The Stop Button

The splash page has Spirit with Ellen over his knee, giving her a spanking for some reason. That reason? Only the Spirit knows.

Anyway.

The strip itself has Ellen luring the Spirit up to her college so she can make him take her to prom. She’s told all her friends she can do it and just needs a cadaver from the medical school to make it work. One panicked call to Daddy (Commissioner Dolan) and Spirit and Ebony are winging their way in the autoplane.

We’ll also get some nice, gentle teasing about Ellen from Ebony, who knows the Spirit likes her attentions and troubles more than he’s letting on. It’s another of those incongruities with Ebony; he’s the Spirit’s only confidant (Dolan knows his origin and home address, but little else), a faithful, determined sidekick, and yet visualized as racist caricature.

Ebony will have a particularly good strip, since he’s the one who discovers the actual murder. It just so happens one of the college professors will end up dead as Spirit’s investigating Ellen’s fake murder. She does try to get him to ignore the corpse and take her to the prom, but Spirit’s all business.

The strip is a mix of gentle, pointed, funny, and dangerous, which seems like a perfect Spirit combo. Except then the art’s a bit of a mess. There’s some outstanding composition, both for the slapstick action (chase and fisticuffs) and the expository long shot panels, but the detail is some of the worst in ages. It’s thin, fine lines, then dotty inks on everyone’s face. It feels like a new Spirit but with the earliest style trappings.

Almost all of the strip plays for laughs; even when you think it’s going to be a danger moment, it resolves as a comedy one. So, despite the uneven art and the (more gentle than usual) sexism, the strip’s another perfectly solid entry. If only Ellen could come along as a character a little more. Or, at least, not lose her gains between strips.