It may be hard to believe, but despite having been a DC Comics reader since August, 1965, I’d never bought a single issue of Adventure Comics — the second comic-book series ever to have been released by the publisher, way back in 1935, and one of its longest running — prior to October, 1973. What can I say? I evidently had a huge blind spot in regards to the super-team who’d held the lead feature spot when I first got into comics in the mid-1960s — i.e., the Legion of Super-Heroes (a quirk I wouldn’t really get over until the team’s Paul Levitz-Keith Giffen era kicked off in 1982), and I also wasn’t much of a fan of Supergirl (who took over from the LSH in 1969). Nor did I give Adventure a nibble when, following Supergirl’s graduation to her own title, editor Joe Orlando briefly switched the venerable series formerly known as New Comics to an anthology format with #425, then introduced a mysterious new superheroine, the Black Orchid, who held the cover spot for three issues (#428 to #430).
But the Spectre? The Ghostly Guardian had been one of my favorite DC superheroes ever since I picked up his third tryout issue of Showcase, back in 1966, and I’d been missing him ever since his apparent “death” (how do you kill a ghost, anyway?) in Justice League of America #83 (Sep., 1970). So once I learned that DC was bringing the Astral Avenger back in Adventure Comics, I became a buyer of Adventure Comics… at least for the duration.
The Spectre’s return to regular publication had been heralded a couple of months earlier in Secret Origins #5 (Nov.-Dec., 1973). That issue reprinted writer Jerry Siegel and artist Bernard Bailey’s two-part origin story for the hero, as first presented back in More Fun Comics #52-53 (Feb. and Mar., 1940) — a story my younger self had never seen before, and was happy to finally have the chance to read. Sure, it was a rather different Spectre than I was used to; his alter ego of police detective Jim Corrigan wasn’t a separate, living person who served as the Spectre’s “host body” (as he had been in his 1960s series), but was rather no more or less than the ghostly crusader himself, just not wearing a costume. He was also seemingly a little more deadly in his dealings with evildoers than I was accustomed to. Still, I understood that the character had evolved over time, just like most others who dated back to comics’ Golden Age, so those differences were neither surprising, nor concerning.
What I didn’t realize until Adventure #431 actually came out was that the new iteration of the Spectre feature would use his origin story as its own launching point, ignoring pretty much everything that had been done with the character since 1940. (In fact, setting aside the period details relating to fashion, cars, etc., one could readily take Adventure #431’s “The Wrath of… the Spectre” as a direct follow-up to those first two More Fun appearances.) Evolution, shmevolution; what DC was offering us in the fall of 1973 was the original, Golden Age Spectre — or, at least, that character as editor Joe Orlando, writer Michael Fleisher, and artist Jim Aparo chose to interpret him: an earthbound Angel of Death who casually dispensed gruesome capital punishments upon murderous criminals without any regard whatsoever for due process.
In our last post, we discussed how Marvel Comics’ Punisher character came into being as part of a cultural trend in the early 1970s towards ruthlessly lethal crimefighters — a phenomenon likely inspired at least in part by a dramatic increase in the violent crime rate over the past decade. That cultural trend clearly influenced the 1973 revival of the Spectre, as well; indeed, the latter came about as a direct personal response to real-world crime, according to the account Orlando gave Paul Levitz in an interview for The Amazing World of DC Comics #6 (May-Jun., 1975):
…I had just been mugged in broad daylight on upper Broadway, where I was living at the time. The feeling of helplessness and anger and loss of manhood (my wife was with me at the time). As I watched the two muggers strutting away with my wallet gave me the Walter Mitty idea of fantasy revenge. “That’s what I’ll do to you bums, I’ll bring back The Spectre!” The Spectre will rid the world of the evil vermin that preys on upstanding hard-working middle-aged comic book editors.
From the reaction and sales of ADVENTURE I have a suspicion that a lot of muggers are reading my book.
That’s a striking and memorable anecdote, though one that would be called into question over a decade later, when DC reprinted the 1973-75 Fleisher-Aparo run of Spectre stories in a 1988 miniseries called Wrath of the Spectre. This miniseries included a four-part article by Peter Sanderson about the origins and history of the Spectre feature in Adventure; in the first issue’s installment, Sanderson recounted the anecdote of Orlando’s fateful mugging as recalled by both Jim Aparo and Paul Levitz (whose duties at DC at the time the stories were coming out included serving as Orlando’s assistant, as well as in contributing to The Amazing World of DC Comics). He then went on to add:
Well, we fear we have to demolish this widely known legend, because the facts simply do not bear it out. The mugging did occur, but Joe Orlando is not sure whether it happened before or after he decided to use the Spectre in ADVENTURE. “I might have used that (the mugging) to justify why I was doing that,” he says, referring to ADVENTURE’s portrayal of the Spectre as a ruthless figure of vengeance. “As a kid, I liked the Superman (of the 1930s) who took the criminal up really high and said, ‘Listen, buster, you tell me what’s going to happen or I’m going to drop you.’ That’s why I read Superman. I didn’t like him when people made him into a wimp. I don’t like any super-heroes who are wimps. Because that’s not fulfilling the job they’re supposed to be doing, which is, when you’ve lost all recourse through legal channels, to use force. That’s what a super-hero’s about.” Asked then if he would have done the Fleisher/Aparo SPECTRE stories if the mugging had never occurred, Orlando replies, “Oh, absolutely.”
Based on the above, one could hardly help but conclude that Orlando was embellishing things just a bit back in 1975, when he claimed that his decision to revive the Spectre in Adventure was a direct result of his being mugged. Nevertheless, the waters would be further muddied in 1998 when Jon B. Cooke interviewed Orlando for Comic Book Artist #1; apparently unaware of Sanderson’s supposed debunking of the mugging “legend”, Cooke bought the matter up thusly:
CBA: You’ve mentioned that you had a real-life incident that led to those gruesome [Spectre] stories?
