A number of announcements regarding the late Will Eisner's The Spirit came out of the recent San Diego Comic-Con and provide plenty of hope that Eisner's cemetery-dwelling detective will mount a strong comeback in the coming months.  The long-gestating Spirit feature film appears to finally be on track.  Michael Uslan is shepherding the project along and top flight comic scribe Jeph Loeb is penning the screenplay.  Best of all Oddlot Entertainment, which is backed by the considerable fortunes of the Pritzker family, is self-financing (and distributing) the project, which should mean that it won't have to run the usual gauntlet of Hollywood producers only to end up in development hell.

Jeph Loeb is also writing a Batman/The Spirit one-shot, which is due out in December with art by Darwyn Cooke.  Young fans who get a taste of The Spirit from the Batman crossover will be able to check out the classic Eisner originals in an affordably priced The Best of the Spirit trade paperback due out in Q4 with an introduction by Neil Gaiman. 

In 2006 DC plans to follow up by releasing a brand new monthly Spirit comic book series, written and drawn by Darwyn Cooke.  An excellent artist, Cooke displayed his writing talent in DC's New Frontier and he plans to put The Spirit in a contemporary setting in the new monthly series.   While The Spirit may seem to be forever wedded to the shadowy film noir-influenced zeitgeist of the 1940s, Denis Kitchen, Will Eisner's literary agent, is not worried by the treatment that Denny Colt may receive at the hands of DC.  Kitchen told ICv2 that working with the various creative teams at DC was 'a real pleasure,' and that Eisner's classic creation was being treated 'with great respect and enthusiasm' at DC.