12 Things I learned from Supermen!

The Greg Sadowski-edited collection Supermen!: The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941 is quite nice, full of crazy Golden Age superhero stories from the dawn of the genre. Here's some stuff I found out while reading.

1. "Superhero" can be pretty loosely-defined

The early crime-fighters took several different tacks in their missions, not just limited to the spandex-wearing, power-having musclemen we're familiar with (or perhaps the scope of this book was widened to include some good stories in tangential genres or by famous creators). The heroes here include space-faring adventurers (who also often fight crime), occult-manipulating magicians, whatever the hell you call Fletcher Hanks' heroes, guys wearing masks, and one adventurer in a vast underground kingdom. That's a motley crew, but an entertaining one.

2. In these stories, disbelief must often not only be suspended, but strung up and mercilessly whipped, then drawn and quartered

That metaphor got away from me, but the point is that the stuff these creators came up with is pretty nuts, the kind of thing that anybody with any knowledge of the world would find ridiculously childish today. Maybe that's just an indication of the intended audience, or maybe the fact that people knew less about the world back then opened up more avenues for possible ideas that would just be too far-fetched today. For instance, in Will Eisner and Lou Fine's "The Flame", a gangster brings back a bunch of natives from "an unexplored section of the Gobi" who live for hundreds of years, have super-strength and skin so tough that they're impervious to bullets, sport skull-like visages, and are so childlike that they'll follow anybody's orders. That's just nuts. It does make for a good visual though:

3. Will Eisner could draw great facial expressions and sexy dames as early as 1939

4. While Jack Kirby was never Leonardo Da Vinci, his grasp of human anatomy certainly got better when he was older

Just look at the freakish Cosmic Carson in this panel:

The story around it is fairly unreadable as well, but mostly due to a coloring job that sees Carson's spacesuit switch to a different hue each panel in the middle of a fight scene, making it impossible to tell what is happening.

5. The stories within comic books often don't match the covers, but I can't imagine not wanting to buy these and find out what's inside

Wow, check out this amazing piece of work by Will Eisner and Lou Fine:

Holy crap! And this grotesque beaut by Jack Cole is arresting for a completely different reason:

6. Yes, Fletcher Hanks was totally insane

Everybody knows this already, since the publication of I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! and You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation!, but I'm late to the game, so the two Hanks stories presented here, featuring Stardust and Fantomah, are enough to convince me that his comics are worth reading for all their demented energy. I can't say they're actually good, but they're certainly something. I'm especially impressed by a moment where Stardust rescues a woman who's too frightened to go home, so he hits her with an anti-gravity ray and leaves her hanging in mid-air while he goes and kills a bunch of space vultures. What a bastard.

7. Marvelo, Monarch of Magicians, has the most convoluted plan for stopping crime ever

In this story by Gardner Fox and Fred Guardineer, Marvelo comes to America and only gets caught up in the crime-fighting game when some gangsters try to shove him out of the way and get in his taxi. So he turns them into pigs and raises the ire of the head gangster, Big Shot Bonnet. A few seconds later, Bonnet's guys do a drive-by on a rival, so Marvelo whips up a cyclone that deposits their car on top of a skyscraper. Big Shot then decides to rob the Treasury, but Marvelo finds out, so he stops the armored car on the way, making it fall apart and put itself back together to show off for the guards, then drives it up and has some skeletons get out to scare Big Shot, and turns the gold into gravestones bearing his name. Then he makes a statue of George Washington come alive and carry the goons off to jail, but lets Big Shot go to try to scare a confession out of him. He makes Big Shot think everything he touches turns to gold, prompting him to break out a pickaxe and start taking apart a subway platform. When he comes to his senses, he decides a rival gangster is causing the visions, so he goes to confront him, but when he gets there and they're about to shoot each other, Marvelo turns their guns "spongy", then whey they try to beat him up, he confuses their sense of direction, turns one's limbs rubbery, and makes the other melt into a puddle of liquid. So they decide to confess (to the robbery that only one of them was already caught committing, I guess), and that's the end of crime in the city!

Wow, that's a completely nonsensical story, a perfect example of "just make some shit up, we gotta fill pages" writing. It's hilarious in a "what the fuck?" way, but it's pretty goddamn awful overall.

