#will esiner

No, your eyes don't deceive you: that is, indeed Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's Nana Visitor, and Flash Gordon himself, Sam Jones, as Ellen Dolan and The Spirit/Denny Colt.

They starred in a 1987 ABC television movie The Spirit, which had originally been shot as a TV series pilot for the 1986 season. However, management changes at ABC lead the pilot to be shelved and the series never coming to fruition.

The TV movie finally aired without no advance promotion, which is just as well as it wasn't very good. Spirit creator Will Eisner was not very happy with the end product at all, and didn't mind telling everyone.

Now, here’s a cool thing -- this looks like a first draft for this fabulous double-wide Spirit cover I analyzed a couple weeks back: 

The “Never Published Before” at the base of the logotecture clinches it. 

It’s obviously a soft batch, which is why he moved on to the terrific version 2.0, but it’s interesting to see the progression. Just about everything in the first draft is present in the final, with one exception: the man at P’Gell’s feet in the original is Picar, one of P’Gell’s husbands, and the only one who stuck around long enough to pose a reasonable intellectual threat to the serial widow. His grinning superciliousness is pretty out of character. In the final, he’s replaced with a legion of anonymous fawners, which works better all around. 

The worst sin of the first pass is that P’Gell is not the center of attention. With the Spirit ascending the logotecture (via a less than obvious set of stairs on the back of the T), he dominates the image. P’Gell’s just kicking it at the base, vaguely leaning against it. Her dress is identical, although it appears the temperature is just a little bit... nippier in the original. 

Thing is, the original is fine. It’s hardly bad work. It’s work a lot of artists would be proud to call it a day on. But it’s only fine -- and this issue needed something special. A show-stopper. 

Sometimes it’s worth the time investment to throw out the fine work to redo it as something truly good. That time is finite. Good work is forever. 

P’Gell’s also smoking in the original, I just realized. For shame, madam. The children. 

But then again...

Like I said before —I love these Kitchen Sink Will Eisner Spirit covers. They exist in this crazy, heightened version of the already crazy, heightened reality of the comic.They’re fascinating and bonkers in equal measure.

Winding down for the night, I wrote down some things I noticed about one of my favorites; All About P’Gell. Let’s see if I can’t learn something. 

1. A double-wide cover like this changes the typical flow of the narrative from left-right to right-left— yet here, all the action draws to the center, to P’Gell.  She’s actually right of center, but Dolan’s speech balloon/ad copy absorbs the extra space and tricks the eye into seeing her as dead middle. 

2. Yeah, everything draws up to P’Gell… the stairs, the trail of money, the title itself — where she’s literally in the spotlight — and of course, the droves of men killing, prostrating, and scraping to try and bid for her affection. The passageway in the floor, through which we can see a deeper system of tunnels and catacombs, implies a limitless supply of fools to throw themselves to their doom at her feet. The corpse against the ’T’ platform especially speaks to that last bit.

3. (in one story, men break off their relationships by the hundreds when P’Gell comes back to Paris — and upon hearing news of her departure at the end of the story, the suicide rate soars.)

4. (P’Gell is my favorite Spirit character.)

5. On to the man in the mask; while the men draw up from the depths, Spirit comes down from above — the visual metaphor is clear. The KO’d thugs on the steps not only create the sense of his movement towards P’Gell, but show that of the men trying to get to her, the Spirit will always come out on top; to her bemusement, he’s the only one who doesn’t want her. Or at least, won’t act on it.

6. It’s also worth noting that without the rips in his clothes, it might not be clear that The Spirit's responsible for those unconscious bodies, rather than just more victims of Hurricane P’Gell. Coming to appreciate what clever visual shorthand that is. 

7. The Spirit poster on the left also comes down from above. The girl mooning up at it is Saree, P’Gell’s stepdaughter and protege. The mooning does speak a bit to the Spirit’s own power over the opposite sex… although next to P’Gell, to paraphrase a Garth Ennis line, he’s a matchstick next to an incinerator.

8. Speaking of which, the money that leads from Saree to P’Gell might indicate the girl’s potential future as a maneater supreme… or might just be a handy way for Eisner keep the action heading towards the main event.

9. Leaning against the poster, easy to ignore — which is, brilliantly, the point — is Ellen Dolan. Her pose mirrors P’Gell’s, with both their arms and legs bent at the same angles. But while P’Gell’s arms vamp, Ellen’s are shyly tucked behind her back. P’Gell’s bent leg creates a power stance, while Ellen’s draws a sad little circle on the ground. And most importantly, P’Gell leans against a physical piece of Spirit mythology, the center of attention, while Ellen leans against a colorless photo of the man she loves, a wallflower. Her outfit, her beauty, are meant to show us that this is not her natural demeanor — it’s the P’Gell effect that makes her feel so tiny.

10. And lastly, what’s going on with P’Gell herself? Well, she’s fabulous. Her expression is not oblivious to the carnage around her, but also not particularly moved. It’s not boring, nor is it anything to write home about. It’s wednesday. And her brilliant little line echoes the first line of dialogue she ever utters on the splash page of her first appearance: “I am P’Gell… and this is NOT a story for little boys!!”

Fifty cents, this was! It’s more now, I imagine. 

***

The main takeaway of this for me is the way the movement of characters is implied through ‘breadcrumbs,’ like the guys climbing out of the catacombs and the thugs snoozing on the stairs. I’m also appreciating the beautifully simple opposition of having one character defined by upward movement and the other defined by downward movement. 

(All the character moments on the left side are gravy more than anything central to the piece’s contraction, but the Ellen/P’Gell of it all are a good lesson in exposing the differences between characters by subverting a similarity.)

And the butter on the pie: This is what can happen when you have amazing characters to help you do the heavy lifting. P’Gell and The Spirit -- man, it just ain’t fair.