Overall, the collection falls a little flat with me.  The stories are okay, but not great, in my opinion.  Certainly, if I had picked these up as comic book issues, I would have been happy enough, I guess.  On the other hand, one reason I stopped buying monthlies was that I was tired of merely okay story lines, and hoped that graphic novels would collect the better ones for me.

The book is interesting in that it lets you get a glimpse at the work of someone who went on to bigger and better things.  Pick it up at the library, or buy it if you love Brian K. Vaughan.

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Now, I’m at a little disadvantage here, since I’m coming at The Spirit from the point of view of Darwyn Cooke, and not Will Eisner.  So, while I can say that I enjoyed the stories as well as the art, I can’t tell you whether or not you will enjoy them as a fan of the original Spirit.  Obviously, I have some reading to do, if only so I can sort that out for myself :)

As I said, I enjoyed the stories.  They are set in Central City, a town which seems to be stuck in an interesting combination of 1955 and 2005.  There are villains with outdated cybernetics consisting of “600K of UNIX space in [their] head.”  People carry normal, pocket-sized cell phones.  The Minutemen patrol the American side of the US-Mexico border.

But the retro craze has hit hard here.  The Spirit isn’t the only one wearing a trench coat and a fedora.  The women tend to look like pin-up girls, complete with wasp-waist and pointy bras.  People write with a really nice brush script.  Of course, this plays into Cooke’s talents as an artist, but it also helps to frame the pulp origins of The Spirit in the modern stories.

The stories are humourous, a little sexy, a little adventurous.  The most interesting part, to me, is how little The Spirit seems to do in them.  It is clear that he is a capable hero, but many of the stories seem to be happening to someone else, with The Spirit showing up to wrap things up.  I am interested to see if this is true to the original Spirit stories, or is something Cooke brought to the title.

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In the future (as now), you can’t live in The City without money, so Spider needs to scare up a job in order to get an apartment and news-feeds so he can write.  He manages to convince an old colleague to hire him to write for his newspaper and starts investigating his first story, The City’s growing transient problem (which is brilliantly not what you think – or is it?).

Transmetropolitan is a fantastic Warren Ellis story – brash, vulgar, anarchic, head-shaking stuff – and Darick Robertson does a great job on the art.  I have come to this party regretfully late (I only picked it up this year) but I am definitely going back to that well for a longer drink.

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