Random Back Issues #172 - The Spectre #57

This is the 8th issue of The Spectre to appear in Random Back Issues. God's loaded my dice.

Or maybe not, as the issue begins with Spectre finding the Pearly Gates busted open, and nothing behind them! No angels, no souls, no God. The Spectre and Jim Corrigan have been having their differences recently, but they both want to get to the bottom of this.

Corrigan suggests pounding the pavement, question some suspects. First to Limbo, where an extremely skeletal Deadman is hanging around, watching a bunch of shadows traverse a foggy canyon. Spectre explains God's missing, and Deadman busts a gut, to Spectre's displeasure. Deadman says his god, Rama Kushna, is still around, and he doesn't know the Spectre's God 'from spit,' but it ain't here.

Next stop, Hell. Two angels, Remiel and Duma, are running things, because Lucifer abdicated. Remiel is trying to reform Hell, make it a place souls are redeemed through torment. It's not going great. 'Whip them with love,' apparently being a difficult concept to get across. Duma is zoned out, ignoring Remiel to the point the latter considers murdering the former. 

Spectre kicks in the doors, wishing to speak with the Lord of Hell. Duma, finally showing some life, kneels before him and offers the Key to Hell. The Spectre barely resists, claiming he's no creature of Hell, which Remiel thinks is crazy talk. The Spectre can freely enter Hell, but not Heaven. Michael forced his compliance, and Spectre was given a Sisyphean task to complete, walk the Earth until evil is no more. Well, when you put it that way. . . God sounds like kind of a dick. Maybe it's good he's missing.

Or maybe not. When Spectre delivers the news, the demons go into a frenzy, calling him a liar and attacking him. Which does not go well, and makes the Spectre suspect Hell is behind it, until Remiel points out the demons are afraid. They exist in opposition to God, so if God's gone, will they cease to be? Oblivion terrifies even a demon. I guess Remiel never talked to Jason Lee's character in Dogma, since that guy preferred non-existence to Hell.

At a dead end, the Spectre departs, leaving Duma to cry over Michael's disappearance (I guess Duma loved Michael?), the demons to sulk back to their various fiery pits, and Remiel to remark that for the first time, he feels like he's truly in Hell.

Lucifer's enjoying retirement on a beach in Australia, watching the sunset. Must be nice to have a job that offered retirement benefits. He's unperturbed at Spectre's claim of God's absence, so Spectre sets out to question the pantheons of "lesser" gods. This will involve him barging into places he's not welcome and throwing his weight around like an asshole. Which could either be representative of Corrigan's style of police investigation, or the behavior of Christians throughout human history. Meanwhile, Lucifer sits on the beach, remarking the Spectre should have stayed and watched the sunset. 

{10th longbox, 70th comic. The Spectre #57, by John Ostrander (writer), Tom Mandrake (artist), Carla Feeny and Digital Chamelon (color artists), Todd Klein (letterer)}

Random Back Issues #152 - The Spectre #5

Remarkably, this terrifying experience is brought to you someone besides the Spectre.

The kid is Bill Hoffman. He's been kidnapped and buried in a graveyard, with only a measly pipe to provide air, and carry his cries for his parents to the surface. Unfortunately, once it starts to rain, the pipe also allows water to flow into the box!

The ones responsible, Billy's babysitter, her twin brother Eddie, and their stepdad, are currently fleeing the cops. Stepdad's yelling at Eddie, who insists it wasn't his fault he didn't see the cop when he ran a red light. Eddie tries to cut onto the freeway in front of a truck, hydroplanes, and they get broadsided, then blown up. This is bad, since they were supposed to call in Billy's location after they picked up the ransom. No one told the cops in the patrol car and now no one knows where the kid's buried. No one living, at any rate.

Turns out, one of the Hoffmans' friends is Amy Beitermann, and she knows someone who might be able to speak with the dead. Thinking about Jim Corrigan calls him to the hospital. Eddie clung to life the longest, so Corrigan enters his body to find his soul. He asks Amy to keep thinking of him, to act as an anchor. Eddie's soul has already moved past the land of the recently dead (where Deadman is just, hanging out, for some reason), so the Spectre descends into Hell.

He passes Louis Snipe, who betrayed and murdered Corrigan in the '40s. Snipe curses him, but Spectre says Snipe got what he deserved (being devoured by giant leeches.) Then Jim's dad appears (tied to a swastika with barbed wire) asking if the same is true of him, and if so, isn't it true of Corrigan as well, as written in some verse of the Bible blah blah. Spectre knows a trick when he sees it and calls out Shathan, Lord of Lies, still torn up from a previous fight they had.

