Spectre (DC Comics character)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Spectre first appeared in More Fun Comics #52, dated February 1940, and his debut opens with a murder. A New York detective named Jim Corrigan is on his way to his own engagement party when thugs stuff him into a barrel, fill it with cement, and throw it into the water. His soul is about to enter Heaven when a presence known only as the Voice chooses him instead. The Voice makes him an agent of divine justice on Earth. Jerry Siegel and Bernard Baily created the character for DC Comics, although some sources credit Siegel alone and treat Baily as the artist assigned to the feature. What followed was one of comics' strangest runs: a hero almost too powerful to write, cancelled again and again, then brought back each time in a darker form. Why does the embodiment of divine anger need a dead cop to keep it in check? What happens to the world when no human is holding the leash? And how did a character built on vengeance end up asking whether vengeance is ever justice?

  4345191

• 2. Wrath With a Name

  ›

  Before any detective died in a barrel, the force behind the Spectre had a name, and the name was Aztar. In the version of the story told after the miniseries Crisis on Infinite Earths, shaped by writer John Ostrander, Aztar was an angel who joined Lucifer Morningstar's rebellion against God. He was cast into Hell with the other rebels. There he begged the archangel Michael for forgiveness. God appointed him as the embodiment of divine wrath, but erased his memories and his whole lifetime of experience as part of the punishment.

  That role had belonged to someone else. Aztar replaced the minor DC character Eclipso. Ostrander drew a careful line between the two: the Spectre pursued vengeance, while Eclipso pursued revenge. In this telling Eclipso caused the biblical Flood, and the Spectre was the Angel of Death who killed the firstborn children of Egypt. The two have clashed many times, and neither can be fully destroyed.

  The Spectre's resume reads like a list of the Bible's harshest chapters. He carried out the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, placed around 3000 BCE. He delivered the plagues of Egypt in 1263 BCE, despite interference from the Lord of Order called Nabu. He also brought down the walls of Jericho.

  Then came a problem no angel could fix. The birth of Jesus, an embodiment of forgiveness, banished the Spectre into limbo, because wrath and forgiveness could not exist side by side. The crucifixion called him back, and he arrived hungry for vengeance. Michael stopped him, and God decreed that the Spectre must be bound to a human spirit, following the example Jesus had set.

  The first human host was an Indian man named Caraka, whose family was murdered by a necromancer. His Spectre looked less like the familiar ghost and more like the Hindu god Shiva. Another host was an Irish woman brutalized by highwaymen, and her Spectre took on the manner of a banshee. Other hosts were implied to be Arab and Native American. The necromancer who started it all kept returning in reincarnated forms, becoming one of the Spectre's recurring enemies.

  565758540

• 3. The Cop Who Refused Peace

  ›

  Jim Corrigan was one of countless humans chosen to guide the Spectre, but he became the best known. His father was a fundamentalist preacher who beat him and taught that God's wrath fell on sinners. Corrigan ran away to join the Army. He later settled in New York as a police detective, and by his own account he was arrogant and mean-spirited. In 1940 a mobster named Gat Benson had him killed, and his soul cried out for vengeance.

  The first stories do not soften what happened next. The new Spectre reduced one of Corrigan's killers to a skeleton with a single touch. He made himself a costume and took over Corrigan's old name and job. Clarice Winston, his fiancee, was wounded in the violence. He restored her to life, then ended the relationship and grew distant from his friends and fellow officers.

  The Voice offered him eternal peace as a reward. Corrigan refused it until every trace of evil had been wiped from the world. That stubbornness earned him a seat as a charter member of the Justice Society of America, the first superhero team, in All Star Comics.

  In More Fun #75, in January 1942, the Voice resurrected Corrigan's body using the Ring of Life. The Spectre could now step out of his host and exist on his own. Fan interest in superheroes was fading by then, and the series shrank to fit. The Spectre became guardian angel to a clumsy character called Percival Popp, the Super Cop, who debuted in More Fun #74 in December 1941. When Corrigan left to serve in World War II in issue #90, in April 1943, the Spectre drifted out of his own series. The last installment ran in issue #101, in February 1945. His final Justice Society appearance came around the same time, in All Star Comics #23. By the end he was invisible to everyone except Percy.

  434411424

• 4. The Omnipotence Problem

  ›

  In 1961, readers gave the Spectre the Alley Award for the hero most worthy of revival. In 1964 he won another, for the strip most desired for revival. DC editor Julius Schwartz finally answered in Showcase #60, in February 1966. Writer Gardner Fox and penciller Murphy Anderson gave him far more power than before, at times close to omnipotence. A 1987 magazine retrospective said the comeback had first been announced as a team-up with Doctor Mid-Nite.

