Finally for this week, DC takes the surprising decision to relaunch Will Eisner's Spirit in a new ongoing title, this time by Darwyn Cooke.

As pretty much everyone knows, Eisner's work on The Spirit is almost universally regarded as vastly important and hugely influential, featuring groundbreaking new techniques and demonstrating potential in the medium that most people hadn't even thought to look for.  Even so, there have been very few efforts to revive The Spirit. 

In part, that may be due to rights problems.  But there's another, more obvious explanation: the Spirit isn't an obvious candidate for revival.  Frankly, he's a fairly generic detective hero, who wears a domino mask as a polite concession to the requirements of Eisner's editor.  He worked precisely because he was a stock hero figure who served as a lynchpin for Eisner's stories.  But in himself, he isn't desperately memorable.  The strength of The Spirit lay in the way Eisner told his stories, rather than the bare concept.

This means that there's not a great deal of point in just taking the concept and doing it in a modern style, but by the same token, any creator who takes on the challenge of trying to emulate Eisner's style is setting themselves an insanely difficult challenge.  Eisner was one of the greatest talents in the history of the medium, after all.

Darwyn Cooke has opted for a relatively straight take on the Spirit, brought forward into the modern day but played in a sort of retro, timeless fashion.  There's 24-hour news coverage and cellphones, but the Spirit is still a man in a fedora, with a cover logo promising "Action - mystery - adventure."  The story sees the Spirit racing to the aid of investigative journalist Ginger Coffee (no, really) after she's abducted on air.  She turns out to be an intensely irritating 24/7 journalist, who talks in news-speak almost non-stop - to the Spirit's undisguised annoyance.

You couldn't say it was groundbreaking - only the symbolic double-page spread for the credits really leaps out as innovative.  But Cooke is an extremely talented storyteller in his own right, who has the courage to sell the book on the strength of a straight story, well constructed and well told, instead of trying to be edgy or self-consciously innovative.  Whether this solid, traditional approach is going to find an audience in this day and age is another matter.  Still, it's a pleasure to read a story by somebody who's willing to do a classic style well, instead of trying to chase fashion.

Whether the Spirit is necessarily the best vehicle for this, I'm not altogether sure.  But then, I'm not altogether sure that the Spirit is the best vehicle for anyone, other than Will Eisner himself.  Still, there's a ton to admire in this issue in its own right, if you can view it independently of Eisner's shadow.

Rating: A-

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