Arriving in spinner racks in late April, 1975, the 440th issue of DC’s Adventure Comics featured an updated look, as the title’s current lead feature — the Spectre — finally got a cover logo of his own. A number of artist Jim Aparo’s earlier covers, excellent as they were, hadn’t even featured the character’s name anywhere in their copy… which was perhaps not the best call ever made by editor Joe Orlando. But now, finally, we had the return of the classic logo that the great Ira Schnapp had designed for the Spectre’s Silver Age revival in Showcase back in 1965, which had then gone on to grace most of the issues of his subsequent titular series. It was a good move — though one that came a little late, given that Adventure #440 would be the last to feature the Spectre as the book’s headliner.
Not all that surprisingly, nothing else on the cover gave a hint of the strip’s imminent demise — nor did the opening splash page:
As regular readers of this blog will recall, the previous issue had presented the initial chapter of a two-part story, which gets a brief recap at the top of page two before the creative team of Michael Fleisher (writer) and Aparo continue with their tale…
Naturally, Jim Corrigan shows up at the Coney Island carousel that night, right on schedule…
The story now turns to Jim’s fiance, Gwendolyn Sterling, who’s at home alone, admiring herself in the mirror while modeling her wedding dress (as one does). Suddenly, the doorbell rings…
At this point, it may be best to assume that “the Voice” responsible for bringing Jim Corrigan back from the grave as the Spectre (both times) isn’t actually the Supreme Being that they have always appeared to be — because if they were, they’d be in charge of Jim’s so-called “destiny” and could change things up at any time. That’s what omnipotence means, right? So either they aren’t God (as most of us use that term), or they are, and are just messing with the poor guy — quite a disquieting notion, in my opinion.
The Spectre’s ability to suddenly grow to giant size is one of his earliest, and perhaps one of his most visually striking, super-powers. But Fleisher and Aparo use the familiar trope to especially chilling effect in this sequence…
…an effect that’s perfectly capped by the pitch-black humor of the father-and-son dialogue exchange in the last panel above.
“The end.” At this point, my seventeen-year-old self still had no idea that this was the last Spectre story we’d see in Adventure Comics; I wouldn’t discover that to be true until I got to the end of the issue’s “Seven Soldiers of Victory” backup feature (which we’ll be looking at later in the post, never fear) to find a blurb announcing that with the very next issue, the new star of Adventure would be Aquaman. But, once I was aware that this was in fact the end of the series, the two-part tale presented in issues #439 and #440 certainly felt like Michael Fleisher and Jim Aparo had known that this was going to be their last hurrah regarding the Spectre — and that they had chosen to go out with a story that, after first hinting at a resolution of the character’s central dilemma that would have effectively shut down the series for good, ended up restoring the status quo in a manner that somberly implied that this was the way it would be for Jim Corrigan, the Spectre, forever after… the only real “end” being that of his and Gwen Sterling’s hopeless dream of a normal life together.
Cover to Wrath of the Spectre #4 (Aug., 1988). Art by Jim Aparo.
For that reason, I was surprised to learn, years later, that the cancellation of the feature had been abrupt enough that Fleisher was already three full scripts ahead when the ax fell. Those stories would lie languishing in a file until 1988, when, newly illustrated by Aparo (with the assistance of inker Mike DeCarlo), all three appeared in the fourth issue of Wrath of the Spectre, a miniseries whose previous installments had reprinted the original Fleisher-Aparo run from Adventure. Intriguingly, these stories introduce some modest changes to the feature’s status quo, as reporter Earl Crawford — who’d first been introduced as a foil for the Spectre in Adventure #435, and then had turned up in a couple more stories afterwards — manages to get himself committed to a mental hospital due to his belief in the Spectre. A guilty-feeling Jim decides to break out his nemesis, and enlists Gwen into what amounts to an Alfred Pennyworth-like role, requiring her to disguise herself as an older woman to help pull off the caper. Perhaps most interestingly, the third and last story features a real first for the series, as the Spectre actually never kills anyone. (OK, he does turn one murderous miscreant into a spider, and drives another one insane; nevertheless, they’re both still alive.)