Shathan's got Eddie's soul inside his body, like a heart. Eddie still protests nothing was his fault, but nobody's listening. Spectre claims Shathan is only trying to keep the Spectre from helping a child. Shathan fires back the Spectre is only here because he didn't get to punish Eddie himself. Spectre throws the first punch, but this is Shathan's realm, and he hits the Spectre with a buffet of the tortures Ol' Moonface inflicted on others. Cut up by giant scissors, trapped in a mirror and shattered, all that good stuff.

Spectre ultimately shakes it off, reaches into Shathan's chest and tears out Eddie. As he walks away, Shathan mentions a legend of a devil that repented his rebellion and merged with a human soul to walk the Earth. Is the Spectre that devil? Spectre dismisses it as another trick, but Shathan admits he would even stoop to the truth if it caused doubt in the Spectre's heart. (The answer, fyi, is yes.) The Spectre orders the gates of Hell to open, Eddie explains where the kid is buried, but before he can get too far into excuses, the Spectre chucks him back through the gates.

Back on Earth, Amy and Lt. Nate Kane get a rude surprise as Eddie's corpse sits up and reveals the kid is buried in a cemetery under the name Krause. Nate barrels off with two cops and Billy's dad, while Amy stays behind, trying to help Corrigan get out of Eddie's dead body. It's pouring rain, so the coffin is rapidly filling with water, but they manage to dig it up in time to save the kid. Now if Nate could only figure out how Corrigan got that info, and how Amy knows the "psycho detective."

{10th longbox, 24th comic. The Spectre (vol. 3) #5, by John Ostrander (writer), Tom Mandrake (artist), Digital Chameleon (colorist), Todd Klein (letterer)}

Random Back Issues #143 - The Spectre #19

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)}

Saturday Splash Page #148

"An Ill Wind Blows," in The Spectre (vol. 3) #27, by John Ostrander (writer), Tom Mandrake (artist), Carla Feeny and Digital Chameleon (color artists), Todd Klein (letterer)

Summer (and Fall) of Spiders is on a one-week hiatus, so we can get into the spirit of the season! Or is it the, specter, of the season? *arches eyebrow*

Audience: Boooooooooooooo.

The Spectre had been a bizarre figure, using comets and planets like whips and bludgeons to fight demons. He'd been the source of much ironic punishment to a variety of killers and criminals. He'd been a paranormal detective. In Ostrander and Mandrake's 5-year run, he's a bit of all those things, but mostly he's a being that needs to evolve.

Ostrander takes the approach that, after 50 years, dead cop Jim Corrigan never understood the task he was given as the Spectre. It wasn't to punish evil, but to confront, and most critically, comprehend, evil. The latter is difficult for both halves of the spirit. The Spectre itself was created to punish, without compassion or restraint. Corrigan's not big on those concepts either, feeling he's seen very little of them in his life, and so the guilty don't deserve them (though it's pointed out to him, "guilt" and "evil" aren't the same thing.)

As the Spectre tries to evolve and grow, Corrigan is forced to confront his past, his mistakes and his flaws. His tendency to focus on revenge, leading him to abandon Amy Beitermann and pursue her killer, when she pleaded not to die alone. To lash out rather than admitting he's in pain, which is not great when you have as much power as the Spectre. That's how an entire country (Count Vertigo's home of Vlatava) gets destroyed, an act of genocide that Ostrander never manages to square with the fact "Moonface's" old JSA buddies still speak with him after, let alone Superman or Batman letting that shit slide. The Spectre even acknowledges he killed children by doing so, and the Archangel Michael just handwaves it as 'extreme, but not unjust.' Are you fucking kidding me?

It's a part of the overall work that people (or souls) are often punishing themselves, rather than anything God's doing. And so Corrigan has to forgive himself his mistakes (in that regard, he's ultimately more successful than John Gaunt was in GrimJack.) But even if he came to some sort of peace with himself, that hardly means everyone else would be OK with it. Ostrander tried to go big to make a point of how dangerous a Spectre that's lost any sense of control could be, but in the process, created an anchor that sits around the character's neck for the remaining 4 years of the series. Even if the other characters don't mention it, I was always aware of what the Spectre did to Vlatava in, essentially, a grief-induced rage.

