The Nostalgist
by Dan Nadel
Sunday, February 4, 2007
I recently picked up Darwyn Cooke‘s Spirit and Batman/The Spirit. Cooke specializes in nostalgia-inflected revivals of superheroes. His mini series New Frontier was an epic re-imagining of the DC Comics heroes. It was good fun–a light, affectionate version of Watchmen. I’m not sure it adds up to much more than beautifully drawn fan-fiction, which, minus the “beautifully drawn” is more or less what a lot of superhero comic books are these days. In Cooke’s case, the drawings really make the work. His style is the best version of the contemporary strain of comic book drawing that began with Bruce Timm‘s Batman animated series. Influenced by the design atmospherics of Alex Toth and, in a later generation, the smooth renderings of Steve Rude, it’s a cartoon language that embraces the dynamism inherent in superheroes while glossing over the violence and darkness that has been so prevalent in comics in the last 20 years or so. I like it for its elegance and it’s always-1920s look (even if that clean nostalgia feels extremely easy), but am slightly put off by how sexless and toothless it is. Toth had bite, especially in his pre-1970s work, with grit piled on top of his impeccable formalist sense, while Cooke smooths out all the rough edges, replacing all tension with a soft-focus nostalgia for an imagined past. But really, I buy most of Cooke releases, just to peek at the elegance of the drawing. With these two comics, though, I realized that problem is that appeal is, in fact, just the drawings.
The two Spirit comic books, both with Batman and without, are fun exercises, but feel soulless, like a storyboard more than a story. The Batman/Spirit emphasizes the humor in both characters, but does little with either, and The Spirit comic just demonstrates that the fun of that character was not super heroics, but rather the incidental, O’Henry-esque stories creator Will Eisner used the Spirit as an excuse to tell. But more interestingly, while the drawings are, as usual, slick and fun to look at, it turns out that Cooke isn’t a great comic book storyteller. Comic book storytelling requires pictures that flow into one another, and a sense of the page as a whole. Cooke, however, thinks more like the animator he once was, creating single isolated moments in sequence, as opposed to groups of pictures that work together. His panels are often crowded with information, weighing them down in a way that works against his smooth surfaces and slick drawing. It’s a curious problem–a good cartoonist who can’t quite frame a story. The similarly talented Steve Rude suffers from it too. I wonder if that level of polish simply works against the flow of comics. It’s over-determined, in a sense, preventing the motion of the story and keeping readers at a remove. Toth worked in a cartoon shorthand, always emphasizing both elegance and minimalism and allowing readers to enter the story with him. Cooke, in his eagerness to describe every bit of his nostalgic world, over-renders, weighing it down and leaving the rest of us to watch with disinterested curiosity.
Labels: Alex Toth, Bruce Timm, Darwyn Cooke, nostalgia, Steve Rude, superheroes, Will Eisner
You nailed that! Good show. I am attracted to Cooke and Rude for the same reasons and almost always disappointed by the end result in the exact same conflicted ways, even when it’s kind of fun. Couldn’t have articulated the reasons why any better.
Have you read “Selina’s Big Score?” It’s the only thing I can think of written and drawn by Cooke that neatly violates all the thematic elements you see in “New Frontier” and “Spirit,” opting instead for a gritty heist story with Catwoman in the center.
Curious to see if you have the same reaction to it as to his other work.
I liked Selina’s Big Score very much. It was a fun, more off-hand comic. Suffers from some of the same visual problems, but I remember it being the most enjoyable mainstream comic of the day. He’s gotten a bit more ponderous since then. I should note, also, that, per Tom Spurgeon’s remark on comicsreporter.com, I take the limitations of the genre and writing for granted…I assume it, so I don’t really bother commenting unless it’s egregiously dumb. One could argue that, say, the content of Mome, which I enjoy, has nearly as many genre limitations as the content of your average handful of superhero comics.
here’s a write-up i did on cooke too:
http://vanishingperspective.blogspot.com/2006/12/cartoonist-writer-darwyn-cooke.html
but you are totally spot on about cooke’s storytelling being off and over-rendered. i sensed it but could not find the words to point that out like you did. i think i like looking at his illustrations the best but never really read the story because i wince at the writing.
btw, i also did a write-up on julie doucet’s ‘elle-humor’ that i ordered from you—top notch book… high five dan!
Great article! it’s true that overpolish can distract a cartoonist’s sense for how everything else (the sequence, the storytelling)is supposed to be flowing along with it. Simplification (without loss of quality) seems to be the best method for this aesthetic problem.
Good, thought-provoking post re: Cooke.
Re: the Spirit, I would argue, as I think you are suggesting, that as a premise the Spirit is pretty much an empty vessel, one that Eisner et al. filled week after week with good stuff that had little to do with the character per se: a certain amused irony, a sense of glamor, of screwball romance, and, later, postwar, with the various self-contained stories about distinctly unsuper characters: luckless shlemiels a la Gerhard Shnobble whose stories were nice balances of irony and sentimentality.
All that and, of course, the design unit of the whole page that Eisner & Co. had to work with, perhaps the one thing that gave special oomph to the otherwise Caniff-esque things Eisner was trying to do with the character early on.
Isn’t it obvious by now that Eisner was utterly bored with the Spirit as a concept by the late ’40s, and that he had no desire to substantially revive the property during the celebrated Indian summer of his career?
Re: Cooke, he’s a dab hand at beautiful pictures. I suppose I find his work readable enough, but it’s the sheer substantive emptiness of the stuff that I find frustrating. One ends up clinging to the excellencies of the designs & drawings, qua drawings, as consolation for the shopworn stories. Ditto with Rude, whose stuff I sometimes buy and always spend as much time ogling as I do reading.
The Spirit revival is a spent shell. Personally, I found the second issue plain offensive, with its stereotypes and its ill-advised invocation of contemporary politics. Ditto the sops to liberal sensibility in the otherwise Eisenhower-friendly New Frontier.
You’ve nailed something about the aesthetic of the Cooke Spirits that had eluded me. Thanks!