The noose tightens.
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!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
When you have a passion project, and a lot of people that work on The Spirit do so out of a passion for the property and Will Eisner, you can get some pretty interesting things with it. Francesco Francavilla has gone all out with this five issue series by pretty much doing nearly everything on it (we’re pretty sure he’s at the printer stapling all the issues as well!) and that means you get something that’s pretty magical. I extolled the visuals the last time around but I also knew that with a series like this that we’d get something where it’s going to work better as a whole once you get past the first issue. There was a lot to like in the setup and understanding how Francavilla was going to present things but the “middle” issues of the series are going to do the hard work of leading us deeper into it, which means less meat to latch onto in some ways.
With The Spirit having gotten some good clues thanks to working with White the last time around in the search for Vince, their time this issue centers around the group of thugs that they’ve come across that picked up Vince the day prior. It’s easy to take them out but the “fun” gets underway with The Spirit interrogating them. This is the kind of material that really only works when you go back to a certain time like this because it’s almost playful in some ways thanks to the lack of “mass media” to show how its done. While White is panicked over his cousin, The Spirit plays it cool and turns the screws just right to get the clues they need to go to where Vince may be.
The rest of the book is working events from the other side with what these criminals are up to. It’s not really clear yet, more about setting up more of the tone and atmosphere of it with some skullduggery in the middle of the night, but we also get a little bit through a private investigator named Lisa that’s checking out a possibly straying husband for a wife. It turns out that he’s involved with what we know to be the corpse-makers based on the first issue as they’re gathering up bodies for their mysterious nefarious plans. The connections are slowly being built here and it’s interesting with how Francavilla presents it as the artwork continues to be fantastic, but it is the kind of work that’s going to click better when you’re able to read it in full rather than almost two months between issues.
In Summary:
I knew that getting into this miniseries that I’d fall in love with it through the visual presentation of it as Francavilla is incredibly talented and there’s no disputing that. Everything oozes off the page in a beautiful way with the blending of the art, colors, and the lettering, that’s wonderfully cohesive. This installment builds on what kicked off the series and I love the way the interrogation scene plays out with how The Spirit handles it. But the book feels more like a sliver of the story rather than something that truly advances it, which is fine. What we get is engaging and fun to read and will be a stronger part of a whole than this individual read.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dynamite Entertainment
Release Date: March 22nd, 2017
MSRP: $3.99
