THE SPIRIT: The Movie and 2 Comic stories

click to enlarge and make sense  - continued after article

THE SPIRIT movie, based on Will Eisner's detective newspaper comic strip in the late 1940s and early 1950s, was written and directed by Frank Miller and released 2008.

We watched it the other night.  Being a fan of THE SPIRIT by Eisner, I was happy the way the movie went along with the style of the comic strip (with some exceptions).

I Googled it to get some facts down before writing some comments about it and read that in box office measurements it was considered a flop.

THE SPIRIT was a fighter of crime in a big city.  He was a cop and was killed, or at least people thought he was killed.  Actually, he lived underground in a graveyard and devoted his life to fighting crime.  He wore a simple eye mask just like the Long Ranger.

I like the comic strip because it showed just how rotten inner-city living can be.  And the movie followed the same rule. 

Near the end of  the movie, while The Spirit was fighting a bad man I noticed in the background, on the side of an old building or sign that said FIEFFER MEATS in big letters.  I think that was an Easter Egg.  Jules Feiffer wrote a book about super comicbook heroes and had drawn the best seller SICK, SICK, SICK.  He also had a weekly cartoon on the front page of THE VILLAGE VOICE.  He also may have worked on the assembly-line of artists putting together THE SPIRIT daily at Eisner Studios.

I think it may have been a box office box because it was ahead of its time, which is strange itself, because the details was behind the times, back in the 40s.  Confusing.

The main thing I saw that Frank Miller did not stick with the SPIRIT story plot was THE SPIRIT had an assistant, a street kid Uncle Tom-like teenager.  It could stir racial feelings more than it did back 70 years ago.

I thought it was better than your regular today's super hero movie with a free Stan Lee cameo.

Below are two SPIRIT stories to give you the jest of the plot:

And also: