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.