8. Skyman has to be the most badass pilot in history

This story, by Gardner Fox and Ogden Whitney, is the same sort of thing, with our hero filling pages by fighting "foreign" invaders, but he's pretty awesome, singlehandedly shooting down at least two squadrons of enemy planes, swinging into an enemy plane in mid-flight via rope so he can interrogate the pilot, crashing, getting shot, and managing to shut down an "electrical belt" in the nick of time before it could destroy American planes. And look how buff he is, hauling bombs around so he can blast those dirty foreigners:

This is another one that doesn't make any sense, but it's pretty damn entertaining.

9. Jack Cole came up with some pretty crazy-ass viewing angles when drawing the Silver Streak

The Silver Streak is a speedster, which gave Cole some opportunities for dynamic running action. I love the way he places the readers' point of view at ground level in the following panels (which are non-sequential and also include an amusing bullet-dodging pose), staring straight up at the hero's crotch:

And I don't mean that as a "tee hee!" comment; it's a nice way of making the action move and appear fast and exciting. The story itself is pretty silly (although there's some good comedy that comes from a housewife constantly getting the hero's name wrong, calling him the Brass Streak, or the Lead Streak), but it's a good example of Cole's artistic chops.

10. Jack Cole was also racist (like most everyone else at the time), but that doesn't stop him from being ridiculously entertaining

The other Cole story here features the original Daredevil, fighting the giant, fanged Yellow Peril monster the Claw, who is some sort of war god from Tibet who has his minions tunnel underneath the Atlantic Ocean to attack New York. It's ridiculous as ever, but it's full of stupidly awesome action, with Daredevil taking out goons with a boomerang that appears to be two pieces of kindling nailed together at a right angle, getting out of a pit by running around the sides so fast that he comes right out the top, turning his own body into a boomerang when the Claw tries to fling him into the stratosphere, and then taking out the monster from the inside:

Damn. So racist, but so entertaining.

11. Basil Wolverton drew awesome monsters as early as 1940

His spaceships and spacesuits were kinda clunky though.

12. Jack Kirby got better by 1941, but he still had a long way to go

I can barely make heads or tails out of this Blue Bolt story by Kirby and Joe Simon, but it's got some nice art, like the sexy Green Sorceress and her riveted metal bra or the occasional dynamic action. It has something to do with a stereotypical gangster trying to take over an underground kingdom, but it doesn't make much sense at all and features some pretty poor panel layouts to boot. Considering how great Kirby would get, it's weird to see him at such an early stage in his development.

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There are plenty of other lessons to be gleaned from the book, and it's a pretty fascinating look at an early stage of comics' development, but I don't know if I could really recommend it as actual good comics. There's some really nice art, and a lot of the stories are enjoyable in their batshit insanity, but that doesn't necessarily make them very good. Depending on your tolerance for idiocy and interest in history, you might or might not like it. I did, for the most part, but it's definitely a mixed bag.

The Spirit: I miss Will Eisner

Elsewhere: I reviewed Incognito #3 at Comics Bulletin. Also, I wrote about last week's Dollhouse at The Factual Opinion.

Links: It turns out that "Veronique Tanaka", the creator of the graphic novel Metronome, was fictional, with the actual author being Bryan Talbot. How about that. I was interested in that book before, but now I feel like I should try to seek it out.

I found this article by Paul Gravett, about Italian cartoonist Gianni DeLuca's adaptation of Hamlet, to be rather fascinating, with some incredible examples of the book's artwork and lots of examples of other works that use similar techniques.

A blog called Awesome Engine is doing a series of posts on Go Nagai's Violence Jack, and it's pretty interesting stuff. I don't think I've read anything by Nagai, but the examples here are pretty nuts, full of post-apocalyptic violence in the manner of Kazuo Umezu.

Online comics: Evan Dorkin has a short comic up at TCM's Lost Scenes site, imagining a bit from 2000 Maniacs, and the latest MySpace Dark Horse Presents has a comic by Farel Dalrymple. Good readin'.

Okay, here's some babble about a stupid movie:

The Spirit

Directed by Frank Miller

2008

What was Frank Miller thinking? Actually, that's not the question, since it's pretty obvious that Miller was making this movie solely for himself; rather, we should ask why anybody would sink millions of dollars into his ridiculous vision. It obviously wasn't a good decision, since the movie bombed big-time, but that's something for the bean-counters to worry about; we can just bask in the resulting stupidity and try to figure out what the hell is going on.

