SATURDAY, FEB. 24, 3 PM

The 2007 New York Comic-Con reportedly received 40,000 attendees over three days; San Diego’s Comic-Con International declares that last year it had “ 114,000 individual attendees. . . (not counting the 9,000 or so exhibitors and their staff!)”. The New York con now seems to be acknowledged as being the nation’s second biggest comics convention, yet look at the gap in attendance.

I wonder what percentage of the San Diego attendees come not for the comics but for the movie and television preview presentations, and the chance to see their starts in person. In contrast, the New York Comic-Con, despite ventures into anime and gaming, remains almost entirely a comic book convention. I expect that there will be a greater Hollywood presence in years to come, especially since when the New York con moves to April next year, it will present such an obvious opportunity to promote summer blockbuster movies. (But still, I was surprised that there was no promotion for the 300 movie at the New York con, even though it opened merely two weeks later, whereas San Francisco’s WonderCon, the week after the New York con, got its own preview screening.)

But New York-based producer Michael Uslan has beaten most of the rest of Hollywood to the New York Comic-Con. He hosted the panel previewing the forthcoming film adaptation of Will Eisner’s The Spirit, which is being written and will be directed by comics great Frank Miller.

Opening the presentation, Uslan told the audience that “If you’ve ever been to San Diego,” meaning the Comic-Con, “One of the headlines” the con gets “is ‘Hollywood Invades San Diego.’” This panel, he told us, “is the case of ‘New York Invades New York.’” Uslan explained that Spirit co-producer F. J. DeSanto, who was also on the panel, was from Manhattan, two of their associates on the film were from Long Island and Westchester County, respectively, and Miller himself was a Manhattanite. “Me, I’m a Jersey boy,” Uslan informed us. “We are based here.”

Moreover, Uslan continued, “This con is special to me.” He told us that he had gone to the “New York Comicon” back in July, 1964, that was indeed the “first comic-con” This is long before I ever attended a comics convention in New York City. Uslan recalled that this first convention was in a “fleabag hotel” called the “Broadway Central” that had “drunks in the hallway,” and that the hotel “collapsed a year later.”

At this point Uslan noticed a member of comic books’ generation of founding fathers in the audience. “One of the all-time great legends in the comics industry has graced us with his presence,” Uslan said, introducing Jerry Robinson, who worked with artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger on Batman #1 (see “Comics in Context” #141). Considering Robinson’s efforts to get Finger recognition as co-creator of Batman (see “Comics in Context” #94), it was appropriate that Uslan then reminisced that at this first comics con, when “I was thirteen,” “I met Bill Finger.” Another great comics writer, Otto Binder, was a “friend of mine,” Uslan explained, and he had “a beer with him and Bill Finger.” I don’t know that I approve of these Golden Age giants allowing a thirteen-year-old to drink alcohol, but otherwise this is an enviable experience for anyone with an appreciation of American comic book history.

As fir their present project, Uslan said that “ten or eleven years ago Ben Melniker and I got the [movie] rights to The Spirit.” Uslan told us “I promised and swore to Will Eisner that nobody was going to touch this project if they didn’t get it, if we couldn’t do it the right way. And I’ve held to that promise.”

Of course, Hollywood being Hollywood, lots of people in the movie business didn’t get what The Spirit is about. “It’s painful,” Uslan said, telling us that “We have had many lucrative deals put in front of us that we’ve turned down over the years.” That’s because “We have dealt with people in Hollywood who have said, ‘Great, you want to do a Spirit movie?’” but then added, “Let’s get him out of his suit and tie” and put him in a costume and give him “super-powers.” They would even propose “make him die” so that he could “come back as a ghost,” whereupon Uslan said he replied “That’s a great idea and we can call it The Spectre or Deadman,” referring to two established DC superheroes who really are ghosts.

Meanwhile, Uslan continued, over the years he would consult with Eisner about The Spirit. “Thank God I had an opportunity over those years to spend a lot of time with Will to ask him questions, to get him involved, so that we know what he had in mind, we know what he was thinking about this, what his preferences were or weren’t.”

