Wrath of The Spectre

Writer: Michael Fleisher

Artists: Jim Aparo, Frank Thorne, Ernie Chua, Mike DeCarlo, Pablo Marcos, Russell Carly

Collects: Adventure Comics issues 431-440, Wrath of the Spectre issues 1-4

Published by DC Comics

When I was a kid, my mom used to read me moral stories. Stories that would instill in me a basic sense of right and wrong. Someone (I can’t remember who, at this moment) said something like ‘In this universe, there is a right and a wrong, and that distinction is not difficult to make…lord knows he must have said it long, long ago, for we don’t live in a black and white world anymore – shades of grey prevail all over. I’ve always been interested in The Spectre…actually, scratch that – I’ve always been interested in characters whose basic costume is garish green – Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Poison Ivy, Count Vertigo, Swamp Thing – you get it. And The Spectre was one of them. After a short trade of the (criminally uncollected) Spectre series by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake, I craved…no, make that hungered for more Spectre.

And with this volume, I got that, and a lot of other things, including the moral stories I write about above. This series combines a lot of things. It doesn’t have a lot of moral ambiguity (I’ll not fault them that, they came from simpler times) which was present in spades in the later series. Each Spectre series brought to the table something different. The Forties series (Jerry Siegel and Bernard Bailey) featured creepy, simplistic stories that worked. The late Eighties series (Doug Moench and Gene Colan) were eerie mystery stories, which had a weird charm of their own. The nineties series (John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake) intermingled real life politics and heavenly affairs. In the introduction to this book by Peter Sanderson, Mike says that he considers the stories as a kind of black comedy. I’d rather say that its Panchatantra meets Sherlock Holmes meets EC Comics.

The stories typically feature evildoers who commit some sort of crime where innocents die, and the Spectre chases them down, and disposes of them one by one (heh heh..) usually in a manner that echoes their original crime, and where it doesn’t; why he improvises using goods at hand. This collection features weirdos galore – in addition to bank robbers and arsonists, the Spectre tangles with fake swamis, creepy manikin makers, charming hypnotists and grotesque taxidermists. The series ended due to low sales, with three scripts still in the drawer. In the eighties, the series was collected as ‘Wrath of the Spectre’, a four issue miniseries, where the first three issues collected the originally published stories, while the fourth issue contained the three stories which had not seen print. However, it was still very much a work in progress; there is no conclusion to many ongoing plot threads, but that doesn’t hurt this story any, just like it doesn’t make much of a difference if you don’t know how Ted met the mother, or how the castaways finally got off Gilligan’s Island.

Jim Corrigan, policeman was shot and killed years ago. A power from beyond demands that his time has not come, and he must yet walk the Earth, meting out punishment to evildoers – such is the nature of his curse. Jim still serves on the force, using his powers as he best can. However, in the course of an investigation, a lady named Gwen Sterling falls for him, pretty hard and it’s mutual---save for the fact, that he actually can’t. A heart broken Gwendolyn tries to drown her sorrows, and at the same time tries to bring Jim Corrigan back to the land of the living, and in the course, gets taken for a ride by a fake Swami, hypnotized by a creep who turns her into a human bomb---y’know, your typical damsel in distress.

Just around that time, a magazine writer named Earl Crawford connects reports about Spectre sightings and the grisly way in which the victims were killed – for example, if the Spectre conjures up a giant pair of scissors and cuts the evildoers in half, and the scissors vanish as the Spectre leaves, we have a roomful of homicide investigators and forensic experts wondering how the guy got cut in the first place when there’s no murder object around. And as luck would have it, he gets partnered with Jim Corrigan, when he visits the police asking for permission to tag along. Earl is drawn too similar to Clark Kent---even Jim calls him Clark Kent in jest in one panel. Bothe Earl and Gwen are running characters through the remaining stories. Sadly, we don’t learn whether Earl finds out the Spectre’s secret, nor what happens to Gwen and her love.

Mike Fleisher’s writing is good (although he would write better stories for Jonah Hex, Warlord and Conan the Barbarian) considering that this was his first job in comics and earlier he had written only for screen. The stories in themselves are a little…naïve, and if you’re looking for intellectual philosophical banter, you just might be disappointed. But he does spin a few tales where he does make me wonder what he has around the corner next – in one story he has Corrigan being restored back to life. These are stories of the fast food variety, and would make for excellent reading if you like fast food. Jim Aparo’s art is excellent. He manages to bottle the horrendous moments of EC comics in all notoriety, all throughout the run. The one comic illustrated by Frank Thorne, featuring the manikins is particularly creepy. While I wasn’t blown away by the writing, I have no complaints regarding the art. 

Rating: 7 on 10. This one is out of print currently, but well worth looking for for the art alone. I think the stories are collected in a Showcase Presents volume featuring the Spectre as well, if you don’t mind B&W…me, I just love the green.

Collects full covers, collects only covers for Wrath of the Spectre issues 1-3 as they were reprints, US$19.99