Joe: I was living up on the West Side and my wife was eight months pregnant. We got held up in the daytime. We were pushed up against the wall of a church and they were kids, about 14. My wife started to cry and shake and she opened her pocketbook and I gave them all the money I had in my pocket. Then they walked away so arrogantly, so slowly that I got incensed that I couldn’t do anything about it. I ran around looking for a cop and I suddenly realized the loneliness of being a victim. All that anger came out and it clicked with Fleisher’s needs and so we created some nifty Horror stories…
Cooke conducted his interview with Orlando on February 19, 1998, the veteran comics pro passed away only 10 months later, at the age of 71, so his remarks for CBA #1 probably represent his last word on the subject. But what should we make of them? Did Orlando forget that, just one decade earlier, he’d cast doubt on the causal relationship between his mugging and his decision to bring back the Spectre? Or had his memory of events become clearer in the interim (which admittedly seems doubtful, but can’t be completely ruled out)? We’ll likely never know for sure, one way or the other — but I think it’s worth noting that the version of the story offered by Orlando in 1998 doesn’t have such an emphatic “eureka” moment as the 1975 iteration; to wit, instead of claiming to have come up with the idea of reviving the Spectre on the spot while watching the muggers saunter away, he speaks more generally of how his anger over being victimized “clicked with Fleisher’s needs”. In the end, perhaps the most we can say for certain is that the mugging, whenever it happened, informed Orlando’s editorial approach to the revived Spectre series, whether it actually served as the revival’s “secret origin” or not.
Cover to the first volume of Michael Fleisher’s never-completed Encyclopedia of Comic Book Heroes, published by Macmillan in 1976.
For his part, Michael Fleisher (1942-2018) seems to have believed that the idea to use the Spectre in Adventure originated with him. A couple of years earlier, following a stint writing and editing for Encyclopedia Britannica, Fleisher had come to DC to research a massive, multi-volume reference work, The Encyclopedia of Comic Book Heroes, using the publisher’s on-site library of back issues (sadly, only three volumes of the encyclopedia — dealing with Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman, respectively — ever made it to print). While he’d read and enjoyed comic books as a youth, Fleisher didn’t consider himself a comics “fan”; nevertheless, he impressed Joe Orlando, who not only hired him as an editorial assistant, but also offered him the opportunity to write stories for Orlando’s various titles. Fleisher’s first published effort was “Kiss of the Serpent”, which he scripted from a plot by Mary DeZuñiga, and which appeared in Sinister House of Secret Love #4 [Apr.-May, 1972]); after accepting several more of Fleisher’s stories for his “mystery” anthologies, Orlando decided to offer him a shot at writing the new lead feature in Adventure Comics. But what would that feature be?
Over a decade later, Fleisher explained to Peter Sanderson how he’d first encountered the Spectre in Jules Feiffer’s seminal 1965 book The Great Comic Book Heroes, then became reacquainted with him during the many hours he spent in DC’s library:
…when I read the Spectre stories as part of my research for my encyclopedia, I liked especially the early ones that were very scary and horrific… I thought the Spectre could be a really exciting character, but that the real spirit of the character, no pun intended, had been exemplified by those very early stories. I cut my teeth in comics writing horror stories; I like horror stories. The early SPECTRE stories were much more in keeping with my own sensibility.
There came a time when Joe Orlando needed a character for ADVENTURE COMICS. He showed me a list of characters. I don’t know where the list came from, whether he’d been given the list by management or whether he’d concocted the list on his own. I don’t even remember if the Spectre was on the list. I remember him handing me the list and my reading it, and I remember saying, ‘Let me do the Spectre.’ He wasn’t familiar with the Spectre so I gave him the section of my encyclopedia that dealt with the character, and he took it home and read it. I remember him commenting that he liked the Spectre a lot, and said that the Phantom Stranger was like a weak sister to the Spectre, which I agree with. So it was agreed that the Spectre would be the lead feature for ADVENTURE.
Speaking of the Spectre’s “weak sister” — the Phantom Stranger — the second primary member of Orlando’s new creative team for Adventure‘s lead feature, Jim Aparo, had until recently been the regular artist on that character’s series (another Orlando book, naturally). Aparo had ostensibly given up Phantom Stranger for the somewhat more prestigious gig of drawing 
Batman in Detective Comics. — though, in the end, Aparo only ended up drawing two Batman stories for Detective‘s new editor, Archie Goodwin. According to a later letters-column comment by Goodwin, who was writing as well as editing the Batman feature, he himself ran behind on deadlines, with the result that his and Aparo’s schedules couldn’t sync up successfully; however it happened, fans of Jim Aparo’s rendition of Batman would have to settle for its regular appearances in Brave and the Bold for just a while longer, as the artist returned to Orlando’s fold to take on the Spectre revival in Adventure. And Aparo clearly was a great fit for the Spectre, as might have been suggested by his existing track record on characters previously drawn by Neal Adams (which included the Spectre as well as Batman and the Phantom Stranger) — and which was resoundingly demonstrated by Adventure #431’s macabre, nearly-blurbless cover as well as by its lead story’s ominous opening splash page:
As was his custom, Aparo handled the inking and even the lettering for this story, as well as the pencilling; nevertheless, there’s one additional person named in the credits alongside himself, Fleisher, and Orlando: Russell Carley, whose contribution is listed as “art continuity”. This one stumped me as a sixteen-year-old reader in 1973; as I recall, the best I could come up with was that Carley must have done rough layouts, or breakdowns, for Aparo to follow. That wasn’t quite it, however, as Michael Fleisher would explain years later in an interview published in The Comics Journal #56 (June, 1980):
Russell Carley is a fine artist, a painter, who’s a very close friend of mine, and when I first began to write comics regularly, I really had no experience in coming up with the plots, for example, or in breaking down the stories. Those were both intimidating things for me to do. So Russell and I would get together and we would work out a plot together… And when I’d gotten the plot okayed, Russell would take the plot and he would make a breakdown of it — that is, he would take sheets of paper and divide them into panels, and he would describe in each panel, very briefly, what was to take place, and then he would give me these pieces of paper and I would write the script. When we started out, we wanted to say, “Story by Michael Fleisher and Russell Carley,” but Joe Orlando felt that we should distinguish between what he did and what I did, so we said “script by Michael Fleisher,” and there was no standard title in comics for what Russell was doing, so we made up a term. In retrospect it was a confusing term, and no one really knows what Russell did. So maybe that was a bad idea…
According to Fleisher, this went on for about eighteen months, after which Carley stepped away — both from the specific gig of collaborating with his friend, and from working in the comics industry in general — and Fleisher began crafting his comic-book scripts without assistance.
