Nina Miller from Factual Opinion takes a 'virgin' look at Darwyn Cooke's The Spirit by picking up issue twelve of the current series:
"He's gone. From what I gather, I've got until twelve thirty to find two killers with a deadly virus. One of the people is a Doctor I've never heard of. The other is the first woman I ever really loved."That's the hook--omigod. With Dick Tracy-esque shadows on the first page and the above quote occurring in the last panel, I got all ready to have the voice of The Shadow, from old radio shows in my head. (I was so excited, no sarcasm.) So I turned the page, and the whole Shadow thing didn't really work. Turns out the comic had it's own cadence and sentence structure. It didn't matter. I was hooked by the masked mystery man. What a great story! Essentially, the "first woman" was Sand, the next door neighbor turned girl from the wrong side of the tracks, and the story is her tumultuous relationship with our masked man, Denny Colt. It's all mixed in with crime, revenge, sabotage, betrayal, mystery, and love. I was simultaneously lured to keep reading by both the past relationship between them and by the current storyline's "evil at hand." Aside from the storyline keeping me captivated from start to finish, the art is really cinematic, with the flashbacks occurring in hushed yellow/grey tones and the current story in full color or, my favorite, all those dark colors of mystery.