Then Uslan introduced the other panelists. “One of the important members of the team,” he said, was Denis Kitchen, who was “Will’s friend,” publisher and agent. Next Uslan introduced co-producer F. J. DeSanto, who in turn read an e-mail from Frank Miller, who had been scheduled to appear on the panel.

Miller’s e-mail began with a bit of philosophy: “Sometimes life really sucks.” Miller explained that “I slipped on a patch of black ice on a Manhattan sidewalk, smashed my left hip to bits and have spent the last bunch of weeks undergoing medical procedures and losing out on all these chances to tell everybody how much fun I’m having writing Will Eisner’s The Spirit.” MIller then cautioned, “Don’t go expecting a nostalgic tongue-in-cheek romp here. Remember. . .how scary Eisner got whenever he chose to. Remember, remember how he broke your heart with the story of Sand Serif,” whom Miller has credited as his inspiration for Elektra in Daredevil. “So expect some hairpin turns, some dead end, back alley madness of the wet kind. Get set, we’re on our way to some dark places.”

(As terrible as this injury sounds, Miller was nonetheless able to attend the premiere of the 300 movie in Los Angeles (at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, no less) less than two weeks later, though he was using a cane. See the photo here.

Then the panelists showed the “teaser poster” that Miller had created for The Spirit movie, showing Eisner’s character, looking formidable and grim, his sleeves rolled up, standing amidst darkness. The whole poster was in black and white, with the Spirit’s suit rendered as black and white lines, except for the brilliant red of his tie and of the logo “Will Eisner’s The Spirit.” In short, it looked like a melding of Eisner’s Spirit with Miller’s Sin City. Across the top were two lines in quotation marks: “Down these mean streets a man must come. A hero born, murdered, and born again.” That reminds me of the title of Miller’s Daredevil: Born Again storyline (1986), with its Christian imagery, as well as the title of Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) and Raymond Chandler’s description of the fictional detective in his 1945 essay “The Simple Art of Murder” (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Raymond_Chandler). The emphasis on the Spirit’s figurative death and resurrection reminds me of my debate with Dr. Peter Coogan, author of Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre, as to whether or not the Spirit is a superhero (see “Comics in Context” #163 and 165).

Uslan said that he and Miller “ran into each other again” at Will Eisner’s memorial service in New York City. (Regular readers will recall that I was there, too, and reported on Uslan’s speech. In fact, Uslan said there that whenever he saw a film by “Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra, Orson Welles, and now Frank Miller, I’ll think of Will Eisner.” See “Comics in Context” #80-81.) Miller and Robert Rodriguez’s movie “Sin City had come out a week or two before that, and I said, ‘You know, Frank. . .I’m trying to make comic books into movies and what you’ve done is you’ve made a movie into a comic book.” Uslan had long been planning to do a Spirit movie, but he said at the memorial he told Miller, “For the first time I can really. . .see The Spirit being done, using this Sin City technology.” Uslan told the audience he asked Miller to write and direct The Spirit movie, but at first Miller didn’t think he could do justice to Eisner’s work.

Uslan continued, “But after thinking about this for some time he came back and said, ‘I can’t let anyone else do it. I’ve got to do it.’” Uslan assured the audience that “the Spirit is safe with Frank,” and that even now “Frank is very busy writing the final draft of the movie.”

Denis Kitchen observed that “The Spirit movie is something I don’t think Will ever expected to really happen, because over the years, many people optioned it, and for may reasons, [it] wasn’t an easy thing to translate. Many people had it and it just never got done right.”

Moreover, Kitchen said, “Will also, unlike many other people in the world, did not want to direct and wasn’t particularly intrigued by the idea of comics becoming movies, because most of them he felt didn’t do justice to the original source. If you read Will’s serious works, you know he felt that comics should be an art in its own right and he didn’t like the implied superiority of film, because it was a more lucrative field to be in.” You, like myself, may wonder, then, why he even bothered to sell movie rights to The Spirit. Later during the panel Kitchen recalled Eisner’s comment on a notoriously dreadful TV-movie version of The Spirit: “It made my toes curl.”

