The Spectre in the DC Universe Pt. 1

Even as a teenager, I thought The Spectre to be an awfully Vertigo-ish book, one that sort of straddled the border between that line of comics and DC's main superhero line. Certainly, Ostrander and Mandrake's book was written and drawn as well as anything Berger was editing back then, the storytelling was as sophisticated and the subject matter as mature as what one might have found in Animal Man or Swamp Thing at the time. And, of course, the book's basic premise felt very Vertiginous, if that's the right word to use for it (It's not). 

That is, it was a comic starring an old DC-owned character being reinvented, specifically as a horror comic involving the occult, mysticism and quasi-religious content (Indeed, as we'll see, The Spectre shared multiple characters and settings that appeared in those half-dozen Berger books, and some later Vertigo books). 

Her policeman friend Nate Kane tells her that Corrigan was a detective "who went goofy some time back...left the force and became a private detective--psychic or psycho investigator--or some such." When she looks for Corrigan at his old office, we see an exterior of a building, its sign reading "Corrigan Detective Agency 5th Floor, Madame Xandadu 1st Floor."

While Corrigan isn't there, and his dusty office seemingly abandoned, Amy has a brief encounter with Madame Xanadu, who will be something of an off-and-on supporting character in the book for a while.

She was originally created by David Michelinie and Michael William Kaluta in 1978 for Doorway to Nightmare...and was based on a nameless "host" character that Kaluta had previously drawn in Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion. She was a beautiful, mysterious woman who ran a magic shop where she would give tarot readings...and inevitably get mixed up in an occult adventure in each story. Her exact origins and powers were never delineated.

Writer Doug Moench would make extensive use of her as a supporting character in the pages of the second Spectre ongoing (the 1987-1989 series), where she served as something of a spiritual advisor to Corrigan...and the lover of The Spectre.

Ostrander refers to this period in his stories involving her, and she plays a curious role here, not quite a villain, in the traditional comic book sense, but certainly an adversary. At one point, she will strip Corrigan of The Spectre powers and take them as her own, hoping to change the world for the better, but finding her goal frustrated by The Spectre-Force's need to avenge the murdered dead and punish the guilty. 

She will later predict the inevitable violent death of Amy but take steps to try to avert it. She will also join others in an attempt to free The Spectre from the influence of Eclipso when the villain possesses him and, as the omnibus nears its conclusion, join The Spectre and his allies in Hell, where they fight against Azmodus (More on both Eclipso and Azmodus in a bit).

While her original comics appearances might have been vague on the matter, Ostrander details Xanadu's long—immortally long—life, her origins and the full extent of her considerable sorcerous powers. I'm not sure how these map to Moench's version of the character, as his 31-issue volume of The Spectre hasn't been collected (But seems a decent candidate for a couple of DC Finest volumes, DC!)

Amy has recently met and befriended Corrigan, however, learning that he is actually The Spectre. She and Kane prevail on Corrigan to get the information needed to save the boy's life, by entering one of the kidnappers' bodies and interrogating his soul in the afterlife.

The Spectre first visits "the land of the recently departed," which Mandrake draws as a sort of desolate wasteland punctuated by large rock outcroppings, through which a massive crowd of people are walking toward the reader. Sitting atop one of those outcroppings in the foreground, we see Deadman sitting cross-legged, his head resting in his hand as if he's bored. 

While the character is far enough away that it's hard to see any details, Mandrake seems to draw a version of the character that hues to his original Carmine Infantino design, rather than the rotting corpse look that Kelley Jones gave him in 1989's Deadman: Love After Death miniseries. If there's a big "D" on his red costume, it's obscured.

The Spectre doesn't acknowledge Boston Brand, whose presence is completely unremarked upon. It's apparently just a little cameo for the readers.

That Shatan looked like a pretty generic, if a little stout and somewhat under-dressed, devil figure (You can see him bonking The Spectre on the head with the planet earth of the issue's cover). In Fox's story, Shathan comes from the alternate dimension of Dis, where everything is composed as "psycho-matter", the same stuff that The Spectre was made of.