Part of the path of Corrigan's growth involves actually talking to people, instead of offering booming pronouncements before killing them in ironic ways. Ostrander uses a few existing characters like Madame Xandau or Reverend Craemer, who he introduced in Suicide Squad, and creates a few others like Amy (a social worker who happens to cross paths with Corrigan when he visits the man who helped murder him), or Nate Kane, a hard-nosed cop with a phobia about sick people. While they may sometimes console Corrigan, just as often they give him a metaphorical smack upside the head. 

That said, the book is far from focused on talking about feelings. Mandrake still gets plenty of chances to draw the Spectre dealing out horrific punishments or facing down slithering demons that make you feel grimy just looking at them. The Spectre often travels in another person's mind or soul, which gives the opportunity to get surreal with things. The Spectre may face a kaiju-sized version of the mobster that killed him, firing planets from a Thompson, or find himself caught in a funhouse of his own worst failures.

It helps to reinforce the growing divide between the two halves of the Spectre, one that is still ultimately a human soul, and one that isn't and never was. Corrigan will try to navigate these landscapes, while the Spectre, when left to its own devices, simply smashes through. It's a blunt instrument, and so long as Corrigan was content to be that way, there was no problem. But Jim Corrigan's a human, and humans can change, so that shared sense of purpose doesn't last.

Random Back Issues #84 - The Spectre #14

We looked at the issue after this one almost exactly one year ago. Strange coincidence. I sense the meddling hand of a guy in a fedora and trenchcoat.

We're one issue removed from Spectre killing almost everyone in Count Vertigo's civil war torn country of Vlatava. All because, as a man of the '30s and '40s, Jim Corrigan only knows how to deal with feelings of loss (the death of friend/love interest Amy Beitermann) by looking for someone to blame. Unfortunately, he's ready to blame all of humanity.

As this is a fill-in artist issue, there's no advancing of the plot. Instead the Phantom Stranger visits Father Richard Craemer, who unwittingly gave the Spectre the idea of visiting Vlatava during confession. The Stranger wants to know what the two discussed, but Craemer insists the confessional is sacred and can't be violated, even if the world is at stake.

Phantom Stranger, apparently thinking he's dealing with some kids arrested for stealing lotto tickets from a convenience store, tries to scare Craemer straight with a Bible story. Pretty sure he would know all those already, buddy.

Eclipso was God's first attempt at a Spirit of Wrath, and he's responsible for the Flood. But he wouldn't forgive, got shoved inside a diamond and poof! Here's the Spectre, destroying Sodom and Gomorrah, turning people to salt. You know, generally behaving like a dick. Fast forward to Egypt. Pharaoh's going to drown all the Hebrew children. Nabu, aka the Order entity inside Dr. Fate's helmet, advises against this, but is ignored. Spectre (devoid of a human host and looking like a skeleton) kills pharaoh, with Nabu barely slowing him down.

Next guy on the throne, Nabu abandons appealing to empathy, and tries pragmatism. Kill all your slaves' kids, who's going to do all the hard work nobody wants to do? This works, if you call encouraging slavery an improvement over sitting back and letting someone commit genocide. You know, I have never seen a version of Nabu that wasn't an asshole. 

Anyway, Moses show up, cue party tricks with turning staffs into snakes, frog rain, locusts, the whole bit. Pharaoh won't budge, so Phantom Stranger shows up to warn Nabu shit's about to go down and he best stay out the way. Nabu doesn't listen, Nabu gets his ass beat again, and possibly his powers taken away? The Stranger says the force Spectre represents made the Lords of Order and could unmake them. His kid dead, Pharaoh gives in. . . for about five minutes. Then the whole thing with the Red Sea, look you probably saw the movie with old Guns n' Moses, you don't need me to tell you how this ends for Pharaoh.

Story time over, Phantom Stranger says he's worried how the Spectre will judge the Earth. So worried, he tries to form a team to stop him, but not so worried he would wait for Constantine to sober up to make sure he was involved. Mixed messages.

{10th longbox, 14th comic. The Spectre (vol. 3) #14, by John Ostrander (writer), Joe Phillips (artist), Carla Feeny (colorist), Todd Klein (letterer)]

Random Back Issues #77 - The Spectre #44

Just because you're dead, doesn't mean you get to go around without pants. 

