Undead Puritans in the Hands of an Angry God (Showcase Presents The Spectre)

Showcase Presents The Spectre Volume 1: written by Gardner Fox, Neal Adams, Steve Skeates, Michael Fleisher and others; illustrated by Murphy Anderson, Jerry Grandenetti, Neal Adams, Jim Aparo, Jim Starlin and others (1966-1983; collected 2012): The first collection of the Spectre's Silver- and Bronze-Age adventures at DC Comics is quite a bargain at over 600 pages for less than $20. It's also a bargain because of the 20-year period spanned by the collection. It's like a miniature cross-section of DC Comics in three different decades.

The Spectre was created in 1940 by Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel and artist Bernard Baily. He began as a murdered detective -- Jim Corrigan -- who was brought back to a sort of un-life by a mysterious voice whom most writers have strongly hinted was God.

Charged by the voice with seeking revenge on evil, Corrigan found himself host to one of the odder-looking superheroes of any age of comics, the Spectre. He seems to be dressed in white with green trunks, cape, hood, and boots. He isn't. The white part is the Spectre's body colour, ectoplasm or dead white flesh, depending on the writer. Yeesh.

The Spectre started off as judge, jury, and often very creative executioner. But he wasn't all that popular, though I've always been a bit confused about how companies assessed popularity in the 1940's comic-book industry. The Spectre never had his own book, and his adventures were usually eight to ten page shorts published in the anthology book More Fun Comics. They don't title comics the way they used to!

In any case, the powers that be at the comic-book company that would eventually be known as DC Comics soon changed the tone of the Spectre's adventures and paired him with a comic sidekick who eventually became the lead in the strip, with the Spectre as a helpful ghost. It was quite a comedown. The Spectre continued to act more like his original self in the Justice Society's adventures, but the late 1940's and early 1950's would soon end the ghostly creature's adventures.

Then came the Silver Age, and two Earths of DC characters, one being established as the home of the Golden-Age versions of everyone from Superman to Green Arrow. And finally the Spectre returned in the mid-1960's, less vengeful and more cosmic, in what seemed to be an attempt to emulate Marvel's supernatural hero Dr. Strange. The literal-minded Murphy Anderson was mysteriously chosen for the first few adventures collected here, written by the high-speed human typewriter of DC's Silver Age, Gardner Fox. They're certainly interesting stories, though the Spectre is a bit off a stiff. And not in a good way.

Different artists and writers followed in relatively quick succession, all sticking to the Spectre's new role as lovable cosmic avenger. Only towards the end of the Spectre's short-lived 1960's series does the character's vengeful streak come out, resulting in the hero being reprimanded by that Voice again just prior to cancellation.

There's some splendid cosmic art here from Neal Adams, along with some weird stuff from Jerry Grandenetti, who seems to be channeling the art of Dr. Strange's Steve Ditko in some of his more outlandish character designs, and the spirit of unintelligibility in some of his weirder page and panel layouts. Grandenetti can't make undead Puritans scary but he gives it the old college try, God bless him.

Five years after that 1969 cancellation came the character's post-Golden-Age career highlight: ten adventures in Adventure Comics (briefly retitled Weird Adventure) written by Michael Fleisher with help from Russell Carey and mostly illustrated by perennial Batman artist Jim Aparo. Fleisher returned the Spectre to his violent roots, in the process getting away with a surprising amount of graphic violence for a 1970's comic book.

The Spectre turned people into wood and then buzz-sawed them into pieces. He reduced them to skeletons. He melted them into screaming pools of dying goo. He cut them in half with giant scissors. He chopped them up with flying cleavers, fed them to alligators, and had magically animated stuffed gorillas tear them limb from limb. It was awesome.

