Lead Adventure Forum
Miniatures Adventure => Pulp => Topic started by: Driscoles on 18 December 2007, 08:55:25 PM
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Hi,
Iam not sure if this was already posted. But Frank Miller directs on THE SPIRIT, by Will Eisner.
I always loved the comic.
Here is the link :
http://www.lionsgate.com/thespirit/
Cheers
Björn
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Miller is a true storytelling master. Now if he only did the Dark Knight after his DK Returns. That would have been the greatest comic and maybe even all time movie ever.
Brian
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Miller is a true storytelling master. Now if he only did the Dark Knight after his DK Returns. That would have been the greatest comic and maybe even all time movie ever.
Brian
Yes, well, you're entitled to your opinion but none of Miller's movies have been good.
Robocop II was utter bollocks.
Sin City was interesting in as much as it showed the comic translated to the screen but it had the unfortunate side effect of highlighting how two-dimensional and uninteresting Miller's characters are and how dismal his dialogue is when it comes out of real people's mouths and isn't safely ensconced in a speech balloon.
300 was unwatchable and resembled a cut scene from a PS2 game for the most part.
Even Miller admits all his movies are crap :lol:
The thought of his GoddamnBatman(TM) getting onto the big screen with him behind the script is not something DC would relish (which is why it hasn't happened).
Finally, it's abundantly clear from the Miller-Eisner conversations that Miller doesn't 'get' the Spirit or Eisner's approach to comics. Eisner was a stroy-telling genius, Miller doesn't come close.
I have very low hopes for this film but could do with being pleasantly surprised. The TV pilot was dismal, this can't be worse than that (please God... :roll: )
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O...M...G...
(http://willeisner.com/spirit/images/miller_spirit_poster.jpg)
Noooooooooo!
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Wow talk about complete opposites of opinion. :o What are your favorite comic book story or story line?
My top five
Dark Knight Returns
Kingdom Come
Earth X
Millar's Sin City (Sin City and That Yellow Bastard)
Anything Captain America (Even the Cap Wolf days)
Brian
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I'm right in the middle on this. I don't have high hopes that The Spirit by Miller will be The Spirit of Eisner. I mean, Eisner was a master storyteller. Miller's strength is his minimalist approach which does not translate well to the screen.
I've read and re-read Eisner's material. He was the first one to experiment with telling a comic with very little dialogue.
My hope is to be able to enjoy the film, but not expect it to feel like The SPirit, just another crime story told by Miller.
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My favourite comics are hard to pin down but here's a list of some in no particular order :)
Eisner: Spirit, and later work, particularly Contract with God.
Herge: Tintin
Moebius: Early work mostly but the Incal is great too. Airtight Garage is probably my favourite extended work.
Richard Corben: Most stuff, early is better, Neverwhere etc.
Jordi Bernet: Torpedo
There's more of course. I admire the work of Alex Toth, Goscinny, Ditko, Kirby and many others.
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Sin City was interesting in as much as it showed the comic translated to the screen but it had the unfortunate side effect of highlighting how two-dimensional and uninteresting Miller's characters are and how dismal his dialogue is when it comes out of real people's mouths and isn't safely ensconced in a speech balloon.
that's pulp for me! :wink:
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I would agree. Pulp isn't exactly full of blockbuster dialog and complex character developement. It's strong point is adventure and tons of it.
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I do not like Frank Miller for the same reasons as Matakishi. Miller is not a good storyteller. He is a good composer of images of violence. His visual minimalism is something he attempts to transfer into his dialog, and he composes some of the flattest, least interesting words to come out of people's mouths.
If I'm going to wallow in violence, I'll read Chuck Palahniuk. If I want brutal, realistic violence in pulp, I'll read Raymond Chandler. If I want interesting takes on the supers, I'll listen to Joss Whedon.