The thing is, Miller is a terrible choice to adapt anything by Will Eisner. The former's comics are pretty much completely bereft of the latter's humanity; trying to create a mash-up of the two styles is near-impossible, and now we have the evidence to prove it. Miller has taken Eisner's characters and setting and removed most anything resembling Eisner's original creation, transporting them to the world of Sin City while trying to retain a distractingly broad sense of humor. It doesn't work at all, but it's a hell of a crazy thing to witness.

The tone of the movie is all over the place, veering from the grim-and-grittiness of The Dark Knight Returns (or, more appropriately, All-Star Batman and Robin) to over-the-top silliness, often in the same scene. Gabriel Macht, playing the title character, gives lots of Batman-esque voiceover narration (or just talks to the camera) about how Central City is his lover, and his mother, and his obsession, and, I dunno, his snuggly teddy bear. He's so serious about his mission to fight crime (which, other than a single mugger, seems to consist only of Samuel L. Jackson's Octopus), but then he'll start mugging and acting clumsy, in an apparent attempt to reference those Eisner-drawn images of the character shrugging or rolling his eyes. An early fight scene with Jackson sees him spit out lines like "I'm going to kill you all kinds of dead!" and spend thirty straight seconds repeatedly punching his adversary in the face, and then he gets whacked in the crotch by a giant wrench or bonked on the head with a toilet. It's downright whiplash-inducing.

Miller does try to cram in a lot of Eisner creations, including a bunch of sexy dames, but other than Eva Mendes as Sand Saref, most of them seem like window dressing. Sarah Paulson's Ellen Dolan is the good girl. Scarlett Johansson's Silken Floss is the bad girl, Jackson's sidekick. And beyond that, it's little more than cameos, with Jaime King playing Lorelai Rox as a sort of spectre of death rather than a siren-ish criminal, and Paz Vega nonsensically dancing around for one scene as Plaster of Paris (which is a terrible character name, even if Eisner came up with it). And don't forget Stana Katic as rookie cop Morgenstern, who manages to make a uniform and flak jacket look like a leather catsuit. They're all just there to look hot though. Mendes does try to make her performance fit the varying tone of the film, even though she's a pretty poor actress. And in an odd twist, a photocopy of her ass ends up being a pretty key prop. That was just one moment that made me wonder what the hell I was watching.

And hell, the plot itself is pretty bonkers, somehow mixing in mad science and mythology with the crime aspects of the original stories. The Spirit is now more of a superhero, with a regenerative healing ability that he shares with his nemesis, the Octopus, who is a mad scientist that gave him his powers and also shares them. And they're busy fighting over a vase containing the blood of Heracles, which will grant immortality. I guess this is Miller's attempt to do something a bit more comic-booky than his usual hardboiled violence? Like most of the movie, it really doesn't work.

Really, the only thing that does work is Samuel L. Jackson, who throws himself into his character, giving a strange, cartoony performance that seems to be the only thing actually keyed into Miller's "vision". He shouts and cackles like a madman, he changes into a series of ridiculous costumes, he obsesses over eggs for some reason, he violently murders his army of cloned henchmen (all played by Louis Lombardi) whenever he gets upset. It's hilarious to watch, but like the rest of the movie, it can be a bit much.

I suppose a word could be said about the look of the movie, but if you've seen any commercials, you know what to expect; it's basically Sin City, with possibly a bit more (virtual) urban backdrops. It can be pretty distracting, with the occasional cut to white-on-black silhouettes, or spot color highlighting the bright red of the Spirit's tie or the bright white of the soles of his sneakers (I don't know why that would be worth highlighting either). There are a few images that are meant to be homages to Eisner, like sewer grates or curved lampposts, but it's really all Miller, all the time.

So, I don't know, I really can't recommend this movie, at least not without a multitude of caveats. It's certainly a unique work, and the majority of the appeal is seeing what ridiculous, moronic thing Miller will do next. If that sounds like a good time to you, then by all means, see it. But don't expect it to be good.

Ping Pong: More Matsumoto manga must, um, migrate

A movie review!  But first some links; god knows I love my links:

This manga story in which the author (a sort of right-wing Japanese political commentator) defends whaling is crazy and hilarious.  My favorite part was when he told the story about being kept up all night by a humping dog.  I have no idea what that was all about.