And now, on with our story…
And here he is — the Spectre’s alter ego, Jim Corrigan — with no explanation of how he’s returned from the great beyond following the events of JLA #83, where we readers had seen his essence dissipate into the void of interdimensional space.
The gang’s leader, Fritz, tells their remaining confederate, Charlie, to keep working at his antiques store like everything is normal; meanwhile, he himself will head down to South America. Everyone agrees to this plan, and soon they go their separate ways. But before much time has gone by, Charlie receives a surprise visitor…
Almost as confounding to my younger self as Jim Corrigan’s unexplained return from his supposedly final reward was his invulnerability to bullets, and ability to disappear. Yeah, sure, the initial setup for the Spectre feature in More Fun had been that Corrigan and Spectre were one and the same ghost; but I was familiar with the later modification — first introduced in More Fun #75 (Jan., 1942), and maintained throughout the character’s Silver Age appearances — that saw Jim restored to life as an ordinary, physical human being, so that he now served merely as the mortal host for the awesomely powerful Spectre. If the Jim Corrigan I knew from the Spectre’s 1960s series had been riddled with bullets, he’d presumably have bled out and died (again). So what the heck was going on here?
Hank, the garage owner, blows off Charlie’s warning, figuring his fellow crook’s been hitting the bottle again…
The Swamp Thing poster on Hank’s wall (based on Bernie Wrightson’s cover for the series’ 5th issue) is the kind of obvious but amusing visual gag Jim Aparo liked to drop into his artwork on a fairly routine basis. The same might be said about the next panel’s revelation that Hank is reading the Daily Bugle — the New York newspaper that Spider-Man sells photos to over at DC’s competitor, Marvel Comics:
Something which I’m pretty sure my younger self didn’t notice in 1973, but stands out sharply in my latest re-reading… how did the Spectre locate Hank? We have to assume that he’s not omniscient, since Jim Corrigan needed the initial clue of the Golden Age Antiques business card to point him in the direction of the killers. Perhaps he gleaned the location from reading Charlie’s mind earlier… after all, his first words to Hank (in the last panel of page 8, above) indicate he’s privy to that latter crook’s unspoken thoughts.
Hank’s horrific fate has already been presented to us via this issue’s cover; there, however, a viewer might imagine that the Spectre is messing with the miscreant’s head, and that his melting into messy goo is all happening only in his mind. Actually, you can still imagine that’s what’s happening even as you come to the end of page 7 — but you definitely can no longer do so once you’ve turned to where our story continues on the “2nd page following”:
Again, how does the Spectre know that the criminals’ ringleader Mitch is on this particular flight? Or that he even exists, for that matter? The mind-reading hypothesis would seem to be the only one that makes sense.
The “turned into a skeleton” bit has been lifted by Fleisher directly from the Spectre’s debut adventure in More Fun #53 — though the effect in that story was actually even eerier, as our protagonist allowed his victim to remain sentient and vocal for a moment or two before letting his skeleton fall to the floor as a heap of lifeless bones. And in light of Fleisher and Orlando’s later claims that, in making their Spectre so unrelentingly and unsparingly homicidal, they were simply doing “the Golden Age Spectre” as the character had originally been envisioned, I think it’s worth pointing out that although Jim Corrigan takes vengeance on all three of the gangsters who murdered him in his origin story, Skeleton Guy is the only one that he outright kills (the other two merely lose their wits — and one of them even manages to hang around long enough to make a return engagement 28 years later, in Neal Adams’ Spectre #5).
And on that rather incongruously humorous note, the premiere installment of the revived Spectre feature comes to a close. Whew.
Back in October, 1973, this story left me bemused on multiple levels, beginning with the fact that it didn’t jibe with the Discarnate Detective’s past continuity in the slightest — a concern that had been anticipated by at least one fan even before Adventure #431’s release, as I’d learn when I turned to the book’s “Dateline: Adventure” letters column:
As I recall, my sixteen-year-old self found the editorial response to Jim True’s letter unsatisfying for a couple of reasons. The more nitpicky one had to do with the supposed quote from Fleisher about JLA #83’s writer, Denny O’Neil, sticking the Spectre in a crypt and leaving him there — since, as anyone who’d actually read that issue should have known, O’Neil did get him out of the crypt within that comic’s pages, only to have him “killed” later on in the story. My more substantial objection had to do with the proffered explanation of the Spectre’s exploits in Adventure taking place “before he was imprisoned”. I was well aware that in his last pre-JLA #82-83 
appearances — i.e., the final two issues of his own series — the Spectre had been charged by the Heavenly Power that had created him with lugging around a “Journal of Judgement” — a penance imposed upon him for the transgression of summarily executing a criminal. If one homicide had gotten him in immediate trouble with the Big Boss Upstairs, it hardly made sense that he’d have been allowed to commit three in rapid succession, as he does in Adventure #431. Not to mention the fact that in those stories — as well as in every other story featuring the character since his 1965 revival — Jim Corrigan and the Spectre had been represented as being two different people. If the new stories in Adventure were supposed to have taken place before JLA #83, then they must have taken place way before — like, in the 1940s. But that theory didn’t seem to be borne out by the look of the clothes and automobiles Jim Aparo had drawn in “The Wrath of… the Spectre”.*
I suspect that neither Michael Fleisher nor Joe Orlando ever thought much about these issues, if they did at all. Orlando had first come to prominence in the comics industry in the 1950s as an artist at EC Comics, which had set the standard for pre-Comics code horror, and he clearly still had much greater affinity for “weird” material than he did for the superhero genre. Meanwhile, Michael Fleisher — his immersion in DC’s library of back issues notwithstanding — seems to have had little interest in writing traditional cape-and-cowl yarns. In any case, fan concerns over inconsistencies in the details of DC’s superhero universe were probably irrelevant to both men (save, perhaps, for how they might ultimately affect sales).