However, Kitchen stated, referring to Miller, that “Will would be very pleased to know that his friend and someone he respected is going to take this and mold it into another medium.” Kitchen voiced his approval of the Sin City movie and added, “I knew Frank was thinking right when he told me he was clipping out panels of Will’s Spirit and taping them on his wall and doing in-betweening.”

What Kitchen was describing was Miller’s method of storyboarding the movie. Walt Disney and his animation studio pioneered storyboarding, which means plotting out a movie as if it were a long comics story. “in-betweening” is also an animation term, meaning filling in the movement between two separate poses of the character.

DeSanto explained MIller’s process: “When we first started talking about the movie and ideas started to pour out of Frank’s head, he would xerox Will’s graphic novels”–presumably DeSanto actually meant Eisner’s Spirit stories, perhaps as collected in DC’s Archives editions–“and start cutting and pasting them into some sort of order. That’s how he mapped out the initial film. I was having lunch with him about six months ago and all of a sudden he had a pile of papers on his lap and he said, ‘Okay, here’s the movie.’”

Later during the panel, Uslan put it this way: “The storyboards are by Will Eisner with an assist by Frank Miller.” While the film’s story is “not a specific story we’ve seen” in Eisner’s Spirit canon, Uslan explained, “you will recognize sequences” from classic Eisner Spirit stories in the film.

Recently I have been having a discussion via e-mail with comics writer Peter Gillis as to whether “decompressed” storytelling in contemporary comics is more “cinematic” than Eisner’s Spirit; he votes for the former, while I vote for the latter. (As Scott McCloud explains in Understanding Comics, time works differently in comics and movies, and I feel that “decompressed” storytelling in Western-style comics moves at a deadening pace.) Miller’s comics storytelling is closer to the Eisner mode, and the Sin City movie testifies to the cinematic nature of Miller’s comics work. I certainly hope that these Spirit storyboards will be published if someday there will be an “art of The Spirit movie” book.

So what will the story of the movie be like? DeSanto said “It’s not an origin story. When you meet the Spirit, he is the Spirit.” And how much will the film look as if Will Eisner drew it? For one thing, DeSanto said that “We’ll be incorporating the logo into the background,” thus imitating Eisner’s trademark technique in his Spirit splash pages. “With the technology they made Sin City and 300 with, we’re at a really neat point in filmmaking where we can make that world as Eisneresque as possible.”

Will there be familiar Eisner characters aside from the Spirit himself in the movie? DeSanto said that “we’re going to see some of the femme fatales.”

Then Uslan cautioned that “We’re not going to do the whimsical Spirit stories [in the movie]. We’re not going to do Rat-Tat the Machine Gun or Gerhard Shnobble” (see “Comics in Context” #68). Uslan continued, “However, that doesn’t mean that when we move to some animation projects that we won’t necessarily cover that then.” It seemed Uslan had revealed something he had not intended, for he quickly added, “But that’s a story I’m not allowed to talk about now.”

But as for characters who will be in the movie, Uslan said, “We’ve got Commissioner Dolan, and believe me, you’ll understand why he is so different from Commissioner Gordon [in Batman]. Ellen Dolan will be there. Sand Saref and that magnificent romantic triangle will be there.” Later on during the panel Uslan advised the audience to “check out some of the Octopus stories” as preparation for seeing the movie, so it would seem that the Spirit’s archenemy is also in the film.

Will the movie be set back in the 1940s, when most of Eisner’s Spirit stories were first published? Uslan recounted that he asked Eisner, “’Should this be set in the 40s? Should this be set in the 50s? Should this be set today?’ He was kind of shocked at my question and said, ‘I never wrote The Spirit in a nostalgic sense. Whenever I write it and drew it, I was always doing something that was relevant at the time. He was in the 40s in the 40s. When I was doing it in the 50s it was the 50s. When I did it in the 60s, it was the 60s. There’s no reason this shouldn’t be contemporary or at least timeless.’”