  After a three-issue tryout, he joined the Justice League of America and the Justice Society in issues #46-47 of the League's own title. He then teamed with the Flash in The Brave and the Bold #72, in July 1967. He earned his own series in December 1967, and appeared with Batman in The Brave and the Bold #75 the following month. A newcomer named Neal Adams drew issues #2-5 and wrote #4-5. The series lasted only 10 issues, and its last two read like a horror anthology with the Spectre as a narrator. The old trouble had returned: it is hard to write a gripping story about someone who can do nearly anything.

  In these years Corrigan served as captain of the police in a place called Gateway City. A dying man named Ace Chance once seized Corrigan's body and romanced an heiress named Mona Marcy. Long stretches away from his body also drained the Spectre's energy, and Corrigan's own willpower sometimes blocked his spirit from re-entering. After one of these lapses the tired Spectre struck an innocent man, and he was chained to the Journal of Judgment.

  Later accounts list the cracks in his armor. At full strength he commands space, time, reality and matter, along with flight, great strength and the power to create illusions. Yet he still needs a human host to function properly. He is vulnerable to strong magic and to the Spear of Destiny, which can kill him because it was bathed in the blood of Jesus Christ.

  The silver age run ended in a collision. An alien device hidden inside the android Red Tornado pushed Earth-One and Earth-Two toward each other. Doctor Fate freed the Spectre from a crypt in time to help. Fate then caused a massive explosion that destroyed the device and returned both worlds to their own dimensions. The blast tore the Spectre's body apart.

  4546471411

• 5. Wrath of the Spectre

  ›

  Issue #431 of Adventure Comics, dated February 1974, opened with a 12-page story titled "The Wrath of... the Spectre." Writer Michael Fleisher and artist Jim Aparo produced 10 stories, running through issue #440 in July 1975. Editor Joe Orlando said this was the Earth-One Spectre, though some at DC disagreed. Later stories explained that he had moved over from Earth-Two and taken the body of that world's Jim Corrigan.

  Comics historian Les Daniels traced the new tone to Orlando himself. According to Daniels, Orlando had been mugged and decided the world needed a truly relentless hero. He and Fleisher plotted tales that lingered on the grisly fates of criminals. The Comics Code had recently been loosened, and these stories tested its limits. Wrongdoers were turned into objects such as broken glass or melting candles, and then destroyed. Fleisher pointed out that many of his stranger ideas had been borrowed from stories printed decades earlier.

  Some fans wrote to the letter column to say the violence made them uneasy. In issue #435, in October 1974, Fleisher answered by adding a reporter named Earl Crawford, who shared their doubts. The series was cancelled with three scripts written but not drawn. Aparo penciled them years later, with others lettering and inking, and they appeared in the fourth issue of the 1988 miniseries Wrath of the Spectre. The first three issues reprinted the original ten stories. Fleisher had said in 1980 that only two scripts remained undrawn.

  The Spectre kept turning up as a guest. He appeared in the Doctor Thirteen feature in Ghosts #97-99, from February to April 1981. A new series was planned for 1986 with writer Steve Gerber and penciler Gene Colan. Gerber missed the first deadline because he wanted to watch the last day of shooting on the film Howard the Duck, and DC cancelled the project.

  After the Crisis on Infinite Earths miniseries, a largely depowered Spectre fought the Anti-Monitor. In Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run, he guards an entrance to Hell, and the Great Evil Beast later defeats him. In the Last Days of the Justice Society of America special, God punishes him for failing to resolve a crisis. Writer Doug Moench then made Corrigan the center of an occult private detective agency. Even stepping out of Corrigan's body hurt both of them, and the series ended with issue #31 in November 1989. A few months later he had a cameo in Neil Gaiman's four-issue miniseries The Books of Magic.

  5152531924

• 6. Ostrander's Moral Puzzles

  ›

  Three years after Moench's series ended, John Ostrander took over the Spectre, and he came with a theology student's habits of mind. He treated the character as two things at once: the Avenging Wrath of the Murdered Dead, and a brutal police officer from the 1930s. His stories asked what a being like that should actually do.

  One case involved a woman who killed her abusive husband while he slept, and the question was what vengeance she deserved. In another, a man who had been wrongly convicted faced execution. The Spectre threatened to kill everyone in New York if the sentence was carried out, arguing that the people of the state would become murderers in his eyes. The sentence was reduced to life imprisonment.

