Random Back Issues #2 - The Spectre #33

Nice to know DC's God at least requires his Spirit of Vengeance to pass a basic literacy test. Given some of the Ghost Riders we've seen over the years, I'd have my doubts about Marvel's version.

This is from the John Ostrander/Tom Mandrake volume, but it's one of the periodic done-in-ones the series had. To give Mandrake a breather, I assume. This issue has Hugh Haynes and Tim Roddick as the penciler and inker, respectively, and the book loses a fair bit of its atmosphere minus Mandrake's heavy shadows and blurred, almost Expressionistic figures. Here, the Spectre's form looks a bit more like a grown up Casper, with the wispy smoke trail in place of legs at times.

There's a shuffling corpse-like creature stalking some university, attacking people and reducing them to charred husks. Inspector Kane - whose most notable character trait is he says "Balzac!" 10 times an issue - is assigned the case, and at this time, the Spectre is acting as his partner, in his Jim Corrigan disguise. Corrigan's style is to threaten to beat people if they don't give him answers he likes, which Kane seems willing to tolerate if it gets him what he wants.

The university was doing some legally questionable experiments in cloning using fetal tissue, and there just happens to be some missing. The creature attacks the professor who was doing the research, and when the Spectre comes in contact with it, part of his soul is absorbed. But the creature doesn't do so well against bullets and runs. The trail leads to a graduate student, who is trying to perfect the cloning technique so he can make a new body for himself, then just keep doing that so he can live forever.

(When she says she's absorbing souls, he responds she's actually using the metagene he picked for the cloning to dump toxins in her body into the victims, and that there is no soul. Yet he expects whatever makes him who he is to be absorbed by his next attempt. What is it going to absorb? Memories I guess, because she seems to do that, but he doesn't mention that in his explanation.)

The creature shuffling around campus was just his first attempt, and is of no importance to him beyond what she can do for him. When she asks why he created her, he first states the creator doesn't have to explain himself to his creation, and then gives her the same answer the one scientist gave the Michael Fassbender-bot in Prometheus: Essentially, to see if he could. Spectre and Kane show up, Kane shoots her, and she releases all the souls she absorbed, asking forgiveness of them. Spectre electrocutes the clone, then draws the souls and the grad student into his cloak to let the souls take their revenge on the one truly responsible. As Kane notes, not sure how he's going to explain this one, since there isn't even a corpse of the student to try and say he was destroyed by his own creation. Just gonna be one of those unsolved cases I guess.

The idea of a capricious, uncaring creator comes up a lot more in the last year of Ostrander and Mandrake's run, as I recall, as the Spectre tries to seek answers, but can't even find God anywhere. When he does, he's distinctly underwhelmed, although if I remember, the story suggests God is acting the way he is because that's how the Spectre and/or Corrigan feel about Him at that point. Their perception informs the reality, creations shaping the creator.

I think Dan Slott did something similar with Hank Pym in his Mighty Avengers run, when Pym meets Eternity, and the first thing Eternity does is punch Hank, then keeps doing it. Because Pym has a victim complex about how the universe has it in for him.

[10th longbox, 63rd issue, The Spectre (vol. 3) #33 John Ostrander (writer), Hugh Haynes (penciler), Tim Roddick (inker), Carla Feeny (colorist), Todd Klein (letterer)]