It’s hard to read that last story and not see it as the creative team — or Adventure editor Joe Orlando, at least — making a conscious effort to steer the Spectre feature at least a little bit away from the horror-genre tendencies that had proven controversial with some comics fans (and fans turned pros) ever since the strip’s debut in issue #431. Interviewed for a text piece by Peter Sanderson that ran in Wrath of the Spectre #3, Paul Levitz (who had been Orlando’s assistant editor on Adventure during this period) described the controversy as being not so much about the fact that the Spectre — who, lest we forget, was a first-generation superhero and a charter member of the Justice Society of America — killed criminals, as about the very imaginative, and usually very grisly, ways in which he did it:
I think what bothered people about the Spectre was a tonal quality. The Punisher and all the characters who are derived from the old Executioner novels have a higher violence quotient than the Spectre, but they don’t have a higher horror quotient. I guess the paradigm of the Spectre is turning a guy into a candle and lighting him, or turning him into a log and buzzsawing him… It’s almost a case of the hero delighting in using his own power to inflict pain for the sake of an eye-for-an-eye justice. The Punisher isn’t really about “an eye for an eye.” It’s about how “Playing by the rules doesn’t solve the problem, so I’ve got to kill him.” But the Punisher doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of fun killing them, and you never see him exercise a great deal of imagination doing it. The Spectre was unique, and may still be unique, in being the first one to stop along the way and say, “Okay, how can I make this [the criminal’s death] into a message for other criminals?” or “How can I have a great time [killing the criminal]?”
Later in the same article, Levitz opined that the controversy was a bigger deal in the DC offices than it was in the wider world of comics fandom:
It was pretty much the professionals. The mail on the series was pretty decent, as I remember. The controversy started within the office, where some of the more fan-oriented writers and assistant editors who were in the field were very uncomfortable with the horror-based treatment the Spectre was given.
That internal controversy, combined with the fact that Orlando and Levitz had three completed scripts on hand when the plug was pulled, would fuel theories that the cancellation of the Spectre feature was driven by more than the usual culprit — i.e., low sales (or at least the publisher’s perception of such). In a follow-up article for Wrath of the Spectre #4, Peter Sanderson would explore this topic with the primary individuals involved with producing the series, and while he didn’t manage to uncover a genuine smoking gun, the overall impression one takes away is that DC publisher Carmine Infantino was probably influenced at least in part by the negative opinions circulating around the office. Paul Levitz, in particular, was frank in expressing the opinion that “the controversy was a significant part” of upper management’s “growing discomfort with the series.”, although he stopped short of pointing any fingers:
[It was] very hard to tell in those days logically why anything happened. Many of the decisions to cancel things or to change the frequencies of publication were based on [the publisher’s] personal perceptions of whether he liked the material without necessarily waiting for sales figures…
I don’t know [if The Spectre was removed from ADVENTURE] as a matter of taste [on the publisher’s part] or a matter of some negative information he got commercially… Based on the limited information that survives, [ADVENTURE when it featured] Spectre wasn’t doing any better or worse than a half dozen other books of that time that weren’t changed around.
Whatever the reasons for the discontinuation of the 1970s “Spectre” strip, neither the controversy nor the cancellation itself seems to have done the character any lasting harm. While it would take until 1987 for the Ghostly Guardian to return in his own solo series (the first of several revivals to follow), he’d make a plethora of guest appearances in the interim — beginning with one in the second half of 1975’s Justice League/Justice Society team-up, which would come out just four months after Adventure #440. In that story, he’d seem to be pretty much back to his more benign, less bloodthirsty, Silver Age self… though more discussion on that topic will naturally need to be postponed until this coming August.
And now, as promised, our backup feature.
As regular readers will recall, the Seven Soldiers of Victory serial running in Adventure during this time had originated with a never-published Golden Age script by Joe Samachson, which had just recently been dusted off and parceled out among several contemporary comics artists to be illustrated. The first two chapters, featuring all Seven Soldiers together and the Shining Knight in solo action, respectively, had appeared in Adventure #438; the third, starring Green Arrow and Speedy, had followed in issue #439. That brings us to our current installment, which features the Crimson Avenger and Wing, and is illustrated by relative newcomer Mike Grell in a manner which perhaps doesn’t evoke older comic-book art styles in quite the same way as the earlier efforts of Howard Chaykin and Lee Elias, but still gets the basic job of graphic storytelling done just fine.