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I'll defend Frank Miller, the comic book creator, as long as I have breath. At least his early work before he went overboard with the violence. His work on Daredevil in the 80's was a breakthrough, or at least a welcome return to artwork driven stories. He was able to express more with less than any artist in my formative years at least. In a comic landscape ruled by the overwritten excesses of the likes of Chris Clairmont's X-Men, it was a welcome relief.
Unfortunately it never translated well to the big screen. Matakishi is right on all counts about the movies he has been involved in. Of course these have all been adaptions of his scripts or comics in some way and I don't think there is enough meat on the bones to tell a complete story. Style only goes so far in the multiplex.
So it remains to be seen what he will turn in as a director. I have always been in the 'let's judge the movie AFTER we've seen it' camp. So I'll wait and see.
Marc
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I think there is no question that Frank Miller is a great author of comic books, but likewise I think there is also no question that he is flawed at best when he is involved with films. While I liked the Sin City & 300 comic books, I disliked the films made therefrom.
While I think that The Spirit benefits from an expressionist visual style (I seem to recall Eisner saying that Fritz Lang's great silent films Metropolis and M were visual influences on The Spirit), the core of The Sprit is Eisner's essential humanism as a storyteller. The Spirit is a great deal more than just a "Two-fisted Tough Guy" and to reduce him to such does a disservice to Eisner and Spirit fans everywhere.
Frankly, I doubt whether Frank Miller (or indeed Hollywood period) has the subtlety to value what is great in The Spirit and bring it to the big screen...
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You said that far better than I did Heldrak. And it is exactly how I feel. Eisner watched people and translated real behaviour to his creations.
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I don't know if this will make me something of a pariah around here, but I must confess that I have never heard of The Spirit or Will Eisner.
I suppose it's because I was brought up on Brit comics for the most part. But oddly enough, the American stuff I enjoyed most was Frank Miller's tenure in charge of "Daredevil" in the early 80s. I absolutely loved all that Bullseye/Elektra stuff. It was like nothing I had ever read before. All those panels with no dialogue, but which told the story perfectly. So different to what we had at home. In British comics if the characters had nothing to say, they still spoke, spewing out pointless expository dialogue that was really unconvincing or that merely described what you could see in the panel. Daredevil just blew me away. It was a comic epiphany for me, which made it hard to go back to the old style.
Pity they made it into such a crappy film.
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Hi,
I will give the movie a chance. Although Miller isnt that great in my eyes and maybe not the right man for this project. I didnt like 300 very much. Sin City was ok but I didnt read the comics so what do I know.
My comic taste is close to Matakishis.
I like Herge
Eisner
Moebius
Hugo Pratt
Hal Foster
Iam not into the super heroes. The only guy I like is Bat Man. Ah yes and the very old Savage Sword of Conan comics.
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Miller's Daredevil was indeed great at the time but he was only taking manga storytelling and pacing techniques and copying them. Ronin, his best work from a storytelling point of view, was pure manga and was new and fresh because so few western people had been exposed to it. His artwork was always scrappy, often rescued by Klaus Jansen's inks. In many panels Daredevil has two left feet (or two right ones) which was always good for a laugh at the time. The comic world owes a lot to Miller but it doesn't owe him enough to let him loose on the Spirit.
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I don't know if this will make me something of a pariah around here, but I must confess that I have never heard of The Spirit or Will Eisner.
I suppose it's because I was brought up on Brit comics for the most part. But oddly enough, the American stuff I enjoyed most was Frank Miller's tenure in charge of "Daredevil" in the early 80s. I absolutely loved all that Bullseye/Elektra stuff. It was like nothing I had ever read before. All those panels with no dialogue, but which told the story perfectly. So different to what we had at home. In British comics if the characters had nothing to say, they still spoke, spewing out pointless expository dialogue that was really unconvincing or that merely described what you could see in the panel. Daredevil just blew me away. It was a comic epiphany for me, which made it hard to go back to the old style.
Pity they made it into such a crappy film.