Dean Haspiel's "Fear, My Dear", the second part of his "Billy Dogma" trilogy, is complete and up for reading at Act-I-Vate.  I'll have to try to read and review it when I get the chance, since I loved the first part, "Immortal".

I'll recommend most anything by Jack Kirby, so be sure to check out this awesome-looking story at Fortress of Fortitude.  It's called "Toxl the World-Killer", from (I believe) an early-70s issue of Weird Mystery. 

And finally, Pappy's Golden Age Comics Blogzine has a sweet "The Spirit in Space" story by Wally Wood (and also a Spanish translation of an Eisner Spirit story).  Kick ass. 

Ping Pong

Directed by Fumihiko Sori

Japan, 2002

I can definitely say, seeing this movie really makes me want to read the Taiyo Matsumoto manga series upon which it was based.  I can just see his version of the story in my mind, full of elongated limbs swinging paddles and faces contorted in the agonizing bliss of athletic combat.  God, I bet it's a great read.  Somebody publish it in the U.S., please.  But in the meantime, this live-action version is a decent substitute, filling the screen with entertaining drama and fun sports action.  I dug it.

It's a more Japanese take on the sports genre than you usually see in sports movies, focusing on elements like honor and friendship.  It helps that the sport is an individual one rather than team-based; this removes those elements of working together and maintaining team spirit and whatnot, allowing the characters to internalize their conflicts before exploding with action at the ping pong table.  You've got two main characters: Smile (so named because he never does), who is serious and nonconfrontational, often losing on purpose so as to not humiliate his opponents; and Peco, his opposite, who is loud and obnoxious, prone to trash-talking and constant self-aggrandizement.  They've been friends every since the latter kept the former from being bullied as a child and then taught him about the pinging and the ponging.  But now that they're both in high school, they're members of the Ping Pong Club and often at odds with each other, their coach, their fellow members, and their opponents.  It's an endearing mix of characters, and it makes for some fun, dramatic storytelling.

Of course, this being of Japanese origin, the drama gets cranked up to maximum, with characters giving up the game, returning dramatically, making life-altering decisions, having angsty confrontations, musing on ping-pong-based life philosophies, and just generally making everything entertaining for the audience.  It's a damn good two hours, especially with the stylish depictions of the sport itself.

So yeah, I give it a recommendation, but what I really want is to read the source material.  With more space to flesh out the characters and their dramatic relationships, not to mention what I expect are some beautifully kinetic depictions of the games, it's gotta be excellent.  Somebody get right on that for me, okay?

Will Eisner Week: Finale!

Well, it looks like I've run out of material in discussing The 'Contract With God' Trilogy, so, barring an epiphany sometime in the next couple days, this post will bring an end to Will Eisner Week. Here are links to the rest of my Eisner posts:

Part 1: Introduction and review of The 'Contract With God' Trilogy.
Part 2: Page Layouts.
Part 3: Character Art.
Part 4: Sex.
Part 5: Violence.

I don't have any more subject that to discuss at length, but there are a few other things I wanted to mention, so this is going to be a "miscellaneous observations" post.

Racism:





I've touched on Eisner's unflinching depiction of racism in some of the other posts, and I wanted to mention it one last time. It was a subject Eisner never shied away from, especially since, being Jewish, he experienced it firsthand. I know of at least two other books he's done dealing with racism: To the Heart of the Storm, which was a series of his encounters with racist attitudes while growing up; and The Plot, his final work, which dealt with anti-Semitic propaganda. It's an important subject, and he deals with it in an adult manner, especially in Dropsie Avenue, where we see it lead to a lot of violence.
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Dialogue:


I love the dialogue and accents that Eisner put in his characters' mouths. Like the art, it was often exaggerated, but it was very effective in establishing their personalities. Especially the Jewish characters; I find myself wanting to read the dialogue aloud in the voice of a Jewish comedian like Jackie Mason.





The above scene is one of my favorite demonstrations of this. We have the repeated use of the word "nu" (I'm still not exactly sure of its meaning), the distinctive cadence of the Jewish accent, and an Italian accent thrown in. Quite enjoyable.
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Heart attacks:

I don't know if this really counts as a theme or recurring motif, but the number of characters to experience heart attacks in the book amused me.