Hence, Uslan continued, “That’s what Frank is going to go for here. There’s going to be a timeless feel to this, The only thing I can throw back to you is what Tim Burton did in our first Batman picture, where a lot of people, if you asked them, weren’t absolutely sure if that movie took place in the past, present or future, or some kind of mix thereof.” For example, in that 1989 film, reporter Alexander Knox, in his fedora (the Spirit wears one, too) and trench coat, looks as if he were from the 1940s, whereas Vicki Vale wears a minidress in one sequence.

Although Uslan and company are based in New York, they have partnered with a Hollywood company, Odd Lot Productions, to produce The Spirit movie. Uslan assured the audience that Odd Lot understood and appreciated The Spirit and the comics medium. He said that when he told Deborah Del Prete, one of the heads of Odd Lot, that he was attempting to make a movie of “the greatest comic in seventy years,” she exclaimed, “Oh my God, it’s The Spirit!” Not only is Del Prete a “comics fan,” Uslan told us, she is a “Legion [of Super-Heroes] completist.” (Well, that certainly makes her One of Us, perhaps more so than many of Us!) Uslan made the point that the film is being “independently financed,” perhaps in order to assure us that there would be no creative interference from a major studio.

Then Uslan started taking questions from the audience. The first questioner started out by saying that writer/artist Darwyn Cooke’s new Spirit comic book series for DC “is my first experience of The Spirit.” That surprised me, but on reflection, I realized it shouldn’t have. I read my first Spirit story decades ago, but in recent years The Spirit had only been in print in DC’s hardcover Archives volumes. I would have assigned Spirit stories to attendees of my lectures, but I didn’t want to compel them to buy a fifty dollar book. Last year DC finally published a Best of the Spirit paperback collection, which should be good news for anyone teaching a course in the history of comics.

This new Spirit fan pointed out that the tone of Cooke’s Spirit stories is considerably lighter than that of Miller’s Sin City. DeSanto responded that the “basis of the film is the very early Eisner work.” The story of Sand Saref, he said, provides “the tone” of the movie. It “will have that noir feel.”

The next question was about the “ideal cast” for The Spirit movie. Denis Kitchen repeated the well known information that years ago, when the actor was closer to the right age, Eisner had “wanted James Garner to play the Spirit.” Kitchen said that Eisner had “really no more” casting suggestions “since then.” At another point during the panel we had been told that Miller already has some casting ideas in mind.

Uslan said that the actor who portrays the Spirit “has to be a little scary. . . have a sense of humor. . .be able to win all these femme fatales,” and “take a lot of punishment.”

Adapting the celebrated line of Eisner’s foremost femme fatale, P’Gell, Uslan told us, “I think if Frank was here, he’d say, ‘My name is Frank and this is not a movie for little boys.’”

(I just saw the Sin City movie again recently. Please, Frank, don’t have the Spirit castrate anybody onscreen!)

Moving to a bigger topic, Uslan declared, “I believe we are now in a Golden Age of comic book moviemaking.” He told us he had been in the movie business for thirty years, but in recent years there has been a “sea change” in how Hollywood regards comics.

First, Uslan stated that years ago many people in Hollywood had no respect for comics. But now, he asserted, there were people in positions of power who grew up reading the comics of Stan Lee and DC editor Julie Schwartz.

Second, he continued, people in Hollywood “finally understood” that comic books are not just about superheroes, that the interest in comics “is not [just] a trend,” and that “comics are an ongoing source of great stories and characters.”

Third, Uslan declared, if you “look at successful comics-based movies” and “take out those based on sixty-year-old franchises”– like Batman and Superman, and he should have also mentioned those based on fortysomething -year-old franchises like Spider-Man and X-Men–then you see that they were based on comics that sold only “ten thousand” copies like Men in Black and Road to Perdition. In other words, even obscure comics properties can give rise to successful movies.

Uslan declared that he and his colleagues were producing The Spirit movie “independently.” This, it seems, gives them the creative freedom to be faithful to the source material. He continued, “So we’ll never ignore sixty years of the history of a character just to create something out of whole cloth.” Uslan maintained, “We get to respect the creators, the characters, and the material.” Would that every producer of a comics-based movie would take that pledge and mean it!