We pause here to express appreciation for the fact that not only has Grell not drawn Wing with stereotyped buck-toothed facial features, but the anonymous colorist has even refrained from coloring his skin an unnatural shade of orange. (Those may seem odd things to single out for commendation, but they’re both more than DC had been able to manage in Adventure #438.)
King Mistybrain explains to our heroes that his palace is currently overrun with guests — his relatives — who’ve overstayed their welcome. Why can’t he just tell them to go home? Because they’re all kings, and that sort of thing just isn’t done. Never fear, the C.A. assures him; he and Wing will be happy to help resolve the problem.
King Adelbert prepares to squash the suddenly tiny heroes flat, but they escape into a bowl of salad just in time. From there, they launch vegetable missiles at their adversary, including a tomato that gets him right in the eye…
Adventure #440 was the last issue of the title I’d buy for a good long time. While I liked Aquaman well enough, I wasn’t enough of a fan of the character in 1975 for his new series to be a must-buy, even with Jim Aparo on art. (Maybe if Aparo’s old collaborator on the hero, Steve Skeates, had returned as writer, it might have been a different story… but I wasn’t yet sold on this new guy who’d be taking on the job, i.e., Paul Levitz.) And though I’d found the Seven Soldiers serial modestly entertaining as a backup, I wasn’t invested enough in its whimsical, low-stakes plot to feel any real suspense about how things were going to turn out.
For that reason, I don’t have much to tell you about the resolution of the “Land of Magic” storyline that can’t be readily found online. But to save you all the trouble of firing up the Google for yourselves, here’s the basics.
The serial ran for three more issues. #441’s “Dead End Animals”, starring the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy, was drawn by Ernie Chan, while #442’s “Gnome Man’s Land”, featuring Vigilante, had art by José Luis García-López and Mike Royer. Dick Dillin and Tex Blaisdell, who’d drawn the opening chapter back in #438, returned for the Soldiers’ final confrontation with the mischievous Willie Wisher in #443’s, er, “Confrontation”. In the story’s final pages, our heroes deal with the irritating little imp once and for all by brutally beating him within an inch of his life and tossing him in a landfill… nahh, just wanted to see if you were still paying attention. What actually happens is the team makes Willie feel so guilty about the harm he may have inadvertently caused that he wishes he’d never been born, causing himself to wink out of existence… though, paradoxically, the film documentary record of the events, with whose premiere this whole storyline began back in Adventure #438, remains intact.
And now you know.
It’s always an interesting read ! If I own the issue then I enjoy the backstory and history, if I don’t have the book I enjoy learning all about and seeing if it’s my thing..or…the third scenario was where this issue sat; I have it on my want-list and I eagerly devour the column…and….remove it from my want list!
See, Alan, you’re entertaining and you save me money!
I’d become attached to Jim Corrigan (any man who decorates with Swamp thing posters can’t be bad!) so a bit disheartening to see his end (why is he taking tips off the guy selling overpriced nuts? He figures he’s being robbed on the nuts, therefore it makes sense he’d know the whereabouts of other gang affiliates?).
on a side note – I was cleaning and pressing issue #431 last week and it remains a fantastic cover – that blue just packs a punch – the series really did start off on a high note, I just wish the art and writing had been given more room to breath!
For a book that had been so stable (first Superboy for years, then the Legion, then Supergirl), it’s remarkable how much Adventure Comics bounced around in the post-Supergirl period. Black Orchid. Spectre. Aquaman. Later Plastic Man, Starman, JSA … I’d come on board with the Black Orchid, stuck around for the Spectre and kept going. Mostly by habit — it’s not like I went Oooh, Aquaman — but the Levitz/Aparo stuff made me more of a fan of the Sea King than I’d been. It didn’t hurt the first story involves a modern-day pirate who combines high tech with pirate cosplay (a submersible that looks like a pirate ship). I’m always a sucker for that.
This story does indeed read like a finish to the series, as you say, and a good one, if downbeat. I see your point about the Voice and destiny, though it’s easy enough to think of explanations (maybe the real point was to show Corrigan he’s stuck with the Spectre gig so suck it up).
I’ve never been one for horror in comics, movies, or TV but I enjoyed the Spectre’s series. This installment featured the only death to bother me to this day, the duck. I’m glad I missed the publication of the three unused scripts since few inkers ever did Aparo any justice, but DeCarlo was among what I considered the worst. And this Law’s Legionnaires installment? Ugh! It’s story was illogical by even the loosest Golden Age stories, and I never liked Grell’s art. I put up with it for Legion out of love for the property only.
