Review: 1997's The Spectre #51

While DC editorial was able to get it together well enough to schedule the Spectre as a guest-star in the pages of Batman and Batman in the pages of The Spectre in January of 1997, they didn't necessarily get the details right. 

On the second page of John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake's The Spectre #51, Batman is swinging from a New York City rooftop, thinking about how he has come in pursuit of The Joker. 

"This is the second such trip made here recently," the Dark Knight thinks, "Last time brought me up against The Spectre.*"

The asterisk refers readers to "Batman 450-451." But, as we know because we just read those issues, Batman did not make a trip to New York City in them, bringing him up against The Spectre. Rather, the New York City-based Spectre journeyed to Batman's Gotham City, where the two clashed...at least in words, if not physically.

Odd.

That aside, this issue, one of the handful of issues of the series I had read off the rack when it was still being published serially, is just as I remember it: A fairly strong done-in-one in which the two caped heroes argue about sin and punishment regarding The Joker, with a terrifying moment in which the madman gets ultimate power (as he apparently occasionally does*) and the villain ultimately being defeated in the same way he will soon be in a JLA story. 

Having just read the Batman crossover, I of course wanted to read this issue, which will presumably be collected in a future The Spectre by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake Omnibus 2. Luckily, DC included it in their 2019 collection The Joker: His Greatest Jokes, which my library had a copy of (Interestingly, this issue of The Spectre is the only story included from a book that isn't one of the Batman line of books. You would think they would have included a Joker vs. Superman story in there, at least...)

It's a tightly-written 22-pager, with no time to waste on anything but the central conflict, only a few lines of dialogue really devoted to what's going on in the pages of the book at the time (Jim Corrigan really is, as he seemed to be in those issues of Batman, on the police force again, and partners with Nate Kane. Apparently, he has recently been injured by the Spear of Destiny again and is hiding out inside Nate's body. Oh, and there's a passing reference to the events of the previous fall's line-wide crossover, Final Night...which I'd love to see DC collect into a DC Finest volume or two...I remember it being one of the better such crossovers). 

The Joker is already in New York City as the book opens, and Batman has obviously already shown up too. Kane takes a report on the Batman foiling a mugging from his superior, thanks to Corrigan/The Spectre temporarily controlling his body.

Both Batman and Kane have the same concern about The Spectre meeting The Joker. "Based on our last meeting, if Spectre encounters The Joker first there won't be much of him left to return to Arkham," Batman thinks to himself. "Moonface, there better be someone left for me to question when I get there," Kane shouts after The Spectre, as the spirit flies off toward the sight of The Joker's attack. 

As for that attack, it too seemed familiar to me at this point. Someone in the city had the bright idea to open up a Joker-themed nightclub, where all the patrons dress up like The Joker (an off-hand remark by a club-goer makes this sound a bit like a comic book world's version of a goth club, where patrons dress a bit like vampires). It's kind of remarkable to read this and realize it was written almost 30 years ago, given how often the last few decades of comics have presented us with various iterations of the fans-of-The Joker or Joker-as-charismatic-figure stories. 

The story I immediately thought of, though, wasn't a comic book one at all, but an episode of the original Batman: The Animated Series, wherein a casino owner opens up a Joker-themed club called Joker's Wild, drawing the attention and the wrath of The Joker himself (For what it's worth, that episode of the show, also called "Joker's Wild", aired in 1992...that said, I suppose it's possible it was based on an older Batman comic I never read, as many episodes of the show were inspired by comics storylines).

Here an emcee announces The Joker on stage and is nervously taken aback when the Clown Prince of Crime seems less than flattered by the club's existence. "You mean, the idea of bedwetting little twits turning me into a fad?" Joker says, reaching to shake hands with the emcee. "What's not to like?"

The Joker then proceeds to electrocute his victim with a deadly joy buzzer ("They also know better than to fall for that in Gotham!" he laughs), and he then turns to spray the club with gas, his henchmen having welded the doors shut and filing in wearing gas masks.

That's when Batman shows up. The Joker immediately sics his fans-turned-victims on the Dark Knight. And then The Spectre appears, materializing out of the gas being shot by The Joker. 