Fox avoided using the word "Hell", but given how obviously the character's design was inspired by a traditional, cartoony conception of the devil, and that "Dis" is the name that Dante gave a city in The Inferno's Hell, it doesn't take much of a leap of the imagination to reorient Shathan into a devil from Hell (The DC Universe's version of Hell, which had emerged by that point in the early '90s, was a plane of existence ruled by a sort of high court of various warring and scheming chieftains, each of these devils vying to be Hell's ultimate ruler; this vision accounts nicely for the fact that books as various as, say, Superman, The Demon and The Sandman might have different takes on Hell, or use different stand-ins for Satan/The Devil. Ostrande and Mandrake will show us a sort of council of devils before this volume ends).

Ostrander even accounts for Mandrake's rather radical redesign of the character, which sports a massive, more animalistic pair of horns, a face full of fangs and gnarled limbs terminating in long claws: "We have fought before and since then I have been able to reconstitute only this miserable form."

AZMODUS

In The Spectre #8, Shathan is being tortured by much smaller, lesser devils, and reflects on "the cycle" he is subject to: "You are great, you are brought low. You rule, you are ruled." But, in the next panel, he mentions that his "familiar" Azmodus had escaped from Hell when The Spectre last departed, and that "He will grow strong, create misery, feed me."

In Showcase #61, the issue after the one in which The Spectre defeated Azmodus, we see Shathan growing strong by making deals with various mortals, exchanging favors for their shadows.

In Ostrander and Mandrake's Spectre, Azmodus will be the one buying shadows from mortals. He too has a rather radical redesign, losing the yellow suit, boots and cape, but still appearing to keep the spirit of the design, being somewhat generically diabolical. 

Mandrake's take looks mostly human, albeit with pointy ears and pointy teeth. He's dressed head-to-toe in red, wears a cape and has big, billowing, rather theatrical-looking sleeves. 

Though Ostrander pretty much spells it out in that dialogue, it wasn't until I was reading his notes later that I realized this priest is the same one who appeared in Ostrander's 1987-1992 Suicide Squad, one of the handful of civilian support staff that filled out the books large and ever-changing cast. 

In this title, Craemer first meets Corrigan when the latter comes to church for confession, during which Craemer brings up a civil war in the fictional Balkan country of Vlatava as an example that no human being can realistically expect to avenge "the blood of the innocent slain", given just how much innocent blood is so regularly spilled around the world.

Unfortunately, Corrigan seems to take that as a challenge and flies off to judge all of Vlatava. 

In "Righteousness", we will learn that he leads one side of a brutal civil war against Muslim opposition, a conflict seemingly somewhat inspired by the then-ongoing Bosnian war. The Spectre, currently suffering from a devastating grief, visits the country to avenge its dead.

He and Vertigo briefly fight, but Vertigo's powers to disorient and unbalance his foes has little effect on The Spectre ("I know good from evil," he says, grabbing Vertigo by the throat, "That is enough.) 

Ultimately, The Spectre judges the entire nation guilty of a centuries-long conflict that has killed countless innocents, and he inflicts his vengeance upon it, killing, as will be made clear in later dialogue, every man, woman and child in Vlatava, sparing only two people: Count Vertigo and the general leading the opposition forces.

"You both wanted this land," The Spectre says, "It is now yours. That is your punishment."

As is often the case, The Stranger seems to know more than any mortal should about what is going on, speaking of The Spectre's state of mind and future intentions, but just where he gets his information and who exactly he is doesn't get discussed at all—not in the issues collected in this omnibus volume, anyway, despite Ostrander's work of building a consistent mythology of various DC supernatural characters from decades' worth of disparate stories within the book.

This issue, by the way, is one of the handful that the prolific Mandrake did not pencil and ink himself. Instead, guest-artist Joe Phillips draws it. 

Phillips' version of The Stranger seems a bit closer to that of the Vertigo Stranger, which had then just recently appeared in 1993's Vertigo Visions: The Phantom Stranger #1, by Alisa Kwitney and Guy Davis. Rather than a cape, fancy suit and medallion, he merely wears a big blue trenchcoat that completely obscures whatever he might be wearing underneath in shadow. He also wears white gloves and the familiar hat, shading his eyes, which appear blank and white beneath it.

Most notably, there's a glare of white light that emanates from his upper chest.

His role in the series is to, first, explain some of the history and nature of The Spectre to Craemer, whose mention of Vlatava seems to have set The Spectre on his current path of contemplating the judgement of nations and even the world, and then gather a handful of magic-users to try to confront The Spectre in order to save the world.

ECLIPSO

Four panels, including one splash page, are devoted to Eclipso's role as God's spirit of wrath. In that splash, Phillips draws a giant Eclipso standing knee-deep in stormy, wave-filled waters, a huge wooden boat looking tiny next to his form in the lower righthand corner.