Being primarily interested in the horror aspect of the Spectre feature, they may also have been disinterested in the other major issue that my younger self had with this new take in addition to the continuity problems — which was that the suspense factor in this first outing was essentially nil. I was used to the Ghostly Guardian going up against supernatural menaces who, as powerful as he was, could still credibly give him a run for his money. But the three hapless hoods in “The Wrath of… the Spectre” are clearly no challenge whatsoever to the story’s protagonist. If there’s any suspense at all in this kind of story, it derives from our waiting to see just what sort of gruesomely imaginative demise the Astral Avenger has in store for the latest evildoer to face his displeasure… which might be OK for a horror story (although in my experience, even horror stories — the good ones, anyway — tend to rely on twist endings), but isn’t very satisfying in a superhero adventure — at least, not to this particular reader, then or now.
All that said, there’s no faulting “The Wrath of… the Spectre” on the artistic side of things. With this initial effort, Jim Aparo immediately joined the first rank of the character’s visual interpreters, alongside such worthies as Neal Adams and Murphy Anderson. And the appeal of this artwork would be enough to bring your humble blogger back for the next issue of Adventure Comics… that, and my curiosity to see whether the stories would continue to follow the pattern that this first episode seemed to establish, or if Fleisher might up the suspense quotient a bit — either by giving the Spectre more formidable opponents, or by introducing subplots, or by, well, anything else. But how all that ultimately worked out for your humble blogger will, naturally, have to be a matter for discussion in future posts.
And now for something completely different…
As noted earlier in this post, when Supergirl was promoted out of Adventure Comics‘ lead spot to helm her own title, Joe Orlando didn’t immediately replace her with another continuing feature. Rather, he moved to an anthology format — one that was a bit more free-form than his other titles of that ilk (e.g., House of Mystery, Weird War Tales, etc.), so that the stories might range from historical adventure to fantasy to science fiction. By the time issue #431 was in production, the title’s editorial focus had already shifted back towards continuing characters, but Orlando evidently still had some “anthology” stories in inventory — and the eight content pages in #431 that remained to be filled following the 12-page debut of the Spectre feature were given over to one such:
“Is a Snerl Human?” was the work of Sheldon “Shelly” Mayer (whose long tenure at DC as a writer and editor extended all the way back to the company’s beginnings in 1935) and Alex Toth (who’d received some of his earliest professional assignments from Mayer, back in 1947).
Like Jim Aparo, Alex Toth preferred to ink and letter as well as pencil his work when he could; his devotion to designing a page of comics as a single aesthetic unit may clearly be seen in the opening splash page of this tale, where he’s gone so far as to incorporate the story’s very job number (“J-1713”) into his composition. (UPDATE: 10/28/23, 2:00 p.m.: Per the Grand Comics Database, the lettering in this story was actually by Joe Letterese [though Toth still seems likely to have handled the balloon and caption placement]. Many thanks to David Allen Jones on Facebook for the correction.)
Most of Toth’s comic-book work during this era was for horror and war titles; but he clearly also had an aptitude for science fiction, as anyone familiar with his design work for such classic animated series as Space Ghost and The Herculoids could tell you. His animation background comes through in this story, particularly with his simple, yet striking — and very appealing — visualization of the Snerls.
A savvy science fiction fan might have all kinds of questions about this story’s premise, such as: How did the “higher forms of animal life” (seemingly just birds and, as we’re about to see, mammals) manage to “separate” themselves from the humans of the planet Teyton (whose backwards spelling of “not yet” is almost certainly not coincidental)? When and how did such beasts learn to speak? And how in the world could such a large and intelligent creature as the Snerl be suddenly “discovered”? Those are all good questions — or would be, if we wanted to take this yarn as a piece of “hard” SF. But I think the reader is best served by viewing this as a fable, like those of Aesop — though one with SF trappings, obviously.
As best as I can determine, “Is a Snerl Human?” has never been reprinted in the U.S. (it does appear to be available digitally), which seems a shame. Perhaps it doesn’t quite rank as a full-on masterpiece, but it’s still an affecting, superbly illustrated fable whose message, sad to say, remains timeless. It’s been my pleasure to share it with you here.
*A later letters column would offer yet another explanation for the continuity discrepancies between the Spectre stories in Adventure and the ones that preceded them: namely, that Fleisher and Aparo were chronicling the doings of the previously unseen Earth-One Spectre, rather than the Earth-Two-based Justice Society member we’d been reading about ever since 1940. With some revisions, this notion seems to have stuck, more or less — at least up until Crisis on Infinite Earths rendered it obsolete.
I remember getting this one when it came out. I had been a frequent reader of Adventure Comics when it featured The Legion of Super-Heroes and I had bought it when DC converted its comics to 25 cents but included some reprints. If my memory serves I did buy the issues that starred Back Orchid as well. So this has brought back some memories. Unfortunately in moving from Ontario to British Columbia back in the eighties only a fraction of my comics could come with me and those issues of Adventure didn’t.
I’d been a huge Legion of Superheroes fan but Supergirl’s stories came out during the move from the UK to the US and I lost touch with all comics. I picked up Adventure when the Black Orchid debuted and transitioned over to the Spectre.
For me, the horror aspect of the grisly deaths and the risk to innocent bystanders was enough to keep me reading. Rereading them a few years ago, though, they definitely did lack a little something. Suspense, as you say.