This one is actually another great example of Eisner's use of layouts, with the panels askew as the character is dying. Very nicely done.



This is another good layout, with each of the panels in the second row lower than the last, capturing the "sinking feeling" as the character collapses.



And this is the above character's wife, who worried her son with a fake heart attack, then experienced a real one!
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Well, I could keep going on like this, pulling things I like out of the book, but I'm going to put an end to it. In summary, I'll say that I think Eisner was a genius at comics, and I look forward to reading more of his works in the future. Any commentary (on any of these posts) about Eisner is welcome; if you think I'm way off about something, or you want to add some thought of your own, please do!
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I've put a lot of time into these posts over the last week, so I plan to try to relax a little more over the next few days. Expect content to be fairly light, although I would like to do a look at comics that came out this week. But hopefully I'll resume normal operations soon. See you later!

Will Eisner Week: Violence!

So here's the natural follow-up to yesterday's post. Violence was another subject that Will Eisner depicted regularly. He wasn't afraid to shy away from the uglier aspects of human existence. Let's look at his portrayal of violence throughout The 'Contract With God' Trilogy:



This is the street singer from A Contract With God. Before this scene, we might have thought of him as a sort of romantic figure, using his vocal skills to earn whatever meager pay he can, and not above a roll in the hay with one of his female fans. Here, he is revealed as a drunken deadbeat who won't get a job to support his family and physically abuses them when they complain. Eisner says in his introduction that he remembered street singers in his youth, and this is his imagination of what their life might have been like. Not very pretty.



Here's the ignoble end of Contract's super, after he was seen threatening a young girl. It's what his sad, lonely life led to: suicide in the arms of his only friend.



(Warning! Full-size image is NSFW). This is the woman who seduced young Willie in yesterday's post, after being found by her husband.



And here's the young "lovers" after they discover that neither of them is rich and the girl refuses to put out.

So, A Contract With God, in keeping with Eisner's envelope-pushing adult themes, depicts domestic abuse, suicide, and rape. As I mentioned before, he's trying to write mature subject matter, so the book is full of the kind of stuff that wouldn't normally have been depicted in comics. It was a bold move, if a bit rough in plot and dialogue, but he would refine his storytelling in later works.

A Life Force doesn't have as much violence, other than the mobsters who casually rough up guys around the neighborhood, and most of that is implied. But there is this superb scene where the young would-be gunfighter discovers the result of the gangster's activities:



The part of the trilogy that is especially violent is Dropsie Avenue, which makes sense, as it is an examination of the history of the neighborhood, and American history is fraught with violence of every kind. Eisner shows us that Dropsie Ave. was a violent place right from the beginning, as we see one of the Dropsie brothers kill the other one, who had drunkenly set their fields on fire, causing the first brother's daughter to die in the flames.



In fact, the burning of the fields is apparently what allowed the neighborhood to be built, meaning Dropsie Avenue was born out of violence.



This is what resulted after the girl in this scene was disgraced. Sex led to banishment, prostitution, and eventually murder. Eisner depicts the young man's shocked reaction to his own actions beautifully here.



Here's an interesting reversal for Eisner: This family is being harassed for being German (it's right after World War I), and the crowd will take any excuse to beat the tar out of him and chase them out of the neighborhood.



This scene is more on the humorous side, as a man defends his house Three Stooges-style against burglars.



Here we see some mob violence, as the protestations of this man's wife (seen in this scene) are a threat to their liquor and prostitution rackets. In the next scene we find out that the wife ended up "falling" off a roof.



This is a beautifully-done scene, as two kids see the negative side of the romanticized gangster lifestyle.



Eisner covers a lot of the causes of violence in the neighborhood. This one comes from racial tensions. In fact, there is a lot of racial strife throughout Dropsie Avenue; it's interesting to see the competing factions shift over the course of time. The scene here leads to a street fight:



This is another very well-done scene, as we see the beginning of the conflict in the first panel. Then two characters talk about violence entering the neighborhood, just as it literally comes crashing into their laps.



And I love how on the next page Eisner depicts the brawl as a pile of guys pounding on each other. It's a good example of the effectiveness of his exaggerated art. Another example can be seen later in the book, as the police are hauling in the participants of yet another street fight:



Eisner was great at depicting chaotic situations in this manner.



