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Creative Staff:
Story: Francesco Francavilla
Art: Francesco Francavilla
Colors: Francesco Francavilla
Letterer: Francesco Francavilla
What They Say:
A series of unexpected disappearances and deaths hit Central City. Initially these cases seem purely unrelated: no apparent connection between the victims makes it easy for the police to just file them as runaways or natural deaths. But when someone close to Ebony White disappears, The Spirit is on the case! From the mind of writer/artist & Eisner winner Francesco Francavilla, comes a thrilling tale of The Spirit that promises to tingle your spines.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
After the twelve-issue series we had for The Spirit from Matt Wagner and Dan Schkade, I’ll admit that I was very wary of going back into the pool with this property. That series clicked for me in a significant way, enough so that I didn’t look into this book more than knowing the title. So when the review copy came in and I saw that it was essentially a passion project from Francesco Francavilla, I knew I was going to get sucked in, albeit in a different way. Francavilla has a really appealing art style that works better in some areas than others, notably his Afterlife with Archie work to be sure, and The Spirit is another one. There’s such a sense of style about it, keeping to tradition but displaying it through larger panels and a great flow for the movement, that allows it to stand out and remain true.
With this miniseries, what we get here is mostly the setup that puts the basic characters into place but doesn’t try to explain the world or their connections, you simply either know this world or you’ll have to figure it out along the way. Francavilla starts things off with a homeless man that’s been killed, which the Spirit is looking at investigating but ends up not doing, which results in his driver Ebony getting the night off. That reveals that he’s visiting his cousin Vince that he hasn’t seen in a few years, not knowing that he was in prison for robbery and is now being drawn back into it because Mikey will kill Ebony if Vince backs out. Standard tough guy material to get compliant underlings that can be tossed to the wolves should things go bad. And that job most certainly goes bad and we see that Vince is going to be the entry into the bigger picture.
That’s from the title itself, the corpse-makers, as we see some hooded folks early on taking the homeless man from the morgue to their own building. With Vince being drawn into that as well, stumbling into the wrong building at the wrong time, it’ll be the hook for Ebony to investigate and draw the Spirit in. As to what the corpse-makers are up to we have no idea at the moment but the hook is solidly presented. More so because of Francavilla’s style with the artwork and color design. Yes, there are familiar tones to be had here and I can’t see his orange styling without thinking of Afterlife with Archie. But Francavilla completely captures the tone of this city with the darkness, the layouts, the oppressive feeling as everything takes place at night throughout it. It’s engaging with some beautiful two-page spreads and really interesting panel layouts.
In Summary:
While The Spirit as minimally on my radar over the decades of being a comic book fan, I became really engaged with the previous series that Dynamite put out. With this incarnation, Francavilla is bringing his signature style to it with the artwork but also with the more minimal approach to the script with the dialogue. It makes it lean and more focused on the visual storytelling, which completely works – something that I can say as a fan of the live-action film that was definitely style over substance. The Corpse-Makers storyline has plenty of potential and it opens up things for a lot of fun visually as Francavilla is definitely one of the more gifted illustrators I follow with the work that he does. I wasn’t thinking of this series much after being such a fan of the previous one but I’m all in to see where this will take me.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dynamite Entertainment
Release Date: February 1st, 2017
MSRP: $3.99