An article in Amazing World of DC Comics worked out the details of the Spectre’s convoluted history, including his imprisonment in the crypt. Roy Thomas in America vs. The Justice Society asserted it was the Earth-2 Spectre but operating on Earth-One. Which continues his All-Star Squadron decision not to have any One/Two duplicates that weren’t already established.
I love the story of the Snerls. Did not see the ending coming but it’s perfect.
Roy did go out of his way to establish that there was an Earth-2 Aquaman in the closing days of All-Star Squadron. In that case, the original dtories had a different origin, which was probably a big part of his motivation,
He’d planned to tie Earth-2 Aquaman in with Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and Captain Nemo. When the Crisis hit, he eventually recycled it into Neptune Perkins’ backstory.
I had been a loyal reader of Adventure comics for the past three or four years. I stuck with it after Supergirl vacated the cover slot and was bemused with some of the features that replaced her, they just didn’t fit my, at the time very narrow, definition of a comic that I wanted to read. I thoroughly enjoyed the Black Orchid issues and was looking forward to more of the same. I remember being excited and happy when I saw The Spectre on the cover of this issue as, it seemed to reinforce that Adventure was returning to its Superhero roots. I remember it being like a slap in the face when I read the story. Sure, the protagonists deserved to be punished but in this way? Even at the age of 15 I struggled with the way that “Justice” was being delivered. It didn’t stop me from buying and enjoying all of the subsequent Spectre issues of Adventure Comics though. Although I was a bit bemused when “Weird” was added to the title on the cover of subsequent issues as I was not a mystery/horror comic fan.
If my memory serves my right (and I’m sure you will elaborate on this in future posts) the stories did become more complex and there was the addition of a supporting character who disagreed with the Spectre’s brand of justice and tried to hold him to account. Hazy 50 year old memories here!
I was never bothered with the lack of continuity with the Spectre’s previous appearances. I had missed JLA 82/83 and Brave and Bold 75 so I was happy that this was the Earth 1 Spectre and never gave it a second thought. The fact that he appeared again with Batman in Brave and Bold 116 just reinforced this.
I’ve always wondered how this series was viewed by the fans and others. Being in the UK I was so distant from it. I assume that it didn’t sell too well as the series only ran for 10 issues and then the Spectre was replaced with Aquaman as the cover feature. Hopefully your future posts will go into the reasons for its short duration and solve that 50 year old mystery for me.
I’ll do my best, Brian! 😉
Interesting idea here, but it was a bit limited.
I think the violence and the Aparo art made it sell (for a while) . . . but it was a bt too “one note” to stick around.
I think Fleisher and Aparo tried to make the “doomed romance with the mortal woman” angle work. However, it was self-limiting and had no arc. The fourth (book length) installment pencilled by Frank Thorne, with a more powerful bad guy and more of the Jim Corrigam/Clarice Windsor issue worked better, but was not tried again. (The issues with the Mike Grell Aquaman back-ups must have sold better.)
Fleisher died of Altzheimer’s in 2018. He led a kind of sad life but really found an interesting direction later in life. In the late 1980s and early 1990s (when he was about 50), he finished college at Columbia and compleated a Ph.D, in Anthropology st Michigan and become an expert on livestock rustling in East Africa, He much of the rest of his life working in East Africa for NGOs.
He also sued Harlan Ellison and the Comics Journal and lost. Among Ellison’s published thoughts about Fleisher were “derange-o” and “bugf—-” and he said that Publishers’ Weekly had called Fleisher’s novel, Chasing Hairy, “the product of a sick mind.” (It should be noted that Ellison said these things in an over-all appreciation for Fleisher’s originality and distinctiveness. However, Orlando’s comment about Fleisher’s “needs” makes me wonder . . . .)
I hope veery one associated with this found peace in the end . . . .
I have never liked horror or anything else Fleisher wrote so I think the appeal here for me was 100% Aparo, whose name surprisingly is in Edge’s spellcheck. The plots were less detailed and nuanced than preschool readers so maybe that’s why the horrific deaths weren’t taken too seriously by me as well. The biggest surprise in this review for me though is I wasn’t even twelve and a half when I bought it. I can’t recall how I could recall how I afforded as many comics as I bought at that age or why the parents who wouldn’t let me watch Mission Impossible would countenance that cover.
And I call bullshit on Goodwin’s dismissal of Aparo. The man could draw, ink, and letter two monthlies at a time. There’s no way he wouldn’t be able to produce.
Quoting myself: “According to a later letters-column comment by Goodwin, who was writing as well as editing the Batman feature, his and Aparo’s schedules simply didn’t sync up successfully.”
Clearly, I could have worded that better. Goodwin actually indicated it was his own lateness that sparked the scheduling problem, and that it was no fault of Aparo’s.
I’m going to revise that sentence, but will leave the original phrasing in this comment for reference’s sake.
I thought this period of Aparo’s career was “film noir in comics.” He was painting the covers of the paperbacks of McBain’s 87th Precinct Novels at the time in a similar style.
B&B # 104, a Deadman Team-up, was the epitome of this. https://www.comics.org/issue/25598/ How it got ignored for an award, I don’t know.
Alan…you didn’t read the Legion of Super Heroes either? I don’t know what it is about this particular moment in 1973-74, but we have certainly been seeing the holes in your collecting, haven’t we? The Legion, Kamandi, Omac and most egregiously the Goodwin/Simonson Manhunter stories (don’t think I didn’t notice that the issue of Detective you included above to illustrate Aparo’s move to the book didn’t include a cover blurb for the Manhunter back-up feature, which is probably the closest we’ll ever get to a post on that incredible series) make up a large part of my own collecting and reading at the time and it makes me sad that we won’t get to talk about them. SIGH. (and for French readers and fans of Pepe Le Pew, “Le Sigh”). It’s very sad and I mourn for the sixteen-year-old you who never discovered these books and the stories they contained. Weird aside, but do you realize that the time you’re writing about now is only two years away now from when we actually met in college? Talk about a really Weird Adventure (see what I did there?).
