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.

Top Ten Uncollected runs from DC Comics, Part 1 - 10 to 6

Hello and welcome back to another post by yours truly after a long gap.

With everything DCnU right now and the new 52 being the buzzword for months, it's time I think, to look to past runs that have been acclaimed as well as underrated - but largely uncollected or partly collected. Sadly, most trades of partially collected runs are also out of print. These runs were done at a time when a collection of back issues was rare unless alarmingly popular (Batman: A Death in The Family, Death of Superman, Green Lantern/Green Arrow). The trend of collecting back issues with any sort of regularity started just in the early 2000s, with Superman: Godfall and Batman: Hush, and for the most part, all the stories after these have been collected, albeit with a few exceptions. So the fault of these issues or the creative teams was, that they were just before their time. I have avoided citing multiple runs of the same character/title for the most part, mentioning other memorable runs under honourable mentions. Let's start with #10 to 6:

10. Green Lantern by Ron Marz, Darryl Banks and Romeo Tanghal

Fans were in a killer frenzy when DC decided that the era of Hal Jordan had passed. Then current script writer Gerard Jones turned in a last Hal Jordan script, which was rejected, and was drastically different compared to what finally saw print, by new series writer Ron Marz. Essentially, Ron Marz turned Hal Jordan into a psychopath who tried to use the ring's power to change the past, and lay waste the whole corps, leaving behind only Ganthet who delivered the ring to a young Kyle Rayner. And if you think this was a global event, it spanned only three issues.....which had more content than the recent War of the Green Lanterns (just sayin'). Then began the era of Kyle Rayner. The fall of Hal Jordon took place a little before 1994...