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Spirit, The #4

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    Ian Jane
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  • Spirit, The #4



    Spirit, The #4
    Released by: Dynamite Entertainment
    Released on: October 21st, 2015.
    Written by: Matt Wagner
    llustrated by: Dan Schkade
    Purchase From Amazon

    Get caught up. Done? Good. This fourth issue of The Spirit opens up with a killer splash page with the series' logo worked into the panel, just as it should be. Some traditions should forgotten, some should be celebrated - we're definitely going for celebration here. A certain Ms. P'Gell tells the boys that she knows what happened to The Spirit, but Strunk and White don't have any money and she's not talking without some cash up front. But then, maybe betting on The Saints pays off… and maybe one of the guys has got more cash than the other realized.

    P'Gell tells them to pull up a seat and proceeds to tell her tale…

    Ellen wake up, finds a note, flashbacks happen - P'Gell's marriage to Yuri ended when he fell victim to a boating accident, leaving her in charge. Her first job? Have her crew deliver some leftover Nazi weapons to Mao's rebels in China. Things went fine until it was tie for the handoff. It was then and there that a certain masked avenger showed up and solved this particular problem with his fists.

    At The Spirit's inner sanctum, Dolan busts his balls about the cleanliness of the place. Turns out that letter Ellen read was from The Spirit and he's not ready to face her just yet. Too many unanswered questions. As Dolan grills him about what actually happened to him, well, his story starts to jive with the story that P'Gell is telling Strunk and White. But for as many similarities as there may be between the note, P'Gell's side of the story and The Spirit's side of the story, well, there are just as many differences.

    The mystery that Matt Wagner has been weaving for the three issues that came before this fourth one starts to reveal itself here, although there are plenty of threads left yet to be tied together. Again we get a nice balance of suspense, action and humor with some interesting doses of character development thrown in to keep things interesting (P'Gell gets a lot of panel time in this issue and she's as interesting to learn about as she is appealing to look at). Lots of great film noir style dialogue and scenarios here with just the right mix of superheroics thrown in to work. Wagner's previous experience writing pulp style characters like The Shadow (his team up with Wagner's own Grendel was pretty much perfect) shows in this series. There's no reason that this series couldn't have been published in the Sunday comics section back in the forties.

    As far as the artwork goes, not only do we get a really nice tip of the hat to a certain Kitchen Sink publisher (hey, they brought The Spirit back at one point, this really is quite touching to see!) but we get that great splash page previously mentioned done in the gorgeous Eisner style but with Schkade's own stamp clearly all over it. The colors from Brennan Wagner suite the nice, shadowy atmosphere that the penciling conjures up quite well and there are some really impressive panels here where, when the action breaks out, things get genuinely dynamic. The art here pays tribute to Eisner without aping his style and it's quite good.

    Eric Powell once again contributes a gorgeous cover suitable for framing. Somewhere in the great beyond, Will Eisner is seeing this series and he's smiling.






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