Jeez, third issue of The Spectre this year. Today finds the Spirit of Vengeance hunting pieces of the American Talisman, a spiritual MacGuffin the Founding Fathers used to create an avatar of the colonies to help them combat Great Britain. I think Ostrander retcons Uncle Sam to be one of the later representations of that avatar, but maybe it was already that way.

One of the pieces was sent to Helen Belcanto by an author she works with. Helen's the best editor at thus publisher, but has hit the glass ceiling hard. All the execs, all old men, sit around laughing about how they won't let her in, and she can't play hardball because she 'hasn't got the equipment.' Not really accurate. It may require balls, but it also requires something to strike them with, and I'm sure she has no shortage of options there.

Anyway, the talisman seized on her frustration and anger and created Hellion. Who promptly lit those execs on fire. Well, the Spectre's not down with that, so away we go. Hellion smacks him across the chest with some flaming chains, and when he's surprised it left a mark, asks if he's surprised a woman is capable of such a thing, then binds him up in the chains. He doesn't seem too troubled. Probably thinking, "Man, I make my chains out of spiders or animated children fingers. This stuff ain't shit."

Then Madame Xanadu shows up and complicates everything. Helen, or rather a past life of hers, is Xanadu's daughter. Originally, Xanadu taught her magic, but Past Helen reached for power she couldn't control and it destroyed her. This has repeated itself through the ages, while Xanadu keeps trying to save her. She thinks this might be the last chance. Well, yeah, if the Spectre casts her into Hell.

The Spectre, showing an unusual amount of restraint, leaves them to this and summons live cop Nate Kane to Salem. By pulling him through a railway station bathroom mirror and dumping him out a different mirror. Nate's not pleased, but agrees to locate Helen's home. Except things are getting weird when he steps outside. He's back in Pilgrim times, right as a bunch of folks prepare to hang a woman accused of being a witch. Nate, in period appropriate clothes, barges in and pulls a flintlock pistol on the leader, right as everything snaps back to the present, leaving a lot of confused people. The time distortion is coming in waves, so Nate goes against the flow, figuring he'll find the source.

Back in the boardroom, Hellion and Xanadu are arguing about the best ways to achieve the freedom to be women, however they define that. Xanadu doesn't think using repression and violence against men, as they have against women, will achieve it. Hellion, who points out she didn't kill the executive circle, merely used her version of the Penance Stare on them, plans to do that to everyone. The Spectre finally rejoins the conversation, stating he's not going to allow that.

Moonface acknowledges Hellion has a fair complaint about how women have been abused, but points out somehow Hellion's causing these ripples in time, causing women in this time to suffer horrors that were inflicted on women in the past. It's harming the innocent, and he'll stop her if he has to. Xanadu warns he has to go through her first, over Hellion's protests she doesn't need protecting. I mean, she hasn't been destroyed yet, but the Spectre also hasn't really attacked her, either.

Hellion is very similar to the "man-killer" type super-villainesses the comics had back in the '70s and on from there, which is kind of rough to read. It can easily feel like someone using a strawman argument, but I think the point is this is just Helen's anger and frustration given physical form. It's not all of what she thinks and feels, just the part that's hurt and tired, which is why it's causing unintended harm, as Xanadu warns her. YMMV.

Hellion senses Nate breaking into her apartment, where Helen's body is in a sort of stasis. She rushes off, Xanadu sics her pet demons on the Spectre to keep him away from her daughter. He swears she'll suffer if Nate's harmed, which Xanadu rebuts, pointing out she can't die. I don't think the Spectre would really make her life unending torment as he warns. He'd get bored eventually.

You can imagine how happy Hellion is to find a strange man in her apartment. The Spectre and Xanadu follow before she can harm Nate. Ultimately, everyone agrees (well, not Nate, no one asks him) Helen has the right to choose what she's going to do. She'll just have to accept the consequences. Helen rejects the power, wishing to be more than just anger, and hands off the talisman piece, remarking, 'it's not part of me or any other woman.' 

Xanadu offers to teach her more about magic, and Spectre's left wondering if the talisman can ever be whole if it truly excluded so many from the dream of America? Well, you get enough people who agree with its vision of America, like the Republican Party, sure.

[10th longbox, 40th comic. The Spectre (vol. 3) #44, by John Ostrander (writer), Tom Mandrake (artist), Carla Feeny (colorist), Todd Klein (letterer)]

Random Back Issues #66 - The Spectre #52

You and an unpleasantly large percentage of people in the American prison system.

