The problem with the Spectre is that he is shackled down by continuity.
This wasn’t how it used to be. It used to be that the Spectre was sort of awesome because you could do anything you wanted to do with him. Gardner Fox and Murphy Anderson had him fight demon lords using whole planets as weapons and travel through time to fight pirate ghosts in a dozen reincarnations. Neal Adams kept that high adventure, but started telling stories where the Spectre fought more horrific evils. Michael Fleisher and Jim Aparo had him straight-up murdering criminals in cruel ways and telling pure horror stories. Doug Moench made him an occult detective again. John Ostrander went to the Christian theology well, again and again. Not for nothing in The Books of Magic does John Constantine snark about how the Spectre’s power levels change all the time.
But it’s that Ostrander run that nailed things in. Prior to the Ostrander run, what the Spectre did and was – these were flexible and mutable things. He was a ghost. No, he was a spirit possessing a dead man. No, he was a spirit working in context with a dead man. No, he was all of that at the same time. However, Ostrander’s take – that the Spectre was God’s Angel of Vengeance possessing a dead human as its avatar – has become the standard.
The problem is that Ostrander’s Spectre worked wonderfully for Ostrander because Ostrander wanted to write a specific set of stories about human belief and the inherent problems that the idea of a vengeful God poses with Christian dogma. That was great when he was playing off in his own corner of the DC Universe and just letting everybody else do their thing. It’s not so great when his rules for the Spectre have become unbending canon because the Ostrander Spectre is ridiculously powerful and becomes an obstacle or menace rather than a character when used by writers not as skilled as Ostrander, which is to say most people.
And this is disappointing because there’s no reason one should feel constrained to keep doing with the Spectre what Ostrander did. After all, one of Ostrander’s plot points was that the Spectre replaced Eclipso as the Angel of Vengeance, which is a reminder that God is basically arbitrary from a mortal standpoint. You can take that as far as you want. Any writer working on a Spectre comic should feel completely empowered to do anything they want to the Spectre and just say “well, because God did it.” Hell, bring back Percival Popp the Super-Cop if you like. All that should be a Spectre writer’s goal is to avoid doing rehashed Ostrander stories, because you can’t really improve on them.
(And although I like Crispus Allen as a character, the Spectre looks stupid with a goatee.)
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And this is disappointing because there’s no reason one should feel constrained to keep doing with the Spectre what Ostrander did.
I’m shocked, MGK, because this sentence shows less insight into the nature of comic book publishing in the 21st century than you usually show.
We’ve reached the point where many of the characters have ossified. Just via empirical observation, characters have a point where they revert back to no matter what anyone tries to do with them. It’s basically “fan inertia” – the current readership is so small that if you take known characters too far from the fan expectations you get rejection at best, backlash at worst and the characters end up reverting back to what the fans expect.
Characters who have had “definitive runs” revert back to those runs. Ostrander’s run on the Spectre was by any measure the Spectre’s definitive run. Much like Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing was that character’s definitive run, or Frank Miller’s take on Batman has turned into Batman’s definitive run.
You can’t escape the pull of fan gravity – characters like the Spectre have a specific orbit that they’re stuck in and they can’t escape it. No matter what you try to do with the Spectre it will eventually revert back.
So yeah there is a reason – the Spectre is now “set” as a character. Attempting to do it differently will only bring rejection at best, backlash at worst. It would be like someone grabbing Swamp Thing and trying to take him in a significantly different direction than what Moore did with the character – you can tinker around the edges, but you can’t escape that orbit for long without the character settling right back down.
That damn goatee bugged me every time I saw it.
Incidentally, I’ve always liked the dynamic between The Phantom Stranger and Spectre; you might say they’re the closest each other has to a real friend, if only because they’re the only ones in the universe as old as the other.
Hell, bring back Percival Popp the Super-Cop if you like.
Ostrander did that already!
Characters who have had “definitive runs” revert back to those runs.
This is one of the things that depresses me most about the DC relaunch: nearly every character is getting dragged back to where they were twenty or thirty years ago, no matter what’s happened in the meanwhile. Superman is single again. Bruce Wayne is the only Batman again, and Dick is Nightwing again–those were some of DC’s best selling titles, and they couldn’t resist the editorially mandated pull!
Even comics that have been lying fallow for years and could theoretically start with a blank slate are going back to the well. My enthusiasm for the new Swamp Thing and Animal Man books pretty much disappeared as soon as I read the words “the Green” and “the Red” in their solicitations. So it’s to be warmed-over Alan Moore retreads forever, then.