  The nation of Vlatava tested him harder. Its history was centuries of civil war, ethnic cleansing and blood feuds. The Spectre judged the whole country guilty, razed it, and killed everyone except two opposing politicians. One of them was the supervillain Count Vertigo. A third story followed a 90-year-old woman who had spent her life atoning for one secret murder in the 1920s. The Spectre found her on her deathbed.

  The character also carried the end of two major crossover events. In Crisis on Infinite Earths and again in Zero Hour: Crisis in Time!, he was the only hero able to stand directly against the main villain. In the first it was the Anti-Monitor, and in the second it was Parallax. His stand bought the other heroes time to carry out the plan that destroyed each villain. The name Parallax would soon matter again, this time for a Green Lantern.

  25565778

• 7. The Hostless Rampage

  ›

  In the early 2000s, Corrigan finally found peace and gave up the role, leaving the Spectre without a host. A rogue angel named Asmodel tried to seize the power. The Sentinels of Magic asked Corrigan to take it back, and he refused. Instead Hal Jordan, the Green Lantern, defeated Asmodel and became the Spectre, serving from 2001 until 2004. He called himself the Spirit of Redemption and used the role to make amends for the evils he had committed as Parallax. During that time he advised Superman in a battle against Emperor Joker. He also helped Wally West protect his family by erasing public knowledge of his identity. When Jordan's soul was purified, he left to return to life, and the Spectre was alone again.

  Without a human to give him context, the Spectre-Force could no longer weigh a sin. It began killing for petty theft. In the miniseries Day of Vengeance, Jean Loring was transformed into the new Eclipso. She convinced the unstable Spectre that anything breaking the rules of the physical universe broke God's law. Magic broke those rules, so magic was evil.

  His campaign was devastating. In one dimension he killed over 700 battle-hardened magicians. He turned the Phantom Stranger into a mouse and imprisoned Doctor Fate in a dimension inside his own helmet. He destroyed Madame Xanadu's eyes so that she could never read her tarot cards, and he killed the wizard Shazam despite Captain Marvel's help. He fought Black Adam in the kingdom of Kahndaq, and he destroyed Atlantis, the home of Aquaman.

  The rampage ended when he killed Nabu, the last of the Great Lords of the Ninth Age. Dying, Nabu revealed that the Lords had been working to form a perfect host for the Spectre, and that plan was now ruined. The Presence took notice and forced the Spectre back into a human host. The Lords of Chaos and Order were nearly wiped out, leaving only Mordru and Amethyst. The Ninth Age of Magic ended and the Tenth began. Alexander Luthor later admitted he had set it in motion. He had ordered the Psycho-Pirate to give Eclipso's diamond to Jean Loring, so that magic could be undone and used as fuel for his Multiverse tower.

  4041751

• 8. Afterlives

  ›

  The next host was Crispus Allen, a Gotham City detective regarded as one of the city's most honest cops. He had transferred from Metropolis and was partnered with Renee Montoya. In Gotham Central #38, a corrupt officer named Jim Corrigan, no relation to the first host, murdered him. The Spectre-Force was forced into his body against its will. Allen doubted God's existence, and he tried to balance the Spectre's anger. Yet he too found himself giving in to it.

  During the Blackest Night storyline in 2009-2010, black rings turned Allen into a giant Black Lantern and sealed the true Spectre-Force inside him. The Black Lantern wanted Hal Jordan back. When the real Spectre was freed, Atrocitus, leader of the Red Lantern Corps, tried to turn the spirit into his own rage entity. The Spectre told him he was God's rage and warned him not to meddle. Then he confronted Nekron, the master of the Black Lanterns, only to find that Nekron had no soul and was immune to his powers. In the Brightest Day storyline, the Spectre appeared in Montana, still hosted by Allen, hunting the Red Lantern entity called the Butcher.

  After the New 52 reboot, Corrigan was a Gotham detective whose fiancee was kidnapped. The Phantom Stranger led him to a trap, and he was killed and reborn as the Spectre. The Voice, appearing as a Scottish Terrier to show his sense of humor, told Corrigan his duty was justice rather than vengeance. Corrigan later joined a small Gotham task force that investigated supernatural events off the books.

  On screen, Mark Hamill voiced the character in Batman: The Brave and the Bold. In the episode "Chill of the Night!", he and the Phantom Stranger bet on whether Batman would kill Joe Chill. Gary Cole voiced him in DC Showcase: The Spectre, and Lou Diamond Phillips took over in later animated films. In live action, Emmett J. Scanlan played him on Constantine. IGN ranked him the 70th greatest superhero of all time. In the Arrowverse crossover Crisis on Infinite Earths, Stephen Lobo played an alternate version who passed the Spectre's power to Oliver Queen. Queen used it to save the multiverse from the Anti-Monitor.

  6426747785