Here's some domestic abuse from a different viewpoint, with the roles reversed from the norm. This scene leads to my favorite gag in the book, but I'm not going to ruin it here; you'll have to read it to find out.



We get more domestic violence here, and we're put in the role of the neighbors watching the situation from the outside. We see the deplorable way the man treats his wife in public, then get a hint of what happens in their apartment that night (it's reminiscent of Rear Window). We only get a confirmation when the police haul the couple out the door in the morning. It's another example of the voyeuristic state that Eisner places the reader in.



Finally, we see poor Sarge, who lost his legs in Vietnam and is reduced to acting as an enforcer for a drug dealer.



Like the neighborhood itself, he was once proud and upstanding, but has been reduced to a lowly state. Here we see him chasing a druggie through the remains of the last building on Dropsie Ave. It's pretty sad.
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So that's it for my look at violence. I think I'll be able to squeeze one more post out of this, so come back tomorrow for the finale.

Will Eisner Week: Sex!

That's right, today I'm going to look at Eisner's depiction of sex. It's safe to say that pretty much this whole post will be NSFW, so be forewarned. When Eisner wrote A Contract With God, he was working to bring an adult sensibility to the medium, and dealing unflinchingly with sex was a part of that. Sex is a part of adult life, so Eisner chose to depict it in some of its many forms. Out of the three books in The 'Contract With God' Trilogy, A Contract With God deals with the subject the most, probably because Eisner was going all out in trying to break ground. Here are some examples:



Here's the street singer succumbing to the wiles of a former opera diva. Eisner definitely made his women sexy, even plus-sized women like this one.



Here's the lonely super, surrounded by the nudie pinups on his walls and unable to get the girl who lives upstairs out of his mind. The lower part of the page is a wonderful depiction of his state of mind, with chaotic images swirling around and a literal view through his eye sockets of what he's imagining as he is (apparently) pleasuring himself. Very well done.



This panel is from the final and most sex-filled story in A Contract With God, "Cookalein". This guy is taking advantage of his wife's absence while vacationing in the country to spend time with his mistress.



And in the country, we have the beginnings of an interesting scene. 15-year-old Willie (who is actually a stand-in for Eisner himself) is being seduced by an older woman. That night, he is visited by her in his hay loft bed:




They are interrupted right after this by her husband, who smacks her around a bit before they start up with their own "activities":



Wow, that's quite the interesting experience for young Willie. Eisner says in the introduction to the book that Willie in this book and A Life Force represents "the youthful me", and that "Cookalein" is an "honest account of my coming of age". Who knows how much of this part of the story is actually true, but it's a hell of a way to lose your virginity.



And then we have two young "lovers", who we know are actually both gold-diggers hoping to find a rich spouse. This part of the story doesn't turn out well, as we'll see tomorrow.

And that's it for A Contract With God. Eisner was definitely trying to dealing with adult subjects, including sex, infidelity, and pedophelia. I think he was pretty successful, but Contract is certainly the clunkiest of the trilogy in terms of storytelling, as he was concerned with trying something new and breaking ground. In A Life Force, sex is an issue, but by this time Eisner was developing a well-flowing storyline, and sex was just one part of the whole. Examples:



This is the couple from this scene yesterday and this scene a few days ago. Here they are realizing their love, but afraid to consummate it due to the prejudices keeping them apart.



This is the man from this scene, consummating his long-held love for the woman he helped escape Nazi Germany. It's beautifully realized, as the older couple fades away and we see their memories of the first time they made love.

That's about all that I found notable in A Life Force. Dropsie Avenue has even fewer sexual scenes, although we do see at least one scene about the consequences of sex. But here's one that amused me:



So that's all for the examination of sex in Eisner's work. Come back tomorrow to see his depiction of a closely related subject. I bet you can guess what it is!
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Bonus: Sexy Spirit dames!

You have to call them "dames" when you're talking about The Spirit.

Satin:



P'Gell:



Sand Saref:



The somewhat racist Wild Rice:



Lorelai Rox:



A lady spy from Mars(!):



Autumn Mews, who tries to discover the Spirit's secret identity:



Skinny and Dulcet Tone:



You can actually see the silhouette of these two ladies fighting in the background of one of the panels from yesterday.

And, lest you think the only women in The Spirit are femme fatales (femmes fatale?), here's his love interest, Ellen Dolan:



She's not normally so grumpy.