Which means the Spectre is pretty much doomed to be the big NPC who gets his ass kicked to show how tough this summer’s cosmos-threatening crossover villain is. Or a supernatural menace who’s always on the verge of going crazy and exterminating the human race unless he’s stopped by a ragtag band of DC’s lesser magical powered characters. That’s the only part of the Ostrander run that’s stuck.
Okay, I have to stop typing before I depress myself any further.
I always wanted to like the Spectre, I really did, but the costume has always turned me off.
It doesn’t read right. The combination of ghostly green and white works fine, but he’s the sort of hero for whom the little gloves, booties, and man-panties work against. They pop out too much against the white background of his body and limbs, so that when that mysterious swirling green cap parts you find your eye automatically drawn to those odd little accesories.
..meh, get Mandrake to draw it again and I’ll buy almost any Spectre series. Hell, I’ve added the new Aquaman title to my pull list, it’s ker-azy times we live in.
I do kind of think we might see, say by next summer, an “Earth – Tuu ” or somesuch, with the JSA and the like on. If only so the writers can retell, again, all the great stories they read as bairns.
I have mixed feelings about the whole “God’s Angel of Vengeance” thing as well. Heck, even if one takes Ostrander’s approach as the definitively “right” one, in the hands of other writers, it won’t just be poor writing — it’ll be poor, awkwardly-done *theology*. Ouch. (And I don’t believe in the notion of God being arbitrary, myself, but this is why the whole thing opens a huge can of worms.)
If they bring Spectre back (or will he be part of the new DCU? Will he and the JSA be on their own Earth-Two again? I would not mind that…), having him be more of a powerful ghost sent by a mysterious cosmic “Voice” — perhaps implied to be God but open to a variety of interpretations — might be the best way to go.
As a side note (and full disclosure here), I’m a Christian (Episcopalian), and my very favorite run on the Spectre was actually — despite my initial dislike of the Hal Jordan aspect — the J.M. DeMatteis run. It managed to have a kind of transcendence when dealing with spiritual matters, arguably applicable to a variety of Eastern and Western religious beliefs, but again that’s very hard for random writers to maintain on a title if that writer is not the one guiding things.
He looks stupid with a goatee? Careful, them’s fightin’ words with my friends. Actually, a buddy of mine has the issue of they made a big deal of Crispus Allen is The Spectre, he had a new visual look immediately after Infinite Crisis. In the years Between IC and Blackest Night, you saw goatee blackman Spectre…..twice? Otherwise, he just looked and talked like Jim Corrigan. You never got the feel for the man inside the Spirit. Now you have me wondering if Crispus Spectre will survive the reboot in September.
@Jer: so, what you’re saying is that superhero comics are dead, and we’re just waiting for fanboys to get done with the corpse?
(If so I basically agree)
@Jack-Pumpkinhead:
I’m not even sure if DC will survive the reboot in September.
I’d say that the Fleischer run was more definitive–almost everyone since then has started from the premise of the Spectre as a ghostly vigilante who kills people in horrible ways. Ostrander worked with that (brilliantly). The deMatteis run had Hal consciously choose to turn away from that.
I will say Mark Hamill does an awesome Spectre voice on Brave and Bold.
If they do want to stick with the ‘canon’ but free up the Spectre to be a different kind of character … they have a perfect way to have their cake and eat it to. Have a new Spirit of Vengence. It’s happened before, it can happen again. Just like the whole “new age of magic” thing post Infinite Crisis was sort of an excuse to muck about with magic stuff, they could easily use something like the Flashpoint/Reboot reconfiguration of the universe cause a changing of the guard which leaves the Spectre no longer working for God. Suddenly, you have the potential for some angst as to what is his purpose now, you have the inevitable dealings with Eclipso who would now be ‘in the same boat’ as the Spectre, you could have the potential that the new guy is someone that Spectre opposes (or say, the New Guy sees both the Spectre and Eclipso and needing to be punished, etc).
More so that the “new host” story, it could provide something new, and if they chicken out, it was all a trial, and eventually Spectre is reinstated. At the very least, it could be interesting while it lasts.
I never liked the Spectre, he just seemed pointless, and honestly, the whole “Spirit of God’s Vengeance” thing with him always pissed me off – the idea of an angry, unstoppable embodiment of rage that can basically do whatever it wants but can’t actually deter any baddies…grr.
Take when he went batshit insane and starts killing magical folks, basically kills Atlantis, and NO ONE CALLS HIM ON IT. Poor bastards probably didn’t even know who he was. I dunno, perhaps I’m reading too much into it theologically. Sorry. Had to vent.
I haven’t seen much of the Spectre, but my favorite Spectre story is “Chill of the Night!” from Batman: Brave and the Bold. The plot revolves around Spectre (Mark Hamill!) and Phantom Stranger (Kevin Conroy!) playing tug-of-war with Batman’s soul as he hunts down Joe Chill. The character worked because- while not executing innocent magic users- he was still a very nasty piece of work dedicated to punishing the guilty, and he obviously enjoyed his job.