Uslan then mentioned one other important new “element” in making comic book-based movies: “the technology,” meaning CGI, which he said now allows moviemakers to do the Silver Surfer and Green Lantern onscreen. “This also makes this the Golden Age of comic book movies,” he concluded.

Uslan then said his “guess” was that The Spirit movie would go into production before Sin City 2. “We’re moving like lightning. We really are.” (On the other hand, Frank Miller subsequently announced that he and Sin City 2 co-director Robert Rodriguez “intend to go into prep sometime in the next six weeks, and we’re hoping on shooting by June.”

Then Uslan did something one doesn’t often hear from a movie producer: with obvious heartfelt sincerity, he voiced his sheer happiness in realizing his boyhood dream he had as One of Us. “I am so lucky in life,” he told us. “I’m working with what I loved since I was three years old,” meaning comics, and on his “favorite characters.” Moreover, he continued, he got to work with “geniuses” like Frank Miller, Sam Raimi (director of the Spider-Man movies), and Chris Nolan (director of Batman Begins).

Raimi? The person I missed seeing last summer in San Diego? What’s this about?

But first the panelists answered another question as to whether a familiar member of Eisner’s Spirit cast would turn up in the movie: the Spirit’s young African-American sidekick Ebony, who notoriously looks and speaks like a racist stereotype, something even Eisner acknowledged in his introduction to his last graphic novel, Fagin the Jew (see “Comics in Context” #25).

“No Ebony,” declared DeSanto. Uslan added that “It was Frank’s choice,” repeating Miller’s line that “Creatively everyone has a bad day. That was Will’s bad day.”

Uslan went on that he believed Miller’s main reason for not using Ebony “was less about the controversial nature of the character than it was the story doesn’t lend itself to a little kid being involved in the action.” Miller, he said, had created “too dark and violent and adult [a] world” to be “endangering a child.” (But what about the boy Dick Grayson in Miller’s All-Star Batman and Robin? Well, I suppose Grayson is already a trained athlete, whereas Eisner’s Ebony is not.)

Yet another fan in the question-and-answer line revealed that he had been introduced to The Spirit through Darwyn Cooke’s new comic, and that he was “not very acquainted with Eisner’s Spirit.” I wonder just how many readers are like this. It’s a good thing that DC is finally publishing Spirit stories, new and old, in easily affordable formats. This is when Uslan recommended that he “check out” some of the Octopus stories as preparation for seeing the movie.

The next question was whether The Spirit movie will get “a hard R [rating] like Sin City.” Uslan said “I can’t say” but “guesses” it will get “a hard PG-13.” (I guess that means no onscreen castration, thank God.) Here Uslan made the point that Miller “knows it’s Eisner’s stuff, so Eisner’s sense of humor is going to be there.”

I hope so. With all of the panel’s emphasis on how The Spirit movie will be dark and frightening, and devoid of “whimsy,” and with the examples of the Sin City and 300 movies to consider, and even All-Star Batman and Robin (see “Comics in Context” #119, which was titled “Bats and Spats” before IGN changed it), I worry that Miller’s interpretation of The Spirit will be too one-sided, emphasizing the dark film noir aspect of Eisner’s creation but omitting its humor, essential optimism, and humane, ah, spirit.

The panel drew to a close with news about subjects other than The Spirit movie. For example, Denis Kitchen assured us that “Virtually everything Will did will be back in print if it isn’t already” from a number of different publishers.

Uslan told the audience that he was “making great progress” with developing a Shazam movie, about the original Captain Marvel, at New Line Cinema, where, he said, “everybody gets it.” Not only did Uslan know Otto Binder, the Captain’s principal writer in the Golden Age, but he also had a “correspondence as a kid with C. C. Beck,” the artist who co-created the character.