Last time we looked at Ostrander and Mandrake's Spectre run, the Spirit of Vengeance was out of control because Corrigan couldn't deal with the pain of losing someone he cared about. Today's issue is from about 3 years later, and the Spirit of Vengeance is out of control because Corrigan's having problems.

I'm sensing a recurring theme here.

But first, a dream sequence. The Spectre has been resting inside the soul of Corrigan's cop partner, Detective Kane. This is due to a combination of factors including, but not limited to, the Spectre using his lifeforce to sustain Gaea during Final Night and the Spectre getting stabbed with the Spear of Destiny by the Avatar of White Supremacist America. Completely serious about that last bit, by the way. Also, we just missed the issue where Spectre tries to judge the Joker and ends up getting his power stolen by him. Damn.

Anyway, Kane finds himself in what he thinks is a dream, but soon realizes is a memory of Corrigan's. A memory that involves Jim shooting a woman named Julia Edmonds and her falling over the edge of the Manhattan Bridge. The Spectre denies any knowledge of this and sets out for another fine day of vengeance. 

And what finer place to punish the guilty than a prison? Boy howdy, does the Spectre get down to business. Starts with a guy who shanked someone in the prison yard just to get some quiet time in solitary. Crushes him between the walls of the cell. Then resurrects a bunch of guards to beat the shit out of one that beat a prisoner to death for kicks. And on and on, all except that guy up above, one Mihcael Lincoln, who is set to be executed tomorrow night. The Spectre says that's not his concern, and takes off.

Reverend Craemer is woken up a short time later by Corrigan, who admits to feeling a bit out of control. No shit. Corrigan can't figure out why he and Spectre aren't on the same page. Craemer suspects that Jim is growing beyond his cut-and-dried, black-and-white mindset, but the Spectre can't change. He's a spirit of vengeance, period, full stop. Which presents a problem without a clear solution. 

So Jim decides to table it, and focus on saving Michael Lincoln. He approaches Lincoln's public defender and learns the execution is still on for that night. The Spectre not killing someone, is not considered proof they are innocent of the murder they were imprisoned for. This is what happens when they won't let you put the Ten Commandments outside courthouses any longer, is probably something Mike Huckabee would say. Also, the governor doesn't want to look like he's intimidated by the Spectre, so execution, ho!

That evening, as they prepare to administer the lethal injection, the Spectre appears. He tells them, again, Lincoln is not guilty. The warden tells him he better not try to stop the execution. Real pair of balls on that guy, but the Spectre says he's not there to stop it. Mortal legal matters aren't his jurisdiction. However, he's told them Michael Lincoln is innocent, so if they kill him, that's murder. And we all know what the Spectre does to murderers! 

The doctor refuses to kill a healthy, innocent man. I don't remember the Hippocratic oath making any distinctions about guilt or innocence, but whatever helps you sleep at night, doc. The warden says they'll get another doctor. The Spectre will just show up again, with the same stipulation. Now the warden says they're just carrying out the wishes of the people of New York. So the Spectre replies, and I'd swear Mandrake's shadowing makes it look like part of his mouth might be smiling, that he would have to hold the entire state of New York accountable for the murder.

Keep in mind the Spectre already killed basically everybody in Vlatava already, 40 issues ago. The warden finally takes the hint, and Lincoln at least gets a stay of execution. Meanwhile, Kane's been busy digging into the Edmonds murder, and when the Spectre returns home and dives inside Kane's mind for the night, Kane readies a trap.

[10th longbox, 48th comic. The Spectre (vol. 3) #52, by John Ostrander (writer), Tom Mandrake (artist), Carla Feeny (colorist), Todd Klein (letterer)]

Random Back Issues #59 - The Spectre #15

At least when he's passed out in his own vomit he's not condemning his friends' souls to Hell.

The last time we looked at an issue of John Ostrander's Spectre run, it was a fill-in artist issue about a scientist that created life but didn't respect it. This time, we've got that good Tom Mandrake stuff goin'.

Jim Corrigan, and by extension the Spectre, aren't doing too well. A good friend of his died a few issues earlier while the Spectre was tangled up fighting a demon. Jim, being a man from the 1920s and 1930s, deals with his grief like you'd expect: He lashes out. Problem being, he's attached to God's Spirit of Vengeance, so the blast radius is pretty wide.

