Darwyn Cooke’s Neat The Spirit Trick

Darwyn Cooke’s 12 issues of “The Spirit” live in my mind as some of the finest comics of their time. The stories are clever, packed full of character, and drawn in an interesting and creative way. It’s what comics should be — a great combination of story and art.

At last, there’s a single volume edition collecting all of the Cooke-drawn issues with Act 4’s “Darwyn Cooke’s The Spirit: Connoisseur Edition.” As I’ve been waiting for my copy of the book to arrive on my doorstep, my excitement has prompted me to start re-reading the series already.

In the very first issue, titled “Ice Ginger Coffee,” Cooke splits a single continuous image up into three virtual panels without breaking the image up with more gutters and panel borders. He’s far from the only artist to have ever done it, but he does it in fun ways that I want to talk about.

The First Triptych

It’s Commissioner Dolan letting the officers under his command know what’s going on. Rather than have one big run-on balloon, Cooke breaks it up into three separate balloons. He also does the whole thing in one wide panel with a static foreground and background with Dolan seen three times walking across.

The part that made me smile was how he used the silhouetted foreground figures as the virtual panel breaks. They don’t go all the way to the top of the panel to cut it cleanly apart, but the commissioner is short enough that those figures are over his head, so it looks and feels like he’s trapped between them, confined in separate virtual panels.

Notice, also, the lack of background details at the top of the panel, where all your eye is meant to see is the word balloons. There’s a nice texture to the blue color up there from Dave Stewart to give it some grit and feel, but that’s it. Your memory may later tell you that there was a background, but nope. That’s just a coloring detail. It starts brighter near the characters and gets darker as you push out to the panel borders. It gives off something almost like a vignette effect.

With the third instance of the commissioner in this panel, our reading order suddenly reverses direction. In the first two panels, he’s leaning forward and projecting out his orders. At the end, he’s pulling up and coming to an abrupt stop, his left foot hanging in mid-air like something just caught him short. Sure enough, something did. It isn’t the panel border on the right side, though it might look that way at first glance. It’s the dissenting officer’s word balloon at the bottom of the panel that stops him.

Jared K. Fletcher’s word balloon positioning here is a smart choice, though that might not be obvious at first glance. Given how the eye is so easily gliding across the top of the entire panel, you’d think it’d make sense to move Dolan’s balloon a bit to the left and fit that other balloon right next to it, up into the corner of the panel, if need be.

From a lettering point of view, that would entail crossing balloon tails, and nobody wants that.

It wouldn’t look right for other reasons, though. I think a fast reader wouldn’t realize that it wasn’t Dolan talking in that balloon at that point. The eye glides so easily that it’s hard to stop and see where you are. Placing it at the bottom of the panel makes sense to break it up and force you to follow the new balloon tail to its source.

The eye should naturally find that last balloon, even though it’s suddenly both below the previous balloon AND to the left of it. There it covers mostly a silhouetted officer, so you’re not losing much art. Being slightly to the left, it breaks the flow of the reading of the panel much the same way that the content of it breaks Dolan’s flow. The lettering follows the storytelling in the art, emphasizing the same reading experience in letters as the artwork.

There’s never any doubt as to what order to read the balloons in, and the positioning of that final balloon serves the story moment well.

I don’t know if Cooke suggested that placement or if Fletcher handled it himself, but well done in either case.

The Second Triptych

Cooke uses the same trick here, but in a different way.

Once again, Dolan is crossing from left to right in a single panel, taking control of the situation and addressing the officers on scene. He pulls this one off without any silhouetted foreground characters to break the panels.

The panels are separated by two things: word balloons and distance.

Dolan has three word balloons in this panel and three interactions. The first is with the plain clothes detective (I’m guessing at the rank here), the second is with the same detective, who is now “off -panel,” and the third with an officer who is just barely on panel next to him.

You can easily see where the three gutters would go if this were separated into three panels, and I think two visual things are happening here to make that work.

First, the word balloons over Dolan’s head separate out each moment. The two balloons that are tied together from the officer in the truck form a divide to separate the second and third moment. Those might have worked slightly better if they were slightly higher in the panel and a bit more to the right to better isolate the third moment, but that would also have meant the reader’s eye would have an uncomfortable bump up between Dolan’s second and third balloon.

Second, Dolan’s distance from the reader and his interactions with characters at each level help to define the moments. HIs head is basically at the same height across the panel, but he gets smaller as he gets further away. It’s classic perspective work.

Dolan starts up in the foreground, looking left to the right, but the second two panels have him turned around, speaking over his right shoulder to the left of the panel as he walks further away. So you get that left to right natural movement combined with the opposite direction look that adds a certain tension to the panel. You pay attention more.

As a bonus, the third Dolan looking back saves Cooke from the awkwardness of Dolan looking in the other direction at the brick wall of a panel border.

In effect, you get a panning effect, following Dolan as he walks through a hectic scene. You get the firefighters in the background and the communications van with its doors wide open so the viewer can see everything that’s going on. It’s almost an establishing shot all on its own. You also get a bit of that feeling of a tracking shot like you might see in a television show or movie. It’s a walk-and-talk moment that doesn’t get broken up artificially by the parts of the comics form that are panel borders.

Cooke’s Expert Eye

It shouldn’t be any surprise that these two panels work as well as they do. They channel the creative energy of Will Eisner’s storytelling and pair it nicely with Cooke’s eye for layout and design. This book is filled with panels that work on multiple levels to guide your eyes, often in ways that you don’t even notice at first.

Check out this sequence from the bottom of the same page:

Look at how things line up as you read across the page. You follow Spirit’s eye line up and to the right into the second panel where the same angle continues across the arms of Spirit and Ginger Coffee. That all leads your eye right into the muzzle of a gun against the left border in the third panel. And, again, Cooke reverses direction from the left-to-right movement to the third panel with the shooter firing right-to-left. The flow of movement ends quickly and definitively.

It’s also the last panel of the page, which piques the reader’s curiosity to turn the page to see what happens. Did the shot land? Did Spirit and Ginger find cover? Did the other police officer get shot? (Spoiler alert: It’s the last one.)

One nit-pick: The reader’s eye line trick would have worked even better had the gun been about 20% higher up in the panel. But Jared K. Fletcher saves the day with the perfectly placed “BAM” sound effect. That’s in the perfect spot.

The entire series is filled with tricks like this. Cooke’s eye for composing individual panels to guide your eye through them, as well as sequences of panels to expertly craft a story, is truly stunning. The Spirit deserves a closer look.

No, I’m not about to start Page by Page by Cooke, as tempting as it might be. I still have 30 pages to go with Asterix, thanks.

In the meantime, check out Act 4’s Darwyn Cooke’s The Complete Spirit Connoisseur Edition hardcover, available everywhere now. It sure looks pretty. (That’s an Amazon Affiliate link. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Do as you wish.)