After 50 years, Jim Corrigan finally gets that his mission is to confront evil in others to understand it in himself. Only took him leaving a friend to die alone because he just had to punish her killer, him basically wiping out the nation of Vlatava, getting possessed by Eclipso and nearly ending life on Earth, but hey! Jim's in the remedial class, any progress is encouraging.
The Spectre's going to get his chance to put this to work, because there's trouble brewing in New York City. An elderly rabbi was acquitted after he crashed his car into a group of black kids, killing one of them. This is after his sect bought up a bunch of buildings in a predominantly African-American neighborhood and converted them into an enclave, off-limits to outsiders.
Tensions are running high, the cops are maintaining a perimeter around the enclave, but the Spectre flits right in and confronts the rabbi, who admits he hit the kids. Not intentionally, but he had known he shouldn't still be driving, and couldn't accept one more sign of his encroaching mortality. Old Moonface weighs the rabbi's soul and says that, taken as a whole, the good he's done outweighs the sin. Will the father of the dead child accept, "God says this man is no sinner?"
Yeah, me neither. The Spectre tries to disperse the angry people on both sides, and two demons of hate and anger emerge from the crowd and start brawling in the sky. It takes a couple of pages, but Spectre takes them down, and it's revealed his old foe Asmodus summoned them. Unfortunately, it's turned into a street fight down below during that, until the Spectre breaks it up. I guess the crowd could see his fight with the demons, but decided to have their own fight anyway? The rabbi emerges to apologize to the grieving father, but that's not helping.
So the Spectre makes them experience each other's grief. The concentration camps, dealing with the Klan. It seems to cool the father's anger, but the experience, the grief, something, kills the rabbi. Even when the Spectre isn't trying to kill people he still kills them. Frank Castle would not approve of such sloppy work.
In other plot threads, a young environmentalist who was set on fire by oil rig workers is reborn as Earth's water elemental (I assume this is picking up threads from Ostrander's Firestorm), and President Bill Clinton takes a break from being a scarfing Big Macs and being a creep to bring in one of his old professors, Nicodemus West, to discuss if there's a way to control or destroy the Spectre after he, you know, killed an entire country because he can't process grief in a healthy manner.
{10th longbox, 36th comic. The Spectre #19, by John Ostrander (writer), Tom Mandrake (artist), Carla Feeny and Digital Chameleon (color artists), Todd Klein (letterer)}
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