The acclaimed writer gets into the nitty gritty of he and longtime partner Sergio Aragones' take on the Will Eisner icon.
By Kiel Phegley
Posted 4/15/2008
It's one of the most revered and well-remembered comics in the history of the medium, the key creation of an indispensable legend in the field and the first blockbuster comic film of 2009.
But Will Eisner's The Spirit is also the star of a new series of monthly adventure comics courtesy of DC, and the latest creative minds to tackle the task of doing Mr. Eisner justice are co-writers Mark Evanier and Sergio Aragones. Taking up the reigns of The Spirit with issue #14, the pair have—so far—produced two Spirit stories for artist Mike Ploog which serve as an updated homage to the original strip in a different fashion than Darwyn Cooke's relaunch of the property. This week, the writers third issue ships with art from Paul Smith, and so Wizard Universe asked Evanier about his history and future with the character.
Your take on The Spirit has been quite different from that of Darwyn Cooke, and I noticed that the changing of the guard in terms of creative take also came with a change of editors. When the book landed in Joey Cavalari’s hands, did he seek you out to see what your take would be?
EVANIER: Yeah. I don't know the thought process that led to "Let's get Mark and Sergio," but Sergio got a call one day. And Sergio doesn't usually do other people's characters, but you generally don't get asked to do The Spirit either. [Laughs] I'm afraid I don't have a fascinating story about this. Joey just thought we might be the guys to do it, and we said, "Sure." I assume that others had turned it down because I never expect to be anybody's first choice for anything.
Once you had the assignment, what was your background for both of you in terms of when you read the original Eisner strips, and what was your mission statement with the book?
EVANIER: We both read The Spirit for years. Some of us even read it in English, but Sergio was a fan of it down in Mexico. You look at this thing, and you go, "Well, the given is that it has to follow Darwyn's storyline." And Darwyn's was set in the present day, and DC wanted it in the present day. So right there you stop and think, "What would The Spirit be doing if he was in the current era? What would a Spirit story like that be?" And while I was very fond of what Darwyn did, you've got to go back to the original on some of this and read over stuff. Darwyn did us the enormous favor of making it possible for us to not have to follow directly in Eisner's footsteps. There were other people in between there also.
But you go back and say, "Well, what is The Spirit for us?" and Sergio works on instinct with a lot of these things. He wanted to tell light stories. The Spirit does not lend itself to quite as gritty of an interpretation as some deem for comics these days. There's a sense of humor underlying it, which I suspect is the reason Sergio and my names came up in the first place, and you just work from there. One of the great things about doing comics sometimes is that you can just operate on instinct. You can just do things because they feel right at the moment.
Mike Ploog came on as the first artist…
EVANIER: Well, Mike is doing some issues, and Paul Smith is doing some issues, and we have some issues being done by other people at the moment. Ploog was my suggestion, and I just thought when they talked about The Spirit, "Let's get Mike Ploog. He'll do such a fabulous job." And he did. He's not available as constantly as we want. One of the problems you have with this book is that anybody who's good enough to draw The Spirit is too good to be sitting around unemployed at any given moment. So it's difficult to find somebody who can do it every month. So we've got a little team of guys doing it, and I'm hoping that if we keep doing it long enough, somebody'll settle down as a regular guy because I like the same artist every month if possible. But on the other hand, we've got some enormously talented other people who have risen to the occasion quite nicely of doing this book.
So far as you've been scripting your issues, have you known who is going to draw it so you can tailor the scripts a bit?
EVANIER: So far we haven't had that much luxury. When we did the first issue, we did not know who was going to draw it. I think we may have with the second. With the third, we didn't. So that hasn't happened yet. The book is running tight on deadline at the moment, and so we've juggled things around. This is one of those things where you get into in comics sometimes where you have to play catch up as you go along. We're very fortunate that we have such talented people that can adapt to anything, but I would like to tailor the stories more towards individual artists and tailor our work to them more if possible. I'm a big believer that there are a lot of different ways into a comic book. Some of the ways that people know as their chosen way to work only works with certain people.
One of the keystones of this series under Darwyn's watch was this broader story being built through subplots. Are you guys planning on doing more stand alone stories or building bigger arcs?
EVANIER: We're subtly threading in subplots. I don't know how much they'll connect because I'm not sure which order some of these issues will be running in, but the answer is "yes." One of the strengths of Mr. Eisner's Spirit was these wonderful self-contained stories. And Sergio likes self-contained stories. We'd occasionally done continued stories in Groo, but we like them to be self-contained. And when we do them continued, it's always with an eye towards "These four will eventually be a collected edition so they won't feel like a continued story anymore." So we wanted for the stories to feel self-contained because we thought that'd be right and proper for The Spirit. But yes, you can do a longer storyline if you want to, and that's not unfaithful to what Mr. Eisner had. He did tend to develop things over the course of issues.
I did also want to ask you about one other thing. DC announced that you will be contributing to the final issue of Countdown To Mystery as a tribute to Steve Gerber, ending his Dr. Fate story. I know that you and he were very close and had been talking a lot over the past year. This must be a very hard thing to do. When you'd spent time with him of late, had you talked at all about his recent work on the character or his current writing output?
EVANIER: No. Nothing with my conversations with Steve was of any use in this. Steve and I, we'd get together and never discussed what we were writing. The last few times we discussed his health problems and computers. And my weight loss. He was fascinated by that. So no, I had no special interest or insights into what he would have done except knowing Steve and therefore maybe being able to read what he did and perceive a little more about what was on his mind as a writer. I knew Steve for close to 30 years. He was my assistant at Hanna-Barbera for a time when I was working there, and I got him in at Ruby Spears where he did "Plastic Man" and "Thundar." Then I worked for him on "Thundar." We had a long time of recommending each other for jobs over the years. I recommended him for the "Star Wars" newspaper strip which people forgot he wrote for a while.
What we’re doing is —I'd like to think we're not doing the ending of his story. We're doing "endings," and people can decide for themselves if they want to accept any one or none of them as finishing what Steve did. In fact, when Joey first called me and left a message talking about Dr. Fate, I thought, "Oh God! He wants me to write 'The Ending!'" And I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to presume that I could come in and finish Steve's work for him. The ending I did was what seemed to me [to be] the most logical place where he was headed, which of course with Gerber might mean that it's exactly where he wasn't going to go. I didn't want to do that. Then when he said, "We want you to be one of four people to do that" I said, "That's a much, much better idea." It didn’t scare me as much.
It was a very tough thing to do. I had to read over all the material again. I hadn't read past Steve's second or third issue at the time. I had to read up to the issues that had not come out yet and go, "Well, you've got four pages." I'm not sure what Steve could have possibly done with four pages, but that's all I had. I crammed it full of what I thought was a very fast, abrupt ending. I hope people don’t get whiplash because it ends so abruptly.
Do you know who's going to be drawing your four pages?
EVANIER: No, which is another one of those things that doesn't always work well in comics, but I think that's what we had to do here. I think the book was a little behind schedule because of Steve's illness, and I assume they're going to have several different people draw them to make it go faster, but maybe not. Maybe the gentleman who was doing it regularly was going to do it. I'm not sure. Nobody tells me anything.
Well, that's the life of a freelancer, isn't it?
EVANIER: Well, I never ask anything either. [Laughs] It just...you go and take your best shot, and you get delightfully surprised sometimes. Then other times you kind of cringe, and I tell people the other Mark Evanier wrote it. Because it's such a common name. [Laughs]