It was Eclipso, The Stranger says, who, "in the name of God," flooded the Earth during the time of Noah. (I am here reminded of a footnote in Douglas Wolk's All of The Marvels, made in reference to Loki escaping where he was when the Norse myths left off to enter into the greater Marvel Comics story.  "As we soon learn, every body of mythology is literally true within the Marvel Universe," Wolk writes. "The traditional stories told in our world about immortal gods, especially those who take human form, are simply how somebody on Earth-616 has documented interesting events." The same seems to be true of the DC Universe.)

It's been a while since I read 1992's Keith Giffen and Robert Loren Fleming-written Eclipso: The Darkness Within (another good candidate for DC Finest collections!), and I've only read a few issues of the 1992-1994 ongoing Eclipso title that followed it (a trade of which I would also totally buy and read), but I believe it was there that the minor Silver Age villain was promoted to a dangerous, demonic entity.

I think Ostrander was the one who integrated the character into The Spectre's history though, making Eclipso his precursor as an avatar of divine vengeance. Please correct me if I'm wrong, though.

The Stranger's history of The Spectre continues through the Old Testament, and soon another familiar DC comics character appears.

"Not all of the pharaoh's court were ill-disposed to the descendants of Joseph and his brothers," The Stranger narrates. "One who counseled prudence was the court magician Nabu."

Nabu was originally created by Garner Fox and Howard Sherman as the magician mentor who gifted Kent Nelson the various magical items that made up his Doctor Fate costume. He was later revealed to be a cosmic Lord of Order, and, over the years, he was gradually integrated into the ancient history of the evolving DC Universe setting.

Here, Phillips draws him as a quite buff Caucasian-looking man with white hair and a white beard. He battles the then host-less Spectre-Force when it comes to claim the life of the pharaoh, avenging his culling of the Hebrews. Phillips draws this hostl-less Spectre-Force as a sort of Grim Reaper figure in a green cloak, with an emaciated, bony body, and a skull for a head.

Afterwards, Nabu becomes advisor to the new pharaoh, the one from the Book of Exodus and, indeed, he's on hand when Moses and Aaron do their staff-to-snake trick (Nabu is one of the magicians who similarly transforms a staff into a snake, although Moses' snake devours his). 

Ramban will continue to play a supporting role throughout the series. In fact, he's one of the characters pictured in that crowd scene from the final issue at the top of the post.

DOCTOR FATE

The Stranger begins to gather allies to oppose The Spectre, should the latter decide to really go through with doing to the rest of the world what he had already done to Vlatava. The first of these is Doctor Fate who, in 1993, was still Inza Nelson, not her husband Kent.

"The Spectre has gone mad," The Stranger tells the Nelsons. "He is trying to decide if he will destroy the world for its wickedness. I am recruiting beings of power to oppose him if we must."

Inza transforms, saying "Then Doctor Fate will join you," in the character's particular dialogue bubble style, and she then asks who else The Stranger will recruit as they leave Fate's door-less tower in Salem, Massachusetts.

"A drunkard, a demon, a sorceress, and a woman who does not die," he replies, rattling off a list of suggestive possibilities that will be realized in the next few issues.

JOHN CONSTANTINE

By the month that this issue was published, Constantine's home book Hellblazer was on issue #73, and had borne a Vertigo logo on its cover for 11 issues. I was more than a little surprised to see what was by then a Vertigo character in a DCU book.

He's not here long, however, only appearing in four panels. We see him lying in a pool of some sickly-colored liquid—Alcohol? Vomit? Piss?—in New York City.

If Constantine proved to be "the drunkard" on The Phantom Stranger's list of recruits, you've probably already guessed who "the demon" was.

The Stranger and Fate find Jason Blood in Gotham City, and The Stranger can barely say hello before Blood cuts him off. 

Though well aware that The Stranger is attempting to manipulate him into aiding him against The Spectre, appealing to Etrigan's pride, the Demon aggrees to join their ad hoc super-team: "I'll come; I'll come. It sounds like fun!"

Let's here pause a moment to praise Mandrake's version of Etrigan. 

His expressions, meanwhile, are mostly a series of leers and grins, exposing his fangs and tongue, suggesting writer Alan Grant's "mad" version of the character.

