miller’s incarnation of Will Eisner’s series The Spirit. I was skeptical about the movie when it was in theaters. I’m not a huge fan, or particularly familiar, with the character of The Spirit and his stories, but I knew a few basic things going into it. The first thing I knew was that The Spirit was a brightly colored book, which seemed sharply contrasted with Miller’s preferred style of noir-esque, high contrasting art. The second thing was that The Spirit was funny. Miller’s funny isn’t often well received (look at his most recent entries in the Dark Knight collections) and the previews all suggested that it was a very serious movie.

For a little bit of background, The Spirit is a man named Denny Colt who was a police officer. During a big to-do, he was somehow killed. But he didn’t die, not entirely. He was buried, and dead for all intents and purposes. But, Denny didn’t stay dead. Denny came back, somehow or another, and decided to become a kind of shadow, or spirit, to the city. He wasn’t Denny anymore, he was simply The Spirit. And that’s how it was, and that’s how it was always going to be.
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I’ve decided to do another one of these, since I need to bring SOME content back to this website, or else it’s just a waste of space on the Internet. So let’s do this. Today we’ll be covering the bathroom at Target located at 35 Computer Dr in Haverhill, MA
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I was, originally, going to wait until I had seen this movie again, to be able to appreciate it on multiple levels, before I started writing this review of sorts on the movie. However, I decided that the best course of action would be to talk about it now, and get it out of the way.

I have said, before, in concurrence with people, I feel there is an inverse relationship between the amount of material for a given story and how said material is used. In using Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta we see that there were a lot of instances removed. Possibly for time, possibly for reasons I neither know nor care about. I’m going for the latter, personally. Watchmen is less than fifteen standard issues long. It’s slightly longer than V, but still falls victim to the same kind of constraints of time and medium change that it’s predecessor went through.

But is it a good movie? Or is it bad?
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In V for Vendetta, the title character, V, the man from room five makes the following statement before he dies.

There. Did you think to kill me? There’s no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There’s only an idea. Ideas are bullet-proof.

I’ve been reading Captain America volume four, the most recent incarnation of the book with that name, and in this book, Captain America– specifically Steve Rogers, the Man Behind the Mask– is killed. So I got to thinking… Captain America himself is an idea, really. Steve Rogers was man, yes, but he represented something. Captain America, not Steve Rogers, was the symbol of the triumph of America. He was the Super Soldier, the man who would help turn the tide against the Axis powers and win The War.

And he did. And he was a hero. He was the epitome of the Golden Age superhero for Marvel comics. The man was Good to the very core of who he was, and no one tried to change that about him. Though some would try to write him, in varying incarnations, some kind of backwards and old-fashioned to an extreme, they always maintained the nobility of the character and the spirit he represented as Captain America.

This brings me to “Civil War”, which is, “A Marvel Comics Event”.

Civil War brought with it the idea of, like so common within Marvel, ambiguity in the ideas of justice. Captain America was adamantly opposed to the idea of the Superhuman Registration Act– which was, in part, the idea behind this event. The heroes were divided. Steve believed that the idea behind it, of forcing the compliance of heroes to the government and the revealing of their identities, was against everything that he had fought so hard (and lost so many decades) to protect.

He knew, like so many other heroes, the cost of having your identity known by even just one person with malicious intent. After all, if it wasn’t for the SHRA, we wouldn’t have Spider-Man where he is today. If Norman Osborne had not known Parker was Spider-Man, he might have stayed with Gwen. But these are “What If” ideas that the writers had decided wouldn’t happen. Gwen had to die, and that’s another ramble.

Steve knew, in his heart, that it was wrong to do what they were doing. He couldn’t stand for the things that were happening and he rebelled. It cost him respect, and friends, but he felt that his cause was more true than that.

In the end, though, Steve saw what he was doing, and how he was tearing everything apart. Steve surrendered. The Civil War that was fought over six issues and several cross-over books was done. The man, the ideal, was done. But Captain America lived on, still, even if he was just a man with a shield.

Steve Rogers was killed in issue #25, immediately following his surrender. It wasn’t detailed in any way, there was no pointing out the event. It was just “In this issue: The Death of a Dream”. The previous issues didn’t lead up to this, directly. Brubaker, however, is a fantastic writer and foreshadowed this almost immediately. Steve Rogers was dead now. The Man Who Was Captain America was gunned down in public, and with that, hope was lost for the other side.

The point I’m not really making is that Steve Rogers was a man behind an idea– specifically the idea of an Ideal America. Of freedom, for lack of a better word. Captain America was that idea. That ideal. He fought for what was right, no matter if he wasn’t the best laid plan or the most ethical. It was right. And that’s what you do.

The idea of Captain America didn’t die with him, the offshoot mini-series “Fallen Son”, and the later issues of the solo book showed that Captain America influenced many people and kept the idea of truth and liberty and justice and everything else alive. He lived on, Captain America, because he was what people wanted in America.

It wasn’t Captain America that day who surrendered, really. It was Steve Rogers, a man bound to another name, but who felt the same way. It was Steve Rogers who was killed, not Captain America. Captain America is bulletproof, because there can always be someone else to take up the mantle of the Name, and to carry on the ideals and the mission behind the name.

