By supertextual I was grasping for a word to mean the opposite of subtext and could think of nothing other than "explicit" which certainly conjures up the wrong image. I think.

I realise now, the word CANONICAL would have done just fine.

::smacks self lightly on brain::

Sheesh, Neil Gaiman's tribute to Will Eisner got me choked up.

***************

Tuesday, January 04, 2005
Will Eisner, 1917-2005
posted by Neil Gaiman 1/4/2005 10:12:11 AM

I interviewed my friend Will Eisner a few year ago, at the Chicago Humanities Festival. At one point I asked him why he kept going, why he kept making comics when his contemporaries (and his contemporaries were people like Bob Kane -- before he did Batman -- remember) had long ago retired and stopped making art and telling stories, and gone.

He told me about a film he had seen once, in which a jazz musician kept playing because he was still in search of The Note. That it was out there somewhere, and he kept going to reach it. And that was why Will kept going: in the hopes that he'd one day do something that satisfied him. He was still looking for The Note...

Will Eisner was better than any of us, and he kept working in the hope that one day he'd get it right.

I was woken up this morning, with the news that Will had died last night, aged 87, and I've let a few friends know, and already had to speak to one journalist about who Will was and what he did ("It's as if Orson Welles had made Citizen Kane and redefined what you could do in film, and then carried on making movies until now," I said, wishing I could come up with a better analogy, and knowing that that didn't explain it. And I didn't mention how proud he was of any of us who did good comics -- how much he cared about the medium -- or how glad I am that I got to tell him that I wouldn't have written comics if it wasn't for him. There's a reason that the Oscars of comics are the Eisner Awards.)

I'm suddenly very grateful for the time I've had with Will over the years, in England and Germany and Spain and the US, for the times that I went over to see him and Ann when I was in the Fort Lauderdale area. I'm glad I was there in Erlangen, when they gave Will an award and the place erupted into a standing ovation that went on and on until I thought that the walls would collapse and the Millenium come and we'd still be in that theatre cheering and clapping, with Will beaming down at us from the stage.

I'm going to miss him enormously, more than I can say. I made a speech last year, where I said how strange it was to discover that the gods of comics, the people who made the medium, were, when I met them, cranky old Jews. Will Eisner wasn't cranky, and he was never old. He was, in all ways, a mensch.

And I keep weighing it in my head, the sorrow at losing Will with the knowledge of how fortunate I was to have known him ("you're always sorry, you're always grateful," as Sondheim said about something quite different).

I'm more grateful than sorry.

In the characters' first appearance they were naked together in their warehouse lair. And used, shall we say, an unconventional posture for the flighted member of the duo to carry the non-flighted one. I suppose some people saw it as subtextual, but I didn't think much doubt was left for that kiss in the second Authority story arc to dispel.

The Ellis issues are worth reading. The stuff after, not so much. I'm liking Ed Brubaker's work thus far on The Authority: Revolutions.

I'll second Shrift on this.

When I first started googling, I found this page, which says " Some suggest that Apollo is homosexual but, I must admit, I have never seen anything conclusive in that respect."

I figured that merited further investigation.

Denial has a characteristic smell.

"Some suggest that Apollo is homosexual but, I must admit, I have never seen anything conclusive in that respect."

Wow. That's got to be REALLY old. They've been so terribly, terribly out since, like, the first few issues of the Authority, and glaringly barely-subtext before that. I mean, the first time we see them they wake up naked together on the floor of the place they've been hiding from Henry Bendix. And of course, as mentioned, they are now married.

Otherwise, I've been reading Auhority in Graphic Novel form, and have really enjoyed it, but it gets a little less enjoyable each time, and think I skipped the last one.

There's a time-check in the Jenny Sparks bio that lists her as 96 years old, so it's pretty far out of date. Like, pre-series-debut out of date.

Oh, god. Sad now.

What an Eisner woman looks like

Yowza! Red hot

The Women of The Spirit (at the spiff Wildwood Cemetary Spirit database).

Check this entry:

Silk Satin (nee Sylvia Satin aka Black Satin) was the next recurring woman character who entered The Spirit's life, and probably the only serious competition to Ellen for the Spirit's affections. She first appeared in March 16, 1941 leading a gang of jewel thieves. She had a penchant for wearing suits and wearing her hair short, and was introduced to the reader when she strode into a room demanding a clean razor and hot water to pluck a bullet from her arm. She captures the Spirit but refrains from killing him, and later frees him to betray her gang... driving their getaway car off a bridge, but escaped from drowning herself in a manner reminiscent of the first Catwoman story.

As time went on, Satin revealed herself to be one of the least static characters in the series. Unlike her feline counterpart, she eventually reformed and aided the war effort working as a spy for the British government, and later the United Nations; after a period of meritorious service her criminal record was destroyed. She eventually moved to Scotland and worked as an investigator for the insurance company Croyd's of Glasgow. She frequently fought alongside the Spirit, assisting him and oftimes competing with him to solve a case. The dynamics of these shared adventures are like few others in comics, as the two frequently attempt to gain the upper hand by the end of the adventure, and the reader would often never know until the final pages who had come out on top ... and it was Satin as often as not. Of all the women of the series she was most like The Spirit, and the two shared many tender moments.