Yeah, the Chill of the Night bit just WORKED, even if it makes the Spectre more villainous than I prefer. The “I wouldn’t know anything about that…” followed by malicious laughter when confronted by the Stranger about how Joe Chill just happened to die IS the quintessential Spectre bit. The teaser the next episode with him transforming Professor Milo into cheese and letting his lab rats eat him is equally perfect.
I liked the short that was packaged with JLA: Crisis on Two Worlds as well. I’m of the school that sees the Wrath of the Spectre-Spectre as being the core of the character, so it was very satisfactory to see a story that might as well have been a part of that run animated. Great stuff…
By the way, let me vent about this: why on Earth has DC NOT released the entire Ostrander run in trade by now? A real tragedy…
Sorry but I only read the DeMatteis Jordan spectre (who I really liked!), so I can’t really have an opinion on Spectre… but what would you think would give this guy a fresh start?
& next , which one will it be? If it’s Beat boy, I swear to god I’ll make you a picture of Rex the Motherfucking wonder tearing the , as you call it, “green little bitch” apart! & I am A MAN OF MY WORD!
Your hatred of Beast boy is so tasty that it ‘s heart-warmling!
The thing that really got me to loving the Spectre was the way Alex Ross painted him in Kingdom Come. No absurd accessories, no human warmth, just a nude marble statue draped in a green cloak, death glittering in his shadowed eyes.
This guy is just Goddamn glorious-looking: http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_ldg40lwsR91qcaee5o1_1280.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ6IHWSU3BX3X7X3Q&Expires=1312173104&Signature=B5eRWJxSPc%2Feedj3wSKfJvoy0UU%3D
superhero comics are dead, and we’re just waiting for fanboys to get done with the corpse?
Even if this is true, I doubt it’s a reason to be all that despondent. First of all, the Big Two are big enough that they can probably get by on inertia for quite a while yet. Second, even if irrevocable economic forces have made the super hero comic book doomed to unprofitability, it’s still useful as a laboratory and idea farm for movies and TV shows. Fun fact: the rights to a movie version of Kick-Ass were sold before the first issue of the comic book was published. The film and comic were developed concurrently. The point is, a superhero doesn’t have to ascend to A-list status to be the next Blade. Third, what makes you think fanboys will ever “get done with the corpse”? A lack of originality probably won’t prevent kill the industry completely if it didn’t prevent the industry from lasting this long. I read somewhere or other (weak source, I know, sorry) that during the Silver Age some comic book writers would unabashedly repeat plots as recently as three years apart, on the assumption that their entire audience would have turned over by then and the new kids wouldn’t have read that story yet.
Well, now that I write that down, it sounds like a reason to be incredibly despondent about the comic book industry, and quite possibly yourself as well. “Marvel and DC will survive for a while just because they have money, the future of the industry is action movie tie-ins, and it’s not like it was ever original to begin with.” Ouch. Sorry.
But seriously, it just depends on what you want. Yes, true, it’s formulaic and predictable. But serial media exist to make money, and 90 percent of everything is crap. If you like the genre but not the current stars of it, there are still some lesser-known titles still out there (ever read Invincible? It’s the only comic I’ve read regularly for the past couple years) and tons and tons of back issues from the past 80-odd years of the genre. If you like the genre, don’t give up on it just because the latest relaunch is a retread.
I never knew much about The Spectre until I read the Ostrander/Mandrake run, but I really did love it. I guess what I dislike the most about the things they’ve done with The Spectre in recent years is they apparently gave him the ability to damn people directly, which makes no sense, because, as we’ve seen, they’ve made him incredibly fallible. Apparently he also has to take vengeance even on justifiable homicide these days, which makes the damnation power even more problematic and even more nonsensical.
I was a big fan of Gaiman’s Books of Magic, and am still convinced he was implying that the Spectre was Raguel.
However, I earlier recall Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing Annual where Spectre is revealed to be guarding an entrance to Hell, which would seem to suggest he was Maalik or one of the Zabaaniyah? I wonder why Gaiman overlooked Moore’s reveal when they had been discussing their work closely back then!?
Given the direction Neil took Spectre’s origin during Books of Magic, I’m wondering if when he showed the six angels Uriel, Raphael, Michael, Saraquel, Gabriel, and Raguel, his exclusion of Ramiel – when they’re always referred to as a group – was meant to suggest that he was the proposed identity for the Phantom Stranger?
I still am keen to know what specific angel Alan Moore intended the Phantom Stranger to be from his Secret Origins tale?