From February through April, DC's The Spirit series will have a guest writing team: Michael Uslan and F.J. DeSanto, the producers of the Frank Miller-directed Spirit movie that's opening this month. Uslan hasn't written many comics since he became the producer of the Batman movies (aside from the Batman graphic novel Detective No. 27 a few years ago), but he wrote stories for The Shadow, Beowulf, Detective Comics and other series back in the early '70s, when, as he put it at a recent interview in New York, "I was a Junior Woodchuck at DC Comics. They didn't have the term 'intern' then, but it was me and that skinny kid--what was his name?--Paul... Levitz! Levitz! I don't know what happened to him, but he was a Woodchuck too."

The difficulty with creating new Spirit comics, DeSanto noted, is that the character is so closely identified with Eisner: "It's not like Batman, where you have 70 years of Batman stories by so many different creators that you can do The Dark Knight or you can do the Brave and the Bold cartoon--it's Eisner, and that's it." So, before they started writing, he and Uslan made a list of elements of Eisner's work they had to incorporate into every Spirit story.

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Will Eisner's classic comics character makes the leap to the screen in this spectacular new live-action movie written and directed by Frank Miller (Sin City, 300), and starring Gabriel Macht as The Spirit, Samuel L. Jackson as his psychotic arch-nemesis The Octopus, and Eva Mendes and Scarlett Johansson as alluring femmes fatale.

In Central City, one man fights crime using nothing but his wits and his fists. He wears a mask, a suit and a fedora, and he is known only as The Spirit...

This stunning volume contains interviews with the cast and the crew, color photos & production art, and Frank Miller sketches and storyboards. The Spirit: The Movie Visual Companion, published by Titan Books, also features loads of Will Eisner sketches and art that inspired the new movie.

Buy The Spirit: The Movie Visual Companion

Please note: The movie release date on the widget is the UK release date for Will Eisner's The Spirit.

The Post and Courier's Bill Thompson takes a look at the life and career of Will Eisner:

"Will was still very productive near the end of his life," says Carl Gropper, archivist of Will Eisner Studios, Inc., in New Jersey. "I suspect that now that the new movie based on his work is coming out, there will be quite a bit of additional interest in his remarkable career."

An adaptation of Eisner's most famous work, "The Spirit," comes to the big screen Christmas Day.

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In a guest essay for Hero Complex, Steven Paul Leiva talks about the film version of The Spirit that could have been...

Frank Miller's film version of Will Eisner's innovative 1940s comic book, "The Spirit" opens on Christmas Day. It will be stylistic and hyper-visual, a hoped-for perfect melding of film and "sequential art," a term coined by Eisner. What it will not be, however, is revolutionary. Comic book movies are now the meat and potatoes -- not to mention several side vegetables -- of Hollywood. And even its green screen, scene-simulation style is just part of a Miller continuum that started with "Sin City."

But if the world had turned a little differently, if fate had been a little kinder, a "Spirit" feature film would have debuted in the 1980s that would not only have been revolutionary but -- those of us involved in it were convinced -- a huge hit, possibly the first $100 million-grossing animated feature. And the futures of such filmmakers as Brad Bird, Gary Kurtz, John Musker and John Lasseter might have taken alternative paths.

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Eisner Awards Now Accepting Submissions for 2009

SAN DIEGO - Comic-Con International, the largest comic book and popular arts event in the United States, announced today that submissions are now being accepted for consideration by the judges for the 2009 Will Eisner Comics Industry Awards. Publishers wanting to submit entries should send one copy each of the comics or books they wish to nominate and include a cover letter indicating what is being submitted and in what categories. There are no entry fees for any submissions.

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