Wrath Wreaking Wraith

… Yet even in death I live on! For so long as men wallow in the filth of their own evil … 

Thus spake The Spectre, DC Comics forgotten stalwart, created in 1940, brought back in the late 60’s with Batman in The Brave & The Bold line and then given his own title.  This is where I first encountered him as my dad has quite a few of the issues from then.  I remember him being quite frightening as a kid, his costume always freaked me somewhat.

My uncle Jim gave me a bound volume of about 15 issues of The Spectre and Adventure Comics from 1973-5, a couple of years ago and I am ashamed to say I had not really looked at them until recently*.

Reading them was a real revelation.  Written by Michael Fleisher, illustrated by Jim Aparo and edited by Joe Orlando they have an air all of their own.  Used to 60’s and 70’s comics being neutered by the Comics Code into simplistic gaudy ‘Biff! Bang! Pow!’ solutions to crime.  The Spectre is a bit more radical than that, he likes to kill evildoers.  Not only that, he likes to kill evildoers in some pretty far out and unpleasant ways.

In three comics here the Spectre turns a man into wood and then chainsaws through him repeatedly, kills a model with old age on the cat walk, turns a baddie into glass and then topples him over, forces a robber to crash his car off a cliff, melts a hijacker like a candle, turns a crazed manufacturer of mannequins** into one just before it is burned, buries another dude alive in a grave and, my own personal fave, turns himself into a giant pair of scissors to snip one miscreant into pieces.  Heavy, doesn’t quite cover it.

This pushed the, newly-relaxed, comics code to its’ very limits and there is an interesting story behind this untrammelled and unchecked wrath wreaking wraith.  The Spectre was brought back under the aegis of editor Joe Orlando after he had been the victim of a mugging, the vengeance flowed from that.  Boy, did it flow.

The Spectre was a creation of pure, unadulterated revenge whose powers were only slightly lesser than Him-upstairs.  As somebody who holds a grudge, I can respect that.

My collection begins with a half-assed issue #5 of Secret Origins (1973) and runs through Adventure Comics #431 (Feb 1974) through to a Batman/Spectre team up in The Brave & The Bold (Jan 1975, #116).

As always the period adverts are often superb.

1013 Down (still).

*or any other comics/graphic novels for a couple of years now, which is odd for me.  The last time I did a comics post was way back in 2018; remember 2018? life was just peachy then, in retrospect, even the somewhat shit bits.

**spelt ‘mannikins’ in the comic? oh, America!