Anyway, I really loved the Spectre book and to my knowledge, I bought all ten issues. Jim Aparo was at the top of his game here and really seemed to enjoy the work on this one. What struck me from the very beginning is how Aparo’s title pages on The Spectre, all seemed to call back to Will Eisner’s work on The Sprirt, in terms of the creative way he’d include the character’s name within the artwork. I loved that.
As for Michael Fleischer, I don’t even know if I realized he was here. My only memories of Fleischer come from the Batman (pictured above) and Superman volumes of his Encyclopedia of Comics, which I bought then and still own now. I knew next to nothing about the 1940’s Spectre or the differences between his Earth One and Earth Two incarnations, other than I didn’t think that he or “weak sister” Phantom Stranger ought to be hanging out with super-heroes.
I agree that this story is lacking in the suspense department, but I think the graphic and creative nature of the violence and the sheer fact that our hero was killing people, blinded me to that fact in the beginning and it wasn’t a big deal for me. To my mind, this version of the Spectre was sort of a run-up to all of the incredibly violent heroes yet to come in the 90’s. For me, however, The Spectre checked off a bloody box in my black little heart and I certainly enjoyed this one while it lasted. Thanks. Alan.
Fleisher’s encyclopedias were an invaluable tool back in that era. Nothing else gave that much information. Like Alan, I wish he’d finished his set.
I’ll mention here that I’m in the middle of rereading the Ostrander/Mandrake Spectre from the 1990s and they do a magnificent job incorporating all the different Spectre eras and asking questions such as “did God really think the Spectre could wipe out evil?” A shame that after that, and then deMatteis’ brief fling with the Spectre as a force of redemption, they defaulted back to the Fleisher/Aparo version as the definitive take.
Ah, but there *is* a blurb for “Manhunter” on that Detective cover, Don… look again! Other than a head-shot, that’s as much cover promotion as Paul Kirk ever got for his whole run — at least until the final chapter in ‘tec #443, where he and Batman co-starred on the cover as well as inside.
And as I think I’ve already mentioned a time or two now, I *did* buy one issue of Goodwin’s Detective, so we won’t be completely bereft of the opportunity to discuss “Manhunter”. That post will be coming up in almost exactly one month, so start honing your comments now…
I will have much to say when we get to that one. I’m sure I’m not alone.
That’s what I get for writing convoluted sentences with quips and asides that go on so long even I can’t follow them any more. I SAW the Manhunter blurb and was trying to tease you about including it, but got so lost down the rabbit hole of my own sentence structure, I wound up saying just the opposite. Hmm. Hopefully, when you get to Detective #443, you’ll cover the whole Manhunter saga. That will be worth looking forward to.
My one-and-only “new bought” issue of the run is Detective #439, so we’ll all have to squeeze any thoughts we have about the saga as a whole into that one — again, that’ll be coming late next month.
I recently reread the Manhunter backups and remain much impressed with Archie Goodwin’s writing. It would make a great screenplay for a film (though the costume would *have* to be redesigned).
As I was quite the Marvel loyalist in the ’70s, I didn’t get any of the Spectre’s adventures back then, although in the ’80s I read a few articles about Fleischer’s run in The Comics Journal. Very much in it’s own pocket genre of revenge fantasy. More bitter amusement than suspenseful. I’ll confess that when it comes to certain types of psychopaths who gleefully cause much harm and anguish in others, I don’t particularly mind seeing them getting a taste of their own medicine when there’s absolutely no doubt that they committed horrible crimes. Of course, things don’t work like that in the real world, where all too often innocent people are convicted of crimes they didn’t do while the real culprits all too often are never held to account at all. And these sort of stories can get repetitive and boring after a bit, which I think largely explains why they rarely last long as a series. There’s also that problem of the all-too-powerful protagonist, who, while not exactly all-knowing, still comes off as rather omni-potent albeit in an after the fact way — he can’t prevent the murders & other violent crimes from happening, or put anything back to right, but only act afterwards to punish the culprits.
I sort of get the feeling Fleischer was treating this series as existing in a sort of pocket universe separate from the rest of DC and even from every other story the Spectre had appeared in since his first few Golden Age stories. If I’d been like you, Alan, reading this at the time and familiar with the Spectre’s more recent stories, my own fanboy sentiments like would have sent alarm bells going off in me too, prompting me to think, “what the hell is this Fleischer guy doing with my Spectre??? He’s ignoring continuity! This is outrageous!” I did hate it back in the day when I read a story in which a character’s personality, behavior and powers seemed entirely out of sync with what had gone before and with no rational explanation even attempted. Can’t think of any examples right off though, not counting jarring differences in writing styles such as when Kirby took over writing Captain America & the Falcon and the Black Panther back in the mid-70s. Even knowing he co-created both Cap and T’Challa, his versions in 1976 seemed entirely different from the same characters as previously written only months before by, respectively, Englehart and McGregor. I missed the issue of The Comics Journal that had the interview with Harlan Ellison, which referenced Fleischer’s run on the Spectre, but subsequently read much about the fallout from that printed discussion as Ellison described Fleischer’s writing of that series as “crazy” or words to that effect, prompting Fleischer to file a lawsuit against Ellison and TCJ for defamation of his character. Sheesh, I thought that was being excessively sensitive as from I read of the transcript it didn’t strike me as genuinely depreciative of him, unlike their take down of Don Heck’s art. and apparently Heck didn’t feel it was worth his while to sue about that!
Love that Snerl backup story by Toth, and it is a classic in my book.
I have the 3 encyclopedia volumes Fleischer completed. I read he was planning to do 6 volumes. What were the other volumes going to be about? Also in one of the annual Justice League/Justice Society teamups (the one that retconned Black Canary into being her own daughter) it was established that the Spectre came from Earth 2 and was inhabiting the Jim Corrigan of Earth 1.
