SPIRITUAL LEGACY

This isn't a direct follow-up to my last post, but rather another segue to a question posed on a couple of messageboards:

Did Miller's mishandling of the SPIRIT property ruin a golden opportunity for comics-outsiders to find some appreciation for the Eisner SPIRIT comics?

The short answer: no.

The long answer: It's been almost a full twenty years since Tim Burton succeeded in making the BATMAN franchise marketable as entertainment for adult filmgoers. (Yes, he stood on the shoulders of giants and all that, but his success does mark a paradigm shift.) Arguably this adaptation may have helped some outsiders to the comics-medium appreciate the kinetic and visceral appeal of the Batman character, and view comics as possessing some merit beyond whatever merit was appropriate to simple kidstuff.

But aside from the origin-story of the Batman-- liberally used in the '89 film-- what do modern outsiders know about the corpus of outstanding Batman-stories, after these twenty years? After four films either by Burton or influenced by him, and two by Nolan-- not to mention a couple of animated TV serials-- what does John Q. Public know about the specific texts of the Batman corpus? Of "Robin Dies at Dawn," of the Englehart-Rogers run, of "Hush?"

Not a thing.

And I don't care if Miller or anyone else had somehow succeeded in making a successful SPIRIT film for 21st-century audiences; the same fate would have befallen the whole corpus of Eisner's 60+ year-old stories, as well as any recent renditions of the character.

Years ago (going on memory), Neil Gaiman wrote an essay in which he wondered whether or not the storytelling language of comic books was literally hard for "comics-outsiders" to take in. I don't believe that the language itself is difficult, but that within this culture of the United States, most audiences simply don't have any motivation to make the effort beyond whatever they may've read as kids. In contrast, in the US one may be a good or bad reader of film's storytelling strategies, but a cultural consensus exists here that It Is Important to Know That Language (or at least bits and pieces of it). No such consensus exists for comic books, and without such a consensus the closest "honoring of the canon" we're likely to see will be in Sunday-supplement articles, in which a journalist has cobbled together, purely for his article, a basic summary of Significant Moments in the Batman Oeuvre.

Nor do I think the situation is any better for artcomics. A few comics-outsiders may be more comfortable buying DAVID BORING rather than BATMAN, but I get no sense that the canon of Clowes has become a cynosure either, even within the more circumscribed realm of the High Art Crowd.

Years ago Dave Sim advised fans as a whole (by which I think he meant both mainstream and artcomics fans, though I'm not sure) to stop waiting for that bolt from the blue that would legitimize comic books in the eyes of the outsiders. I agree that the bolt is never going to come, and would add that even whatever legimitacy has come to the medium in recent years has been slow and steady, like Aesop's turtle.

But one bad movie won't significantly help or hurt that progress. And even if the SPIRIT had been a great film, I think the legacy of Eisner would remain confined to those of us who have already gone apeshit about the medium's multifarous forms.