DC Comics has a certain reputation among comic fans. Their characters have accomplished some of the most impressive feats in fiction. Merely going back to the Silver and Bronze Age Superman comics will reveal a character that can pretty much do anything he wanted to; he could move planets like people moved couches, and could fly across the cosmos faster than the speed of light. Powerful characters like Martian Manhunter, the Flash, the various Green Lanterns, Bizarro, the Anti-Monitor, Superboy-Prime, and many more have appeared over the years, showing levels of power that fans don’t often get to see in the company’s marvelous competition.
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DC is full of overpowered characters who get a lot of spotlight, but there’s one that doesn’t get the credit he deserves: the Spectre. The ghostly hero was once a detective named Jim Corrigan, who was murdered by the mob and became the Spirit of Vengeance on Earth-Two. Over the years, the character has changed numerous times, but fit perfectly into the darker horror stories that were a hallmark of the publisher in the late Silver and Bronze Ages. The character had an amazing series in the ’90s, and has become an integral part of the cosmological powers of the universe. The Spectre is an amazing character, and it’s long past time DC started pushing him again.
The Spectre Has Grown Into a Complex and Entertaining Character
The Spectre started his existence like most other Golden Age superheroes — committing horrific acts of violence against evildoers. Back then, the character hadn’t become God’s Angel of Vengeance, and was instead just a resurrected detective looking to clean up the city who killed him. He was powerful and simple, his white and green look a distinctive one on the Justice Society. DC’s Golden Age was full of heavy hitters, and the Spectre would prove to be one of the less popular members of the team, mostly because no one really knew what to do with him back then; there was already powerhouses like Superman, Green Lantern, and Doctor Fate. He felt like a surplus to requirements.
This would continue through the Silver Age return of the Justice Society, but it was during this period that the character started to morph into a more important aspect of the multiverse. 1966 would see the character move over to Showcase with issue #60, becoming a more and more powerful avenging spirit. He proved so popular he eventually got his own series in 1967, which was one of the legendary Neal Adams’s first works in the industry. The Spectre was the perfect way to tell horror stories in the more conservative comic industry of the ’60s and ’70s, with an Earth-One version of the character (at least, according to editor Joe Orlando) first appearing in Adventures Comics, and he would stick around as a powerful force in the world, becoming more and more esoteric and eventually becoming a servant of Heaven and Hell.
The Spectre had a great glow-up in the post-Crisis DC Universe when he gained his origin as a divine servant, starting out as a demon before becoming the agent of the Presence. He was a big deal in the cosmology of everything in a way he hadn’t had before, and was a key character in DC’s ’90s classic Kingdom Come. He was introduced to a whole new generation of readers, and ’90s fans were given the most fun Spectre ever in the decade of extreme from John Ostrander, a key architect of the post-Crisis universe, and Tom Mandrake. Their series was more Vertigo than DC, with the creators blowing readers’ minds with every issue, coming up with amazing stories and punishments. It was dark and spooky, and flirted with the violence of the Vertigo books of the era.
Since then, the mantle of the Spectre has been moved around; Jim Corrigan lost it, Hal Jordan got it, then it was freed and manipulated by Eclispo and Alexander Luthor, and then newly slain detective Crispus Allen was put in the mantle. Since the late ’00s, the character has mostly disappeared; he was no longer positioned as so important, and there’s no real current status quo for him. He’s a character who is basically hibernating, but one that can be dusted off at any time to give readers some amazing stories starring God’s Angel of Vengeance.
It’s Long Past Time for the Spectre to Come Back to Prominence
I came up with DC in the ’90s, and there was always this feeling that the Spectre was an important part of the order of things in a way that Ghost Rider, Marvel’s Spirit of Vengeance, wasn’t. The publisher was able to take the Golden Age origins of the character — a violent avenger of the weak — and used it in the best possible way. Seriously, Ostrander and Mandrake’s The Spectre is a masterpiece of ’90s DC, a modern take on the character that saw the two creators go out of their ways to astound readers.
It’s a bit disappointing that it seems like the only time we see the character nowadays it’s in Golden Age flashback stories. With the comic more industry more open to the kind of imaginative violence that the Spectre is built on, it’s weird that DC hasn’t brought him back yet. The publisher has been bringing back their Golden Age legends, and hopefully he’ll get his chance to shine again. Someone like Ram V could make a perfect Spectre story, and there’s so much potential for the character to be one of the titans of creation again. He’s had a rich history (I’ve already praised Ostrander and Mandrake, but the early Adams stuff on The Spectre (Vol. 1) and the years in Adventure Comics starting with issue #431 are brilliant), and it’s about time the publisher took advantage of that again.
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