By Will Pfeifer & Cliff Chiang: David Lapham, Eric Battle & Prentis Rollins (DC Comics)
ISBN13: 978-1-84576-577-X
The Spectre first appeared in 1940 in More Fun Comics #52 (February 1940), the brainchild of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel and artist Bernard Baily. Jim Corrigan, a murdered police detective, was given a mission to fight crime and evil by a glowing light and disembodied voice, and swiftly became one of the most overwhelmingly powerful heroes of the Golden Age.
He has been revamped and revived many times since. Latterly revealed to be God’s Spirit of Vengeance bonded to a human conscience, Corrigan was finally laid to rest and Hal Jordan replaced him.
Jordan was a Green Lantern who had nearly destroyed the universe when possessed by the antediluvian fear-parasite Parallax, only to sacrifice his life to reignite our dying sun in the Final Night miniseries (ISBN-13: 978-1-56389-419-0).
Jordan’s soul bonded with the Spectre force and became a Spirit of Redemption as well as Retribution. Following a complex series of events in the wake of the Infinite Crisis Jordan was resurrected as a mortal superhero and the Spectre was left without human guidance.
Collecting the three-part miniseries Crisis Aftermath: The Spectre and the lead stories from Tales of the Unexpected #1-3, this book follows the Ghostly Guardian in a search for a new host, which he finds in the reluctant, intangible form of Crispus Allen, a Detective in the Gotham City police force, murdered by fellow officer and dirty cop Jim Corrigan (no relation to the original).
In ‘Dead Again’ by Will Pfeifer and Cliff Chiang, The Spectre first has to convince the angry atheist Allen to bond with him to dispense Heavenly Justice. It then has to prove the validity of the admittedly illogical way the Spirit of Retribution selects his victims from the billions of murderous sinners in sore need of their personal and bloodily ironic attentions.
A subtle tale, the inescapable tragedy of the ending lends some desperately needed depth to a character far too powerful for traditional periodical tale-telling. This is followed by the first quarter of an eight-part epic by David Lapham, Eric Battle and Prentis Rollins that featured in DC’s revival of the classic anthology title Tales of the Unexpected.
Slum-lord Leonard Krieger has been murdered in one of his own rat-traps. He was chained and tortured for two weeks in the foul basement of a tenement filled with desperate people and outcasts on the edge of society. When he was very nearly dead he was stabbed repeatedly. There’s certainly no shortage of suspects…
Crispus Allen may be dead but he’s a still a detective and he knows that there’s some terrible secret buried in the wasteland of the Granville Towers. And so do investigating officers Marcus Driver and Josh Azeveda. When the Spectre identifies and dispatches the killer it would seem the case is over but the dark mysteries of the building are not all revealed and the horrors within keep calling out to both the harassed unsettled cops and Allen as well…
Davis Lapham took the Spectre into uncharted waters with this raw and savage portmanteau saga. Rather than one crime and one grisly punishment, he examines the nature of evil by focusing on all the inhabitants of the slum and their degree of culpability in this murder as well as other sins. Can every door hide a secret worthy of God’s punishment? And does Crispus Allen have the power – and the inclination – to temper the Spectre’s awful judgements?
‘The Cold Hand of Vengeance’ is engrossing and challenging stuff, well worth your attention, but to truncate the saga this way (the remaining issues 4-8 are collected in the sequel The Spectre: Tales of the Unexpected, ISBN: 978-1-84576-668-9) is annoying and unnecessary.
Even with a gallery of alternate covers by such luminaries as Neal Adams & Moose Bauman, Michael Wm. Kaluta & David Baron, Michael Mignola, Matt Wagner & Dave Stewart, both these books are short: 128 pages for this one and 144 for the follow-up. Would it have been so hard to schedule them all as one larger format volume such as Superman: Birthright?
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