Aparo illustrated all this with a weirdly unsettling matter-of-fact style augmented by suggestion rather than illustration at certain points due to the censorious Comics Code Authority: scissors man, for instance, is shown as being cut in half at the waist, but curtains are wrapped around the character below that waist. The empty area where the legs were is just a deflated expanse of curtain. Fleisher also works around things by having a character turned to wood before being segmented into pancakes of flesh, though Showcase's B&W reprint eliminates the colouring that made the character woody in the original publication. Now he's just a pile of flapjacks made out of person. Mmm.

After Fleisher and Aparo's delightful run (also collected on its own, in colour), the Spectre returned to a slightly less violent form of himself, guarding the boundaries of the universe and playing nice with other superheroes. The character's recurring omnipotence and near-omnipotence always seems to make him a hard sell. Later attempts at Spectre solo books have run longer than the attempts here, but none of them for that long.

The character has been rebooted an astonishing number of times, with different characters (including Green Lantern Hal Jordan during his dead phase) acting as hosts for the Spectre. Different explanations have been given for the Spectre's role in the universe, and why he needs a human host in the first place (short explanation: the Spectre, God's second attempt at a cosmic spirit of vengeance, goes completely loopy without a human host to ground him). As of 2012, he seems to be back again as the deceased Jim Corrigan, and sorta pissed about it. At least he's not comic relief. Yet. Recommended.

Dear God: The Jerk Store Called...

Comic:

The Book of Genesis, adapted and illustrated by Robert Crumb (2009): Robert Crumb is one of a handful of the world's greatest living cartoonists, given some fame outside comics by the documentary Crumb, which juxtaposed Robert with his sad and complicated siblings. Crumb came to fame in the 1960's as America's preeminent underground cartoonist. He became famous for creations that included Fritz the Cat (bastardized in a Ralph Bakshi animated movie), Mr. Natural, Shuman the Human and the seemingly ubiquitous 'Keep on Truckin'' logo that came to dominate T-shirts and bumper stickers without Crumb seeing a cent.

Since the 1970's, Crumb has widened and deepened his craft, the often insane sexual hijinks of his early work now complemented by pieces on the environment, on his family, on blues legends, on folk culture, and so on, and so forth. He's one of the relatively few living American artists who merits the accolade 'National treasure.'

And here, after five years of work, is his take on the first book of the Bible. And boy, is it a stunner. My only complaint about the volume is that Crumb can't possibly find time to adapt the entire Bible unless he lives as long as one of the Old Testament patriarchs whom he depicts, lovingly and warts-and-all, herein. If you read one chapter-by-chapter comics adaptation of a book of the Bible, make it this one!!!

Crumb's art is lovingly crafted, the research into dress and landscape fully integrated, the characters human and individual. Genesis is in many ways a book of horrors -- the expulsion from Eden, the Great Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. It's also a book in which almost everyone acts badly at least part of the time (Crumb supplies a couple of possible text-history explanations in the appendix for why Abraham keeps pimping out his wife to the rulers of the lands he visits, for instance). God is an arbitrary, vengeful, forgetful jerk who expels Adam and Eve from Eden as much for fear of what will happen if they manage to eat of the Tree of Life as for their sin of disobedience. Incest in various permutations is rampant. Even Joseph, in many ways the most sympathetic of characters (and, with 12 chapters devoted to him, the most fully realized) manages to put together a scheme whereby the Pharoah ends up owning the land of everybody in Egypt except the priests, making the entire population slaves (or serfs, if you wish). Good times, good times!

And through it all, Crumb's art keeps everything grounded in the normative, even the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart, if you will. His career-long fetishes about the female body mean that the matriarchs of Genesis are all big-breasted, big-bummed powerhouses, and there's certainly more female nippleage on display here, covered and naked, than in any previous rendition of a book of the Bible. That doesn't mean Crumb aims for the pornographic -- but sex (and all the attendant alliances and betrayals caused by it, trying to get it, and even trying, like Onan, to get out of it) is a major part of the Old Testament world. Crumb doesn't shy away from that.

All in all, an astonishing achievement of comics work. Highest recommendation.