The issue begins with the Spectre in the Sinai, debating whether to just destroy the planet since humanity is such a bunch of assholes. I identify with that mood. The Phantom Stranger pops up to tell him that wouldn't be allowed. Spectre's not even sure if he'll do it, but if he does, who's gonna stop him?

 

The Stranger sets off to gather a team of magical forces to help him out. Inza Nelson's rocking the Dr. Fate helm, and she's game. The only other thing she had planned was to maybe use its power to clean up a neighborhood or reupholster her couch, so why not? After that, it's on to a drunkard, a demon, a sorceress, and a woman who does not die. 

 

Constantine is, as seen up top, unavailable. Although Inza offers to flush his system, and the Stranger basically says, "fuck that guy." Oh well, good thing he wasn't part of whatever ridiculous plan you had. Jason Blood's a little put out nobody ever shows up asking for his help, but to be fair, Jason Blood's kind of a pill. Etrigan is at least cheerful, and curious to see if he's stronger than the Spectre.

I said Etrigan was cheerful, not that he was intelligent.

That's as far as that plotline gets this month. The rest of the issue follows the Spectre, who ventures on to Cairo. A major Palestinian leader is there as part of peace talks, and the Israeli super-powered security group Ostrander and Yale introduced in Suicide Squad, the Hayoth, are there too. But not to kill him. While Saad had committed attacks against Israel, including some that took the lives of their leader Colonel Hacohen's family, he's pushing for peace now, enough extremists on both sides hate him. Better to protect him, and spare more innocent blood.

Well, a certain chalk-white spook in a green cloak has other plans for someone with innocent blood on his hands. The mage Ramban senses his approach, but the Golem's attempt to smash the Spectre gets him scattered over the landscape. Ramban's a little tougher, because his magic draws on the same power that fuels the Spectre. He tries reasoning with the Spectre, that killing Saad will result in more death, but the Spectre brushes that off. He'll just kill those murderers, and anyone else who kills in response to their murders. Brilliant. DC's Spirit of Vengeance may have needed to pass a literacy test, but clearly wasn't imbued with common sense. God must have created that on the 9th Day. 

 

Though Corrigan can't blast Ramban directly, he can pummel him with large stones. The last member of Hayoth, the assassin Judith, tries getting Dr. Saad to safety (after fighting his security detail), but when she reaches her team's room, Hacohen shoots her. His rage at Saad - plus a certain black diamond - has brought him under Eclipso's control. He pulls the trigger, but the bullet halts in mid-air, and turns into the Spectre. Neat trick. Eclipso calls him "usurper", since he was God's fiery hand first, and they have a brief skirmish before Eclipso bails. Spectre's ready to get back to handing out vengeance, but Ramban explains his life force is now linked with Saad. Will the Spectre take an innocent life to kill this man?

Considering he killed every single person in the civil war-torn country of Vlatava, minus the rival leaders, literally two issues earlier, because he deemed everyone a murderer? Seems like a risky gamble, especially if you're a person who was part of a covert government strike force. Really doubt Ramban's hands are clean, you know? But the Spectre leaves, though his opinion of humanity hasn't improved. And now Eclipso's got plans to take advantage of his unbalanced state. . .

There's a couple more issues to go in this story, and then there's some understandable fallout. Suffice to say, the Phantom Stranger's plan to attack the Spectre is a bust, but a different group has a little more success reaching Corrigan.

[10th longbox, 15th comic. The Spectre (vol. 3) #15, by John Ostrander (writer), Tom Mandrake (artist), Carla Feeny  and Digital Chameleon (colorists), Todd Klein (letterer)]

Everyone Can Use Friendly Ear Sometimes

In the same vein as last Wednesday's post, I had an idea about two characters I would have liked to see interact at some point. In this case, it's Peter David's "earth angel" version of Supergirl, and Reverend Craemer.

Craemer served as chaplain at Belle Reve, and later wound up as a sounding board for spiritual matters to Jim Corrigan, aka the Spectre. So he has experience with both erratic, violent personalities, and aspects of a supreme being combined with a human soul that are struggling to figure out what they're supposed to do. In The Spectre, he was eventually given the boot from the Catholic Church because he wouldn't toe the party line when it came to his sermons. He seemed open to varied conceptions of God and other faiths, so I doubt Linda being an earth angel is gonna faze him.

Plus, once you've been crucified by an out of control Spirit of Vengeance, an angry lady with telekinesis and fire wings maybe doesn't seem so terrifying. To say nothing of having to deal with Amanda Waller.