Flash. Green Lantern. Hawkman and the Big Three from Timely is all I remember (dog’s on my lap so I can’t simply go and look at my volumes for the answer)
At least Fleisher wrote three. Steranko only published two out of his projected six issues of the History of Comics.
Adventure Comics was a “Must have” for me (ever since 1965) and the glory days of the Legion drawn by Superman artist supreme Curt Swan. After issue 380 my purchasing of it was sporadic and it went off my radar when those terrible Schaffenburger Supergirl stories headlined. I bought a few issues to see Mike Sekowsky’s (my favourite JLA artist) rendition of the maid of might, but then dropped it completely. I was overjoyed when The Spectre took centre stage, but was somwhat disappointed that Murphy Anderson was no where to be seen, as, unlike fellow readers I didn’t much care for Aparo’s artwork. I had thought that some of The Spectre’s JSA team mates might turn up, but was disappointed there too…. however, it was good to see The Spectre again (in any form) and I bought the whole 10 issue run. When Aquaman replaced The Spectre my Adventure Comics purchasing days were over. Ufortunately, my comic collecting days ended in 1982 so I missed any subsequent Spectre runs, but may one day log onto one of those “read comics for free” internet sites and catch up with The Ghostly Guardian once more
Murphy Anderson was approaching the end of his primary work being comics, then. His last Action Comics inks on a Superman story hit the stands in January of 1974 and he had some cartoons in Plop in February of ’74 and that was the last new work until late 1976.
He had moved over to work for Will Eisner on the Army’s PS Maintenance bulletins.
Much later he wrote the Black Condor’s origin for the post-Crisis SECRET ORIGINS at DC (he was a huge fan of the original artist, Lou Fine). He was supposed to do an installment of DC’s 1990s Silver Age book but passed (or got sick prior to passing) first.
He did occasional work, starting in 1976. (He tried to do all the origins of the Lou Fine characters in Secret Origin and inked several of Rags Morales’s covers on Black Condor’s short-lived comic in the 1990s, for example)
He inked a Carmine Infantino Adam Strange back-up in Green Lantern in te early 1980s and worked with Swan several times.
In the 1990s, he started a family business doing technical color work and one of the early projects was Alan Moore’s (never completed) 1963 for Image.
Great artist, too often forgotten.
According to the Wonder Woman volume, the remaining books in the Encyclopedia of Comic Book Heroes were to be these volumes: 3 – Captain Marvel, Plastic Man, and the Spirit, 4 – Green Lantern, 5 – The Flash, 6 – Superman (which came out separately before the others), 7 – Captain America, the Sub-Mariner, and the Human Torch, and 8 – Doctor Fate, the Hawkman, Starman, and the Spectre.
I have the Batman and Superman volumes. Never bought the Wonder Woman, as I’ve never really cared for the character. The new Tom King run seems off to an interesting start, however. I wrote a couple of term papers on comics in college and bought a great many of the comics reference books that were out in the late seventies and still have most of them.
I glanced at King’s first issue. Doesn’t have the magic Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow did, at least not yet.
All I’ll say is that it’s the first issue of Wonder Woman to interest me…EVER.
No love whatsoever for even the George Pérez run, Don? I admit that surprises me a little.
I know the Perez Wonder Woman exists, Alan, but I have no memory of it beyond that. I can only assume I checked it out and found it lacking, but perhaps, knowing I didn’t like WW anyway, I never read it. This is what my DCUInfinite account is for. I’ll go back and read it now and see.
Each to their own.
A phrase I just coined but I’m convinced it’s going viral.
The Superman book was clearly published to cash in on the release of the Superman movie, otherwise I doubt it would have seen daylight.
Although I was buying about every superhero comic I could, I became a regular reader too late to read much Spectre other than the handful of golden-age reprints during the bigger and better era of DC, so when I first read this I assumed that’s what the Spectre was supposed to be. I almost never read any of the mystery books, but this didn’t bother me. I am sure that Aparo’s art was the big draw for me. Just beautiful.
The story that really stuck with me was the back-up, though. Although I have now read a huge number of DC’s mystery stories, it remains one of my absolute favorites, second only to the Orlando/Albano/Aparo “The Demon Within” from House of Mystery 201.
“The Demon Within” is a stone-cold classic.
Cheers for clearing up the confusion over the Russell Carley credit that has bugged me ever since I bought this as a twelve-year-old. Aparo’s art was sensational during this period. Is it true that Neal Adams always made a point of seeking out Jim’s new stuff when he was in the offices?
“Is it true that Neal Adams always made a point of seeking out Jim’s new stuff when he was in the offices?”
That wouldn’t surprise me in the least, but I have no actual idea.
As I understand it, Aparo modelled his approach after Adams, so it was the other way around. I actually prefer Aparo’s pre-Adams influence work, like what he did on Aquaman around 1970 – it is almost like Alex Toth in its sparseness.
As for me, I read all of DC’s mystery mags, principally because of Neal Adams and Berni Wrightson, but loved Toth’s contributions, as well as many of the Filipino greats who came along in the early ’70s. By 1974 I started seeing some of these same artists migrate over to Warren where the pay was better.
I can see where Aparo may have picked up some Adams influence after he came to DC. But I can also see where Adams could have been an admirer of Aparo’s work — the early stuff as well as the later. Seems to me that both things could be true. 😉
Yeah, I thought I read somewhere that Adams was a fan. Although the Adams influence became more apparent, Aparo’s distinctive inking style helped give it a different look that I liked. All I remember is how delighted I was to find a new issue with art by either of them during that period. One of the great what-ifs for me from that period involves the kind of look Irv Novick could’ve brought to his Batman work if he, like Aparo, had been allowed to ink his own work.
I agree with you wholeheartedly about Aparo on Aquaman around 1970 (his work on the title may have started earlier). I confess that I wasn’t paying attention to the names of D.C. artists at the age of nine, but some of my favorite artwork ever was in those issues.
anyone else see some Jordi Bernet in the last panel, page 4?
