Q. When is a Main Character Not a Main Character?

A. When the creators are nervous about working with icons.

Of course, who am I to talk? No one has ever plopped a legendary character in my lap and said, "go for it." From a young age, however, I have been crafting my own stories with characters that hold iconic status the world over. Whether it was with action figures in hand, on my mother's old typewriter, or in script programs on a Macbook, I have always tried to understand the unique nature of characters that pass from creator to creator. As I've studied this in practice, a certain "tell" has become noticeable. Many creators, even big, bankable names, have been known to take on classic characters in eponymous books and tell stories that focus on anything but the classic character.

A good perennial example of this is the Vertigo title Hellblazer. The long-running book was first written by Jamie Delano and is now a consistent low-seller, but the book hasn't neared cancellation because it's a good venue to test out new writers at such a small imprint. While the main character may be John Constantine (no resemblance to the awful movie iteration), he is often little more than a lens into whatever fantastic situations or antagonists writers come up with. John Constantine, instead of being a long-established character, is really a cipher.

But enough of 'ole John. Denny Colt has his fair share of time out of the spotlight to deal with. Let us look at the sixth issue of Darwyn Cooke's run, in which the Spirit appears in only a few pages as he listens to the story that he largely missed. I enjoyed the issue, and I felt that the writing and the art were both strong, but there was nothing dictating that it be a Spirit story. Any detective or good-doer could have been substituted in with no ill effect.

Looking at Cooke's collaboration with Jeph Loeb, (in)famously hot and cold writer, we can see a similar, but not identical case unfolding. In this Eisner-award winning one-shot, which sparked enough interest to garner a Spirit ongoing written and drawn by Cooke, Loeb plays heavily on the similarities between the Batman and the Spirit to create a feasible (in comic book sense) reason for the characters to meet. As Batman and the Spirit both have close connections to police commissioners and colorful rogues galleries, the story centers around a grand team-up of the rogues to crash a police ball that brings the crime-busting forces of Gotham and Central City to one place. Though it is an oversized issue, Loeb spends the majority of the time fleshing out the characters of Commissioners Gordon and Dolan and planting the seeds of deception and seduction with Catwoman (a character that Cooke helped to redesign and reinvent) and P'gell (one of the many sultry women to cross the Spirit's path). Batman is nearly wordless throughout much of his appearance (as is completely in character) and the Spirit doesn't have much of a character at all, beyond being a bit less intelligent and a bit more eager than Bats. Cooke's art, complemented by the inkwork of J. Bone and the colors of Dave Stewart, harkens back to the period from which the Spirit emerged without being drenched in noir trappings. The story is fun and no gross mischaracterization is perpetuated, but at the end of the day, the titular characters are secondary to the supporting cast.

Loeb is always either a whiz at cutting right to the core of characters (see: Batman: The Long Halloween, Superman: For All Seasons, the "color" books) or a fiend for taking a massive dump on any previous characterization at the extreme disservice of the finished product (see: anything under the Ultimate banner, the first 12 or so issues of Hulk). Here he walks a fine line between servicing the legacy and actually adding to the mythos. Is that all we can hope for? Even Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, when they tackled the character for a series published by Kitchen Sink Press entitled The Spirit: New Adventures, wrote the hell out of every character except for the damn Spirit! Moore's contribution, drawn by his Watchmen collaborator Dave Gibbons, retells the Spirit's origin -- by telling the origin of three ancillary characters involved. Gaiman's focuses on a sadsack writer who happens to accidentally help the Spirit out on a case. Both stories are beautifully written, feature wonderful art and some of the most inventive titles I have ever seen (Gibbons spells using breakfast items), but they were little more than love notes that were afraid to sully what came before by adding something readers might not agree with. While Will Eisner classically used the character as a vessel to tell stories about many colorful secondary characters with some very poignant notes, he did so without sacrificing actual characterization of the hero. The only other real attempt I have seen at deepening Denny is Frank Miller's movie, and nothing about that could be deemed a success (notice how I never say anything nice about comic book movies?).

As the Spirit prepares to be reintroduced by Brian Azzerello and Rags Morales in the pages of DC's New Wave, he'll also receive his own title written by Prince Valiant news strip scripter Mark Shultz. That (admittedly underwhelming) news, however, was dulled when Shultz spoke to Jeff Renaud at CBR and let it be known that he would depart the title after only three issues, citing too much on his plate. Is he also concerned about the weight of writing such a renowned character? Possibly not, as he made it known that the trademark humor of the series would take a backseat to darker tales featuring the character, a sign that comic fans have learned to fear. Then again, I have to wonder how many fans the Spirit even has. With half a century since his debut, long periods out of the limelight, whole generations of fans that know nothing about him, an awful movie adaptation, several false starts, and a seeming lack of characterization, what fan base is the Spirit holding onto, and how long will it last?