From Linda's perspective, she could have used the support of someone with a little more background in religious matters she could trust. Buzz is giving her some information, but he's a chaos demon or whatever. Not trustworthy. You've got Wally, the little kid who claims to be God, but he's being mysterious and vague a bunch of the time. Nobody has time for that bullshit. Most of her superhero acquaintances aren't much help, and if she's around them, then there's probably a crisis to deal with. Linda's friends don't know anything about what's going on.

Her mother's faith waxed and waned, to the point it seemed Linda was usually trying to prop it up, rather than being able to get support from it herself. Which has a big part of Supergirl's issues, everyone pinning their hopes and faith on her, leaving her to try and live up to it, without anyone she could lean on. Craemer seems like someone that would have at least tried to keep her from being too hard on herself, keep her from beating up on herself for not being able to help everyone, which might have kept her from losing hope. If nothing else, he can point out she never wiped out an entire country like the Spectre did. So how bad can she be doing, really?

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)]

31 Days of Scans - Day 14

It took a little longer to choose a subject than last week’s, because I would think of a writer, then think of a project they did that either sorely disappointed me, or had not interested me in the slightest. Then the answer came to me, and it was so obvious I couldn’t believe I didn’t hit on it immediately. Don’t get me wrong, it took like 5 minutes to figure out, but it was a long 5 minutes at the time.

John Ostrander’s the only comic writer I can think of where I’ve sought out complete runs of 4 different ongoing series he wrote, all of which were at least 20 issues, 3 of which were over 60 issues. I’ve even considered buying his run on Firestorm, and I don’t give a flip about Firestorm, but Ostrander wrote it, so I figure it might be worth a shot. I’ve considered buying Star Wars comics, just because he wrote them (I didn’t buy them, but he’s the only writer that got me that far).

The first time I read Ostrander’s work and knew it, was GrimJack. My cousin had given me a box of comics he couldn’t sell, and inside were the first four years of that book. The cover for the first issue did not impress, so I passed it over. But once I’d read everything else in the box, I had no choice. And I was hooked instantly. Gaunt being this old, battle-scarred guy, for hire for just about any job you’d care to name. In spite of his outward (and justified) cynicism about the world, he nonetheless has certain principles he tries to stick to. He tries hard to be a good friend, he tries to get at the truth of things, and to see a job through to the end, but can’t escape the fact his friends tend to die, and the truths he uncovers cause a lot of damage (both the truth itself, and what he does to get at it). All of this set in a bizarre world, where anything or anyone could be waiting around the corner. GrimJack was the first series where I felt compelled to track down what I didn’t have. First, just through the end of Ostrander’s run with Tom Mandrake, so I could see how the battle with the Dancer played out. Later, all the rest, the Jim Twilley run with Flint Henry, the Demon Wars saga, the Demon Knight graphic novel, the Starslayer back-ups, the mini-series he and Tim Truman did that IDW published in 2005 and 2009.

By then, I’d been in the comics’ blogosphere enough to hear about Suicide Squad, and so I had to go get all of that. Chris Sims talked at length about what made that book so great a few weeks ago – the development the surviving villains get, all the bad ass moments everyone gets, Amanda Waller in every way possible - but I also like the bits of humor Ostrander includes. Dr Light’s desperate attempts, first to fit in, then to be the big hero, all of which backfire on him horribly. Waller and Boomerang’s back and forth, leading to the bit where Waller plays a massive joke on Boomerang because he’s been posing as Mirror Master to commit crimes while pretending to honor the terms of his deal. The unknown pie thrower of Belle Reve. I would expect a certain amount of gallows’ humor in a book where characters can die at any moment, and there is a fair amount bit of that – or maybe it’s just the cruel joke many of their missions are for nothing – but a lot of it is just straight up meant to be funny. Pie gags are always good.

There’s his Heroes for Hire run. It’s not mentioned as often as some of his other work. It’s considerably shorter, it kind gets undercut when Heroes Reborn crapped out after a year (the premise being Iron Fist had formed a team to try and pick up the slack in the wake of all the heroes “dying” fighting Onslaught). It uses the High Evolutionary, and no one likes that guy, and pits him against Exodus, and nobody likes him, either. But he pulls together a lot of disparate characters, some of whom I like already – Iron Fist, Luke Cage, Scott Lang – but others I don’t care much about, like the Black Knight and Thena of the Eternals, and makes me care about them. They have their own stories that take them into or out of the book in ways that make sense, and also contribute to the feeling Danny didn’t really think this through, as usual. It gives the cast a makeshift, almost Defenders feel to it, though with considerably less infighting. 