Mandrake draws him in a few issues here, and will briefly return to the character when he guest-stars in an issue of he and Ostrander's later Martian Manhunter ongoing (Which I hope DC gets around to collecting after a second omnibus collecting the rest of their Spectre; I have every issue in singles, but I wouldn't mind a more readable collection or three on my bookshelves). 

Based on how good Mandrake's Etrigan is, I hope that DC will eventually commission a story of some length starring the character in the future, perhaps with Ostrander writing.

If you're wondering what The Demon was up to at the time this issue hit the shelves, writer Garth Ennis and artist John McCrea (who draws another of my favorite versions of Etrigan) were four issues into their short run on The Demon (Specifically, "Hell's Hitman" part two, guest-starring Tommy Monaghan).

She briefly summarizes the changes of that story to Fate, and Etrigan is not a fan: "No backwards spells? No fishnet hose?! I hate it when a tradition goes!"

Not to worry, Etrigan. This particular phase of Zatanna's career would prove short-lived, and she'd be back in fishnets and speaking her spells backwards before too long.

I was amused by the pair's exchanges here, though. When Zatanna calls out his "doggerel", Etrigan replies:

Here she awakens on a mission of vengeance not too far removed from that of The Spectre's, ultimately targeting Japan. 

The Spectre, who has just recently been talked from using his powers in pursuit of a vengeance that would incur millions of lives, opposes her...as does another DCU guest-star we'll get to in a moment.

She is eventually convinced to relent.

Though The Phantom Stranger and his team, and Father Craemer, Rambala and Madame Xanadu, were eventually able to purge The Spectre of Eclipso's influence and talk Corrigan/The Spectre out of judging the entirety of the world's population, the danger The Spectre poses has convinced the United States government to seek some sort of anti-Spectre countermeasure. 

Then-president Bill Clinton enlists the aid of one of his old professors, Nicodemus Hazzard, to research the issue.

Hazzard first turns to The Spectre's old allies in the JSA. 

The series' twentieth issue, entitled "Strange Friends", follows Hazzard as he meets the aged members of the JSA in the present, their stories of their relationship with The Spectre during the 1940s composing flashbacks where they often appear in costume.

Over the course of these 22 pages, all drawn by guest artist John Ridgway, Hazzard meets with and interviews Johnny Thunder, The Flash Jay Garrick, Wildcat Ted Grant, Hawkman and Hawkwoman Carter and Shiera Hall and Sandman Wesley Dodds. 

They all appear young and in costume in the flashbacks, as do a handful of other heroes, who only have brief cameos (Green Lantern Alan Scott, Doctor Fate, Starman, The Atom, Liberty Belle, Johnny Quick, and Johnny Thunder's Thunderbolt).

It is Hazzard's talk with Dodds, about the Spear of Destiny and dreams, that leads to Hazzard consulting another familiar character, one I was even more surprised to see here than Constantine. He appears in the last few panels of this particular issue.

LUCIEN THE LIBRARIAN

Unable to learn more about the spear from any books or databases on Earth, Hazzard turns to a search of "non-ordinary reality."

To do so, he falls asleep, albeit a more guided sort of sleep than most of us experience each night. His goal is to reach The Dreaming, the realm of Dream/Morpheus/The Sandman from Gaiman's Sandman. Specifically, he's looking for Dream's library, stocked with an infinite number of books that only exist there, each tome one an author has only dreamt of actually writing.

Hazzard ends up finding a book on the history of the Spear of Destiny that he himself wrote, albeit in his dreams, rather than reality, and this provides him with the information he needs.

As I said, I was quite surprised to see a character from The Sandman in the pages of The Spectre...but then I learned from Ostrander's notes on the issue that Gaiman didn't actually create Lucien for The Sandman. Rather, Lucien was one of several relatively obscure "host" characters from 1970s DC Comics that Gaiman had repurposed (like Cain, Able and Eve).

In fact, Lucien hosted the short-lived1975 horror series Tales of Ghost Castle, where he lived in an abandoned Transylvanian castle with a substantial library. I'm not sure who created the character, but looking at the credits for the first issue, writer Paul Levitz and artists Nestor Redondo seem to be responsible for his first appearance and would thus be the most likely to be responsible for creating him.

KOBRA, NIGHTSHADE, SARGE STEEL

According to Hazzard's research, after the end of World War II, the Spear of Destiny passed from the hands of Adolf Hitler to a Soviet collector for decades.