The Spirit is an influential comic strip/book created by Will Eisner (and an ever-changing galaxy of assistants) from the late 1930s to the early 1950s (the strip
was handled soley by assistants during Eisner's service in World War II).
The Spirit tells the story of Denny Colt, a masked vigilante who inhabits a mythical American anytown called Central City. He has a working relationship with Commissioner Dolan, the city's irrascible balding pot-bellied Police Commissioner and a romantic relationship with Dolan's daughter Ellen. The Spirit lives in a secret hideout beneath Wildwood Cemetery with a his wisecracking African-American kid sidekick Ebony White and he battles crime with his wits and his fists, eschewing the use of a gun. He has a colorful rogue's gallery of villains and a bevy of sultry female secondary characters vying for his attention.
(By the way, The Spirit is called The Spirit because on his first case, he battles a mad scientist named Dr. Cobra, who has a plan to ransom the city by threatening to contaminate the water supply with a fluid that causes supended animation. Denny Colt is exposed to the fluid in the process of foiling Dr. Cobra and believed to be dead, and he is interred in Wildwood Cemetery. He later revives and resolves to battle crime outside the law as The Spirit).
So far, so good.
What sets The Spirit apart from it's rather commonplace description is first of all it's strong visual/graphic sense (as noted, Eisner has quoted influence from German Expressionist silent films, etc.). The Spirit was far more experimental in the way it told a story than any other comic strip or comic book of the time (or even of today). It has perhaps rightfully been called the Citizen Kane of the comics books.
Secondly, Eisner exerted a far greater degree of creator control over The Spirit than many other artists & writers (many of whom went uncredited back in the day). This let Eisner deal with social themes and topics that would have been unheard-of in other strips (the warping effects of poverty and its influence on crime, war profiteering, the plight of war orphans, the exploitation of returning servicemen, etc.).
Thirdly, although Ebony White has many characteristics that are shamefully charicatured/stereotyped by the standards of today, he often transcends his secondary role, with entire multi-part storylines being dedicated to his adventures or stories told solely from his point of view. While he is sometimes a figure of fun, he is never a figure without dignity, and his relationship to the other characters is always a relationship of equals.
Finally, Eisners' abilty to tell a good story with an interesting mix of humor, adventure, pathos, slapstick, drama and human interest has never been equalled anywhere else in comics. Many other writers of comics do one thing very well, but Eisner was able to balance many things within a single story in a way that's unrivaled.
My personal favorites are the postwar/later 1940s stories when Eisner returns to the helm and the stories become more elaborate and he plays with the visual & storytelling forms.
P.S. I agree about Frank Miller's work on Daredevil- He took a second-string character on the verge of cancellation and revitalized it into a fantastic read. I particularly like the "Born Again" storyline, where he completely rebuilds the character from the ground up. No question that Miller is a talented and important author of comic books.
If only he weren't such a lousy film maker...:freak:
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I don't know if this will make me something of a pariah around here, but I must confess that I have never heard of The Spirit or Will Eisner.
You know, it strikes me as a bit odd that The Spirit has not been mentioned at all(?) in this forum until now. To me he is very much the epitome of a Plulp Hero: the mask, the frequently torn shirt, the ability to take an ungodly amount of physical abuse and, quite notably, him repeatedly being tied to radiators and beds and then kissed to an inch of his life by chesty femme fatales with a liberated view on female sexuality.
It is possible the reason The Spirit hasn't sprung to mind before is because that comic (and many other by Eisner) often are accused to be litterature, something one rarely pair with other pulp heros.
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Thanks for the info, chaps.
By the way, a word to the wise: Don't type "Ebony White" into Google Images. Most of what comes up has little to do with comic hero sidekicks. :wink:
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By the way, a word to the wise: Don't type "Ebony White" into Google Images. Most of what comes up has little to do with comic hero sidekicks. :wink:
Oh yes, I see what you mean...
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I said "Don't!"
You just had to, didn't you. :)
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Shhh!
I'm still following some of the links :D
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What?! What?! Did I miss something?