The book has a much more irreverent tone, as the narrator is prone to freaking out when things start to look bad (to the point She-Hulk tells him to scram in one issue, back when she was still breaking the 4^th wall regularly). There’s also a strong core of friendship in there, which is something Ostrander often seems to write well, especially between two guys. Luke and Danny, obviously, as old friends, but even between Luke (who is sort of being a triple agent, working for the Master by joining H4H, but really trying to learn the guy’s plan and stop it) and the bad guy. Luke understands the man’s goal, but can’t tolerate the methods. When Luke mentions he is not going to call the guy “Master”, the villain relents, and gives Luke a name he can be called by (I don’t have the issue handy, but it was something like Esau, maybe). You could consider that simply good management strategy, but it’s clear he respects Luke enough to care it would bother him (he didn’t have any trouble treating the U-Foes like lackeys). He’s genuinely hurt when Luke turns against him, and Luke actually feels bad for the guy. I know, Ostrander writes a compelling C-list villain, big surprise. But it was good stuff.

And again, the humor. Namor and Jim Hammond chatting it up like old buds.Calling Hammond "Firebug", which is cute and friendly, but also maybe a little condescending, which sounds about right for Namor. I like the idea that Hammond is one of the people Namor will loosen up around a little, as opposed to most other heroes, or even Captain America. For the record, I know the dialogue is blurry, and I tried to find a better scan online, and you all let me down. So you’re stuck with a picture I thought was a lot clearer when I took it.

In the last year, I hunted down his Spectre run with Tom Mandrake. I’m not religious, but I enjoy the conflict between how Corrigan and the Spectre see themselves, the ideals they claim to serve, the reality of what they are, and what they do. There’s some interesting work there about the nature of faith, and forgiveness, the lies we tell ourselves, the crap we let weigh us down, the judgments we make in ignorance, also about the ideals of the United States versus the reality of its history.

A lot of his work seems to deal with the nature of people, their flaws and hang-ups, and whether those can be overcome. Most of the characters in Heroes for Hire have made bad decisions in the recent past, usually when they were at a low point, or otherwise desperate, and there’s a question of whether they can fix things, or pick themselves back up and try again. That book seemed to respond in the affirmative, but Suicide Squad and GrimJack are somewhat less positive. The members of the Squad seem eternally tripped up by their issues, Waller’s struggle for control and power, Flag’s Daddy issues, Bronze Tiger’s fears about himself, Deadshot’s myriad family and guilt issues, even the question of whether anything good can be accomplished by something like Task Force X. The overarching feeling seems to be no. Most of their missions fail or are pointless, and by the end, Waller’s legacy may be that someone else took her idea and used it as a merc scheme for super-villains to help run a country. As for GrimJack, Gaunt is constantly making the same mistakes, unable to see when he needs to bend a little, pissing off the wrong people, being callous when a little more compassion might have made the difference, then letting it all eat him up inside until he does something stupid and dangerous, which usually causes more trouble for him down the road. He’s survived too long doing things his way to really change, except for temporary moments where he recognizes a singular past mistake, and by then, the damage is done. And when in doubt, he will constantly revert to that willful type that enjoys making people in power look foolish because he can, thumbing his nose with no regard for the consequences. And there are always consequences.

John Gaunt covers all the theological bases in the second part of “Mortal Gods”, a two-part back-up story running in Starslayer (probably issue 11, but I took this from a reprint in GrimJack #24), by John Ostrander (writer), Tim Truman (artist), John Workman (letterer), and Janice Cohen (colorist). The universe shudders at Amanda Waller’s fury in Suicide Squad #21, by Ostrander (writer), Luke McDonnell (penciler), Todd Klein (letterer), and Carl Gifford (colorist). Luke Cage feels bad about stopping the misguided, would-be savior, and Namor wonders how an android grows a beard in Heroes for Hire #12, and #8 respectively, by Ostrander (writer), Pascual Ferry (penciler), Jamie Mendoza (inker), Joe Rosas (colorist), and Jon Babcock (letterer). Corrigan and the Spectre reflect on the nature of the lives together and apart in Spectre #62, by Ostrander, Tom Mandrake (artist), Todd Klein (letterer), Carla Feeny (colorist), and Digital Chameleon (color separations).