I did stick around for Aquaman. I hadn’t yet grown bored with his power set, the repetition of the stories where he was deposed or stepped down as king and/or the destruction of Atlantis hadn’t yet driven me off, and I’d yet to lose my ability to suspend disbelief that a full-time adventurer could never be anything but a failure as a king. Mera’s badly drawn and written descent into madness over her child’s death didn’t help.
At this point, those stories weren’t repetitive — when the Adventure series got into Atlantean politics it was quite novel.
My problem with the Spectre during this period–and when I say problem, I don’t remember if it was a problem for me in ’75 or just now, fifty years later as we read them again–is that a lot of the time, the stories seem to exist only to give the Spectre a really creative way to kill someone. I know that he had his on-going challenges with Gwen and wanting to be human again, but basically it seems like, “criminals break bad/Spectre breaks them worse” is the plot of every story. I kept buying the book, and yes, the creative kills were enough reason to keep coming back, but it was primarily for Aparo’s art because the stories were weak as tissue paper.
I never worried about the true nature of “The Voice,” Alan. I figured even if it was just the DC version of God, and as willful and petty as he sometime seemed, it still wasn’t the same God I believed in, so it didn’t matter.
Really didn’t like the Seven Soldiers story. Back in those days, I never read the reprints unless they featured a character I already liked, and the Seven Soldiers was certainly not that. Mainly, this Willie the Wisher story feels like it was written for an under-achieving six year old and not for the worldly 17 year old I’d become. I didn’t continue Adventure with Aquaman, either. I have nothing against the character, but I’ve never regularly bought his books, so I didn’t miss anything by not reading the last three chapters of the Seven Soldiers story. Thanks, Alan!
When I read SSOV in the archives, I found them well-written better than a lot of JSA material (it helped that as they had no powers, I didn’t have the absurdity of watching Spectre or Starman using fisticuffs to take down their foes). This one, yeah, kind of silly.
Like Don, I always felt that The Spectre story needed to be full-length in order to let the story breathe more. As great as the art was – and for me this was Aparo’s golden period – it all started feeling a bit repetitive after a few issues. Mind you, I was sad when it ended. And for some reason, the comic itself stopped appearing in shops near me after this, so I missed all the Aquaman issues until years later.
By 1975, Aquaman had been appearing on Super Friends for a couple of years. From a very, very quick glance at Mike’s Amazing World, it doesn’t look like he’d been headlining a comic series during that period (I could be wrong about that, in which case disregard everythingelse I say here). Mightn’t that have made DC decide they might get more bang for their buck by featuring one of their TV stars as the headliner in Adventure rather than the Spectre?
That just seems like maybe a more pragmatic explanation for the Spectre being ousted from Adventure Comics than any of the speculations above. DC had a popular Saturday morning cartoon and needed a place to feature one of its characters, and they decided the Spectre was the most expendable headliner they had at the time.
That’s a good point, Wire154. As I touched on briefly in the Adventure #438 post, the Seven Soldiers serial was originally intended to run earlier than it did, but DC decided it was more important to showcase Aquaman, due to the TV show; so, he got the backup slot for four straight issues before the first SSoV chapter appeared. By the time of Adventure #440, DC may have had sales reports on those four issues and decided to run with Aquaman as the book’s new headliner. It makes sense that that would have been one factor in Spectre’s getting the boot, at the least.
After the Legion left Adventure in issue 380 , I was at first a very dissapointed 11 year old and never understood why except I had noted a decline in quality since the Mordru story. Adventure was reinstated in my monthly comic mag buying regime when I saw one of my favourite JSAers The Spectre was to be the headliner !. I stayed for the entire run and I wasn’t troubled one iota in the manner in which the Ghostly Guardian dispatched the bad guys…. nice change from the usual Prison sentence or an attempt to reform the villain !. Sadly once again the main star of the mag was dropped and I never purchased Adventure Comics again.
I thought the stories were still well-written but the art was definitely “off” as the artists changed.
Quite struck by the body count in the first few pages and explicit gunning down. I suppose it’s a reflection of a relaxed comics code but I still find it a bit jarring.