Sometime in the 1980s, the cult of Kobra found it, and their leader planned to use it as Hitler had, to "neutralize or control the metahumans in a bid to take over the world." The Spectre confronted the colorful, snake-themed supervillain/cult leader/terrorist, who wounded him with the spear during their confrontation. 

When Hazzard finally finds the spear, which had been languishing in a government warehouse in Washington, D.C. (Maybe the same one that the Ark of the Covenant ended up in at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark...?), he and President Clinton put it in Superman's hands and point him at Japan, where The Spectre is fighting Naiad (The government thinks the two entities might be allies in attempting to destroy the country, though).

Superman promises to do "whatever is necessary" and seems to use it to kill The Spectre and Naiad...before embarking on a campaign to take over the world, fighting and/or killing many of his former allies. 

This heel turn is the influence of a curse upon the spear, which it apparently acquired while in the hands of Hitler, whose evil was so potent that it permanently altered the spear. 

In reality, Superman's short, one-issue campaign to make himself King of the World is all a vision of a possible future that The Spectre shows him, during the course of which Superman is eventually able to renounce the spear. He is thus able to give up the spear before taking any lives (The Spectre ultimately summons debris to encase the spear in an orb of rock with the face of a skull and hurl it into orbit, where it would remain until 1999's Day of Judgment). 

In Superman's vision, during which he sees what might happen if he fell to the Spear of Destiny's influence, Mandrake fills various panels with Superman battling his fellow heroes. Thus Spectre #22, "Spear of Destiny: Conclusion" is fairly full of DCU cameos.

In four consecutive panels, Superman fights and defeats Captain Atom, Wonder Woman, Bloodwynd and Metamorpho (while Lois and Jonathan and Martha Kent are in various states of shock and mourning alongside the righthand side of the page).

On the next page, we hear a newscast say, "The last of the metahumans opposing Superman have fallen in a savage battle", and we see Superman standing with the Spear held aloft over his head in the background, the foreground littered with a prone Power Girl and Doctor Fate, while Robin Tim Drake holds his head and Martian Manhunter is on his hands and knees.

Rushing at Superman are The Flash and the then all-black clad Hawkman (A character whom Ted Grant had earlier referred to as "this punk in Chicago", as opposed to the real Hawkman). 

Finally, Superman is confronted by the only "masked hero still unaccounted for."

This is, of course, Batman. Ostrander doesn't give the Dark Knight any lines. He simply appears behind Superman. 

As Mandrake draws him here, his left arm is bare, a bandage around his bicep. He's wearing some sort of targeting monocle of the sort Deadshot wore over one eye, he's got a bandolier slung across his chest and he's pointing a long gun at Superman, which Superman surmises contains the kryptonite he had previously given Batman, in case he had ever lost control like this and needed to be taken down.

It is at this point, with his friend there to execute him, that Superman instructs Batman to shoot him—"I deserve it"—and throws down the spear. 

Finally, The Spectre #25 opens, the captions on the first page tell us, in Hell, circa 150 A.D. A group of devil figures are gathered around a table, and in the background is a humanoid shape half-wrapped in a pair of enormous, bat-like wings. 

"Behold the enemy!" he says, showing the assembled an image of the then Spectre, the first time in which the Spectre-Force had been bonded to the human soul. That human is named Caraka, and his version of The Spectre is distinguishable from that of Corrigan's by having a neat little mustache and four arms.

This speaker, it is revealed, is Lucifer, who appears as an exceptionally handsome angel, only with wings that resemble those of a bat rather than those of a bird. While obviously a long-lived literary character, DC Comics had developed their own version of him and their own history of him.

This version of Lucifer seems to be that which Gaiman and various artists had used in The Sandman. After ruling over Hell since creation, in the 1990s he decides to retire to Earth, closing up shop and handing the key to Hell over to Dream of The Endless (In the 1990-1991 story arc "Season of Mists"). From there, he went on to star in his own ongoing series by Mike Carey and Peter Gross, which ran 75 issues between 2000-2006, and, a decade later, a second series that only lasted 19 issues). 

Then there's Shathan, who we are already familiar with, as he has come and gone throughout the series so far (By the way, he's the only of these characters aside from Lucifer to have any lines during the short, two-page meeting).

Then we see Blaze, the demon daughter of the Wizard Shazam introduced into the Superman books by Roger Stern and Bob McLeod in 1990.