Spirit #12

The new Spirit, that is, not your daddy's spirit. Although with each issue it's proving to be every bit as beautiful, diverse and daring as the original.

This issue was highlighted to me by LYSAD reader Gregory Guity who submitted the third of the following panels for the POTW voting. As I usually tend to go for funny (deliberately or not) panels in the votings, I didn't feel the panel would fit in, and there was this feeling of... something missing from the little one panel story. Having finally read the story today, I've figured you need all three panels to grasp the full strengh of the last one:
The same page offers what could be the essential Spirit panel. It's an acclaim for Darwyn Cooke that he packs such intensity and iconic essence in a single panel of a six-panel grid page, and generally invests so much energy - thought into making every panel in his Spirit comics worthy of framing and studying on a gallery wall.
And since we're in the process of killing bandwidth, a brilliant wallpaper from the issue's opening splash page:


The issue follows The Spirit tracking down his childhood sweetheart Sand who has fallen in with the wrong crowd and become involved in the sale of a new lethal substance. Sand apparently originates from Will Eisner's Spirit stories, and Darwyn Cooke went as far as approximating Eisner's palette and ground-breaking page layouts for the sake of the flashback sequences detailing the story between Sand and Denny Colt.

While the plot feels confined in the single issue format, the story still packs an emotional whallop, culminating in the first three panels in this 'review'. A must read.

9/10