I had been buying Adventure off and on since the Legion of Super Heroes days. I enjoyed the Black Orchid stories but something clicked with me and the Spectre run. I hope you review the issue when Jim Corrigan was brought back to life (without his knowledge) by the heavenly power that made him the Spectre.
OK, quick question – until a few years back, I’d always thought that the Spectre wore a white costume with green trunks/hooded cape/gloves/boots. It was just a coincidence that his skin was white (after all, you only saw his face, right?). Then it seemed that I might have been wrong, and that his skin is white all over, and he’s only wearing the trunks/hooded cape/gloves/boots.
I still can’t see it that way, and am quite content with the way I’ve always seen it…but have I got it wrong?
B, I’ve had almost the exact same experience — assumed for decades that Spec was wearing white tights, then had the realization that maybe that’s all supposed to be his skin. I did a little checking back in the day but couldn’t find anything that authoritatively stated what Jerry Siegel and Bernard Bailey might themselves had had in mind.
I’d be interested to know what other readers think on this topic. Like you, I prefer the “tights” option!
I think the Golden Age makes it look obvious it’s his ghostly skin. Though I prefer the tights, having first met the Silver Age version.
I wondered why he needed little green booties – why does a ghost need shoes? But like they say, if *that’s* where you’re going to start insisting on reality ….
I always thought it was his white skin, having seen the original Bernard Baily version and later Adams and Wrightson in the late ’60s iteration of the character.
I don’t remember reading this issue, but I must have because I always enjoyed Adventure Comics starting in 1968 with the Legion of Super Hero days (and I was upset when they were removed from the title). Reading it now, I am shocked by the grisly antics of the Spectre even though the felons in question were killers (then again, by 1973, the Supreme Court had outlawed the death penalty in the United States for the time being). If I did read it, I know I must have stopped around page 10 because I was terrified of skeletons and if I saw one in a comic book I immediately closed it and threw it away (I know, rather extreme, but consider my youth).
I am surprised that no one mentioned here about the Spectre’s actions on the airplane. First of all, he’s endangering the innocent passengers, by engaging a panicky guy with a gun. Second of all, he’s terrorizing at best, traumatizing at worse, the passengers because they have no idea what’s going on except that a crazed man with a gun stood up and then suddenly turned into a skeleton, who they presumably had to ride with for the rest of the flight. If I were there on that flight, even if I weren’t scared of skeletons, that would have certainly been bad for my mental health. There is no reason why the Spectre could not have waited until the flight was over and cornering his victim alone as he did the other two.
That kind of collateral damage was rarely an issue in comics back then, of course. Particularly not the trauma aspect. But I assume the Spectre’s not going to let those bullets cause any problems.
As to skeletons, lots of people have particular Can’t Read/Watch stuff like that, even as adults. A close friend cannot bear to watch a Living Doll story for instance.
I believe I must have bought the Spectre run of Adventure as back issues sometime between 1983 and 1987. I didn’t have any concerns with the continuity because I was only familiar with the Spectre from a couple issues of Brave & Bold and DC Comics Presents. I assumed this was an Earth-1 Spectre, but I never got too hung up on continuity. I had so few issues of various books that I had to treat each one I got my hands on as a stand-alone story. I enjoyed the horror/retribution aspect of this story. I thought then (and now) that Jim Aparo’s art on this issue was fantastic and the cover may be one of his greatest! I probably enjoyed the Snerl back-up more now than I did then. Thanks for the research and write-up of the issue!
Here is a plausible explanation for the inconsistencies in continuity. In Adventure Comics 495 Jim Corrigan is approached by an inquiring reporter. The hard-boiled and sarcastic Corrigan says, “You’re Clark Kent, mild mannered reporter!”; suggesting that in this world Clark Kent is a well known fictional character.
The takeaway? This run of Spectre stories took place on Earth Prime!
But… wouldn’t Earth-Prime have its own Adventure #435, where Jim Corrigan, et al, are *also* fictional characters?
I think Earth-One works fine for the quip: the reporter either assumes Corrigan knows Clark Kent and is making an in-joke (everyone knows Clark’s a wimp) or he just shrugs it off blankly (“Jeez, this guy’s got a weird sense of humor.”).
I remember when that came out. I loved the metaness of the comment, but within the continuity, I just assumed it was because by that point in time, Clark had been a relatively well-known TV news anchor and was probably just a celebrity that Corrigan referenced because of the passing resemblance. It didn’t bother me at all.
Maybe The Spectre isn’t a fictional character in our world.😁Perhaps there really is a Corrigan/Spectre dealing out supernatural justice!😱👻💀
Or he really means “Clark Kent, famous newspaper reporter. best selling novelist. and anchorman for a major local station in s big market, who has a rep as a polite and soft spoken man, who never-the-less gets the story.”
Make that 435!😁
Thanks for sharing the Snerl story. Fascinating.
That Snerl story was tremendous. A great fable, as you astutely note, holds a timeless message.
As for the Spectre – Fleisher would get ever more outrageous in the way the Spectre dispatched the baddies. (The guy who gets cut in half by a pair of giant scissors, the guy turned into wood and tossed into a buzzsaw). :Looking back, it’s kind of amazing the Comics Code Authority gave them a pass.
That said, though, there was something a little bit cold and even sadistic about those stories, given how implacable the Spectre was. When John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake did their (superb) run on the character, they would also include the Spectre dispensing some poetic justice but it seemed a little more rooted in humanity.
“As best as I can determine, “Is a Snerl Human?” has never been reprinted in English (it does appear to be available digitally), which seems a shame.”
Actually, it was reprinted in Australia around May 1979, in the reprint anthology Weird Mystery Tales #39.
In 1986 it was translated into French and appeared in Spécial USA #20.
This info is from the GCD site https://www.comics.org/issue/27119/
Thanks, Pat. Either I missed the GCD’s information about the Australian reprint, or it’s been added since I wrote the original post (that sort of thing happens sometimes). I’ve amended the post to say, “never been reprinted in the U.S.”.