Uslan reminded us that the “first gig I got writing comic books” was on The Shadow for DC. “I knew Walter Gibson,” the principal author of The Shadow pulp novels, Uslan told us, and “talked with him at length.” (Obviously knowing Michael Uslan would do wonders in playing a game of Six Degrees of Separation!) Now Uslan is developing a Shadow movie that Sam Raimi will direct. (Aha!) The “story’s been cracked,” Uslan reported, adding that they had found its “tone.” Interestingly, Uslan would not answer whether the movie is set in the 1930s or the 1940s, when the Shadow pulp novels and radio series were originally done. (It’s also interesting that another Shadow movie is in the works so soon after the 1994 version bombed. Could it be that Raimi and Uslan are changing the time period to make their film different from the last one?)

Finally, Uslan announced that the Montclair Art Museum, in Montclair, New Jersey, would be holding an exhibit on superhero comics that will open on July 14. Indeed, there was a full-page ad for the show, “Reflecting Culture: The Evolution of American Comic Book Superheroes,” on page 11 of the New York Comic-Con program book.

Uslan emphasized that the Montclair museum show would be an exhibit of “comic book art.” I interpreted this as a possible veiled reference to the “Masters of American Comics” museum exhibition, half of which showcased comic strip artwork (see “Comics in Context” #151-156).

Uslan said that he is “really involved” in the Montclair show. Indeed, according to an interview with Uslan in the Asbury Park Press, it will draw from his own collection of comic books and original comics art.

Uslan stated that the Montclair show will examine superhero comics “from three points of view”: First, that “comic books are a true American artform,” second, that comic books present a “modern mythology,” with superheroes as contemporary counterparts of the gods, and third, that comic books reflect changes in American culture.

Uslan also stressed that Montclair was only a “half-hour train ride” from Manhattan. You may recall that one reason that Art Spiegelman pulled his artwork out of the New York area version of “Masters” was that he disapproved of the fact that the show was divided between the Jewish Museum in Manhattan and the Newark Museum in New Jersey. As he pointed out, it is exceedingly difficult to persuade New Yorkers to trek out to the wilds of New Jersey, and my long, complicated trip out to the Newark Museum and back demonstrated why.

Well, good luck to the Montclair Art Museum in attracting visitors from Manhattan. Luckily, I’ve got a friend who lives near Montclair and is willing to put me up overnight, so I will be reporting on this show after it opens.

SATURDAY FEB. 24, 4 PM

Although I was told that the New York Comic-Con cleared each meeting room following each panel, this is not actually true, and I kept my seat in Room 1E12/13 after The Spirit movie panel in order to see the next event in the same room: “NYCC’s Behind the Panels: The 60s Marvel Bullpen.”

Unlike at the San Diego Con, with its mammoth crowds, it is easier to encounter friends and acquaintances at the New York Comic-Con. So it was that while I was sitting in Room 1E12/13 I got to chat with Tom McLean, who writes the “Bags and Boards” blog on comics for Variety and my old friend Scott Lobdell, one of Marvel’s most prolific writers of the 1990s, who asked me to assure my readers that he was “still alive.”

This panel was supposed to start at four, but it didn’t commence at 4, or 4:05 or even 4:10 PM. It’s not that no one had told the panelists to show up, as with my panel earlier in the day. There, over to the right of the meeting room, Jerry Robinson was clapping Stan Lee on the shoulder. And then I saw Stan Lee talking with “Fabulous” Flo Steinberg, his legendary secretary from the 1960s, and bussing her on the cheek.

Flo was here!? Very friendly but also very modest by nature, Flo always downplays the importance of her role at Marvel during its Silver Age, almost ever gives interviews, and never accepts invitations to be a guest at comics conventions. For her to show up here is highly unusual. Could it be that she’s on the panel, too?

It was now 4:15 PM and the panel still hasn’t started. And in the present, I’ve run out of space for this week’s column. You’ll have to wait till next time to learn about the onstage reunion of Stan, Flo, and the great Silver Age artists Gene Colan and Joe Sinnott.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

Editor Ken Plume has advised me that he’s finally making progress in transferring the columns that I did for IGN over to the “Comics in Context” archive page here at Quick Stop. There’s also a new, simpler way to access my archive page: just go to asitecalledfred.com/comicsincontext/.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

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