I’ve said before, many times, I’m a huge fan of the Justice Society of America. I think it could even be said that I like them more than the League. Alan Scott, Jay Garrick, and the rest of them have a kind of, well, goodness about them that emanates through the entirety of the book and brings out some of the best aspects of the characters. The best way I can explain it is to paraphrase a line from the deluxe edition of Batman: Year One in the specials section.

The artist was talking, and, with a modified image of Action Comics #1, with “Tautology” replacing “Action”. The artist said that he appreciated the heroes of the Golden Age– those of the Justice Society– because they were inherently Good. They were always on the side of justice, and righteousness. They did good things because they were good. And there’s a certain quality of this tautology that’s admirable. They did these things just because they were good, and people should do good things.

You stopped really seeing that in the 90s.

Anyway, these characters also have a presence about them that the League doesn’t. Sure, you have The Big Three: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, and these people are the kinds of people who are looked up to, and admired. But the JSA are the people that even the League looks up to and admires. Alan Scott alone has enough tenure as a superhero to merit someone of the likes of Batman using him as a consult, or conceding to him.

But, anyway. I’m here to actually talk about a specific story arc.
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Every character has a shtick, or some kind of identifying piece to let you know that he is not the same person that another is, and that he is his own person. Marvel, for all of the things I don’t like about it, is a great example this sort of thing– especially Stan Lee’s creations. Each character is expressly unique and represents itself in such a way that you know who this character is. You know who Spider-Man is, you know Daredevil, The Hulk, The Fantastic Four, all of the powerhouse characters that Kirby and Lee and Ditko and all of the others worked to create, ushering in an Age in comics that has yet to be passed, really.

For all of my bitching of the Silver Age, Stan Lee and his co-workers were brilliant and deserve my respect.

But, not everyone is Stan Lee, or Jack Kirby.
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So, a couple of months ago I ran across a series called “Doktor Sleepless” by Warren Ellis, who, as everyone knows, has written Transmetropolitan, as well as Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. and is current writing Astonishing X-Men after Whedon left the roll.

I was intrigued by this series because Ellis tends to have a very distinctive style in what he does. When he isn’t explicitly writing superhero stories, most of the stuff I’ve come across by him tends to be in the vein of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk. I’m sure that’s not all he’s ever written, but it seems to be the easiest to come into contact with, and it’s really some of my favorite stuff. Especially Transmetropolitan and, now, this book, Doktor Sleepless.
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I’ve decided to change the theme to the website, for no other reason than that I wanted to.

Also, you may notice that there hasn’t been a link to a forum for some time. That’s because I deleted it. Another forum is in the works with a few other people I know. By “in the works” I mean “we’ve talked about it, but too many other things are up in the air.”

I know I’ve been neglecting this place, but I intend to actually have content very shortly. Just bear with me.

Following a discussion about the current Batman story arc, as well as a few other things that were related to it (mostly just what the hell is going to happen to Batman following this arc and Final Crisis) the discussion turned into that of character legacy. That is to say, which characters could easily be replaced by others in the future, if events required such a thing. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, trying to figure out which characters are best suited for some kind of bequeathing of their throne to another character.

Since the topic was originally on Batman, we’ll start with him.
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I was going to have a long series of articles that detailed my general feeling on the Ultimate Marvel universe, and it’s correlation between the 616 universe, as well as the differences between the two and how Ultimate Marvel is, truly, a wholly unique take on the Marvel franchises and generally an enjoyable piece of work. Then I read Ultimates 3 and I wish I had rather read something much better, or much worse, or stopped reading it back at the first issue. Before I go through and spend the entire time complaining, I’ll give you a brief rundown on just what “Ultimates” is and why this newest series is a travesty of justice or something along those lines.

With the creation of Ultimate Marvel, they decided they needed to create an Avengers team. Instead of calling it “The Ultimate Avengers”, in keeping with the idea that they just tack on “Ultimate” to everything for differences, they decided to call this “The Ultimates”. The Ultimates are a team of people working for Colonel Samuel L. Jackson Nick Fury, of S.H.I.E.L.D. and going about blowing shit up and being generally tough bastards like they do.

The team has had, more or less: Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Wasp, Hank Pym, Hawkeye, and maybe a few others I don’t remember because it’s been a while since I’ve read the comic– oh yeah, Quicksilver and The Scarlet Witch. These people have all been a part of it since about Ultimates 2 which was, obviously, the second book that was involving this superhero team. Mark Millar had been the previous writer of this series, (that is to say the previous two Ultimates books) and was generally pretty good at what he was doing. Miller managed to capture the general aspects of the characters, while at the same time elaborating on them and keeping them separate enough from their 616 counterparts to genuinely make a difference.

Jeph Loeb, however, who I normally like¹ apparently was operating under the impression that what The Ultimates needed was a trip back to the 1990s with all of the worst aspects amplified to the point that I can’t really even understand why they kept him on it. Also, the art was bad. Not just the pencils, but the colors seemed washed out and generally lacking. This felt more like a Ultimate Ultimate Marvel book, as opposed to a regular one.

But anyway, onto the book itself.
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1. After all, Batman: The Long Halloween is one of my favorites [↩]