I always liked the Spectre. The outfit, for one. Simple yet effective. I must say though that realism wise (I know I know.,….comix) this issue had some weird holes. For one thing, Corrigan goes to capture a set of villain’s, at night, alone, and low and behold! It’s a trap! I mean, hasn’t HE read any comics himself? It was so obvious. Why wouldn’t you have a slew of back up if this Ducky was so dangerous? Also, people are generally, almost always to my understanding embalmed after death. So how in the world could he pass off this “uhh you dolts buried me alive” explanation? Anyway, regarding the series as a whole it’s kind of hilarious in today’s ultra-violent media world to hear all these concerns by the people in the DC “bull pen” Sorry, that one was taken…maybe DC Batter’s cage? I mean today’s targeted group of comic readers would barely bat an eye, awash in the violence offered on streaming services and video games at what’s presented here in said comic. I also find it a bit curious that Levitz may have been pushing for the Spectre’s dismissal from Adventure when he was next in line for the title with his Aquaman stories. hmmm.
Nice shout out to Jimmy Cagney in The Public Enemy with how Corrigan is returned to Gwen . . . .
I always enjoyed the Spectre and he was never better than when he was drawn by Jim Aparo! I had no problem with the Adventure stories and, as others have written, I attribute any repetition or lack of depth to the short page-lengths. I did not care for the SSOV backup. Even as an elementary school kid, I found it too childish, but I thought Mike Grell’s art in this installment was decent. I did stick around for Jim Aparo drawing Aquaman in Adventure. And I believe that was one of Aquaman’s greatest runs! During this time period, Jim Aparo could draw anything extremely well! What a great talent!
It’s odd, I never noticed how much of an Adams influence Grell had . . . . It is very obvious here.
I found the issue’s strip a step down from earlier issues. The use of a giant duck as a vessel of vengeance not frightening but silly, and wonder how the story of a cop being buried alive would have been received, both by Jim Corrigan’s police colleagues, and by the press/media.
The issue featured a letter from Bob Rodi, who was then a frequent letter writer ( and a good one at that) which could be taken as an editorial from Orlando: that the Spectre strip was going nowhere; that it had lost it’s ability to shock; and how good the recent Aquaman back-up was, in spite of initial low expectations.
The cancellation, whether by editorial choice or by sales, was a sign of the times to come, as the horror phase started to fizzle out.
Peak Aparo. I too, like the commenter ‘patr..’ above, was taken aback at the casual gunnings down of supporting characters even in a more relaxed Code.
John Minehan, re: Adams on Grell. Yeah, like so many others starting out in the early 70s, I’m surprised if they DIDN’T have an Adams influence! Even old pros like Irv Novick felt they had to draw like him.
“For that reason, I was surprised to learn, years later, that the cancellation of the feature had been abrupt enough that Fleisher was already three full scripts ahead when the ax fell. ”
But maybe he wasn’t.
Although most of us read the text page in WRATH OF THE SPECTRE #4 (“In fact, when the Spectre’s series was cancelled, there were three entire scripts by Michael Fleisher that had not yet been illustrated”) to imply that these were intended for the subsequent installments, it makes more sense that these scripts were intended to PRECEDE the two-part finale. (The strongest evidence of that is the participation of Gwen Sterling with no indication that she had just been rejected by Corrigan/Spectre.)
I believe these stories were placed in the final issue of WRATH, rather than in their originally intended order, for more effective marketing of the reprint: “Here’s what would have happened next!” is more enticing than “Here’s some intermediate chapters we skipped the first time.”
I believe that either the Spectre feature was originally slated to end in #443, and Orlando decided to skip ahead to the already-planned ending (in hopes that Aquaman would be a better seller), or that the decision was made more abruptly, and Fleisher convinced Orlando to let him write a finale rather than have Aparo draw two of the three already-scripted installments. Or perhaps it was Orlando’s choice to assign Fleisher to pen a stronger finale and to write off the other three episodes which, I think most would agree, were much weaker material, anyway.
One of those, or some variation on that chain of events, seems more likely than intending for a chapter that served so well as a series-ending episode to fall in between more conventional chapters of the Spectre feature.
That’s an intriguing idea, Michael, and one that had never occurred to me. Thanks for sharing!
The Spectre story was as wonderful and heartbreaking as I remembered from fifty years ago. And Mike Grell’s artwork is always sensational. I stuck with the magazine to finish the Seven Soldiers story but I don’t remember reading the Aquaman story!