Spec makes short work of The Joker's men in his own inimitable way—

—much to the delight of The Joker. 

Honestly, if you made a Venn diagram, The Spectre's sense of humor and The Joker's sense of humor probably overlap more than a little. Both seem to like dark jokes that end with someone violently dying. 

Before The Spectre can do something like turn The Joker into a giant playing card and rip him in half, though, The Batman makes a case for sparing him.

"The Joker himself is some kind of unholy innocent--a sociopath!" Batman argues. "He has no real concept of good and evil!" He argues that The Joker is sick and needs treatment, and, perhaps appealing to The Spectre's sense of mission, he says that if God created The Joker in this way, how can The Spectre punish him for being that way?

It's only a few panels, but it's an interesting little comic book debate, and with the characters bringing in God, making for a slightly more nuanced than the usual "executing killers makes you no better than them" sorts of arguments Batman can get into with characters who use deadly force (See, for example, his brief fight with The Punisher in 1994's Punisher/Batman: Deadly Knights #1 over how to deal with The Joker).

To get to the truth of the matter, The Spectre enters The Joker's eyes to investigate his mind in person, something we've seen him do repeatedly before, with characters alive and dead, in the pages of The Spectre. Of course, when he does so, he loses the upper hand, the person whose mind or soul he is visiting having the ultimate home court advantage.

This time it goes disastrously wrong. From the other side of the glass in a funhouse mirror within his mind, The Joker tells the Spectre, "Love the cape. And the hood. Mind if I try them on?"

And just like that, The Joker switches places with Corrigan, and the madman is suddenly in control of The Spectre's powers, appearing as a white-skinned grinning giant with a flower on the "lapel" of his giant green cape.

I was at this point rather struck by potentially how big a threat The Joker-with-The Spectre's-powers would be to not only Batman and the city, but to the whole world. Not for the first time while reading Ostrander's Spectre this month, I realized that Ostrander had come up with a plot that could very easily be an epic story arc or even big crossover event, but it was instead just used for an issue or three in the pages of the book. (The other Spectre plot it's easiest to imagine DC having exploited is the conclusion of the arc in which the United States seeks a Spectre counter-measure, ultimately arming Superman with the Spear of Destiny and sending him to confront the Spectre, leading to a sequence in which Superman fights the whole DC Universe and declares himself a sort of king of the world—where have I heard that before?—although much of it is a sort of fantasy that The Spectre presents, Ghost of Christmas Future-style, to Superman.) 

And so, the giant Joker uses Spectre's powers to attack Batman and/or anything within striking distance, the Dark Knight trying to keep the now god-like Joker's attention on him rather than on any other possible victims. 

Meanwhile, Corrigan explores the inside of The Joker's head, where there are a bunch of labeled electrical power boxes in a dilapidated maintenance shack behind a fun house. Just as Batman said, the one labeled "Conscience" isn't hooked up at all, and Mandrake draws it empty but for a crumbling skull.

Corrigan notes that, when it comes to conscience, "I got that in spades," and then he proceeds to stick a handful of glowing electrical cables into his open mouth, essentially hooking up The Joker's mind to Corrigan's conscience. (These scenes occurring in the mind, the sets, props and actions are all visual metaphors, of course.)

"Have a taste, Joker!" Corrigan shouts, his own head now enveloped in electric blue light. "Here's what a sense of right and wrong feel like!"

This has the desired effect as, over the course of a page and a half or so, The Joker is forced to think about and truly understand what he's done in his lifetime of killing:

Oh no!

OH NO!

All those lives! All those precious lives...!

DEAR GOD, WHAT HAVE I DONE?!

As The Joker freaks out, Mandrake draws a crowd of faces, apparently those of his countless victims, washing over his own screaming face like a wave. While they mostly appear to be just random civilians, one is quite recognizable as Robin Jason Todd. 

The Spectre leaves The Joker's body, and the villain collapses into a fetal position. 

"He has tasted his own guilt and it has proven too much for him," The Spectre explains to Batman. "He has slipped into catatonia."

Thus, The Joker's threat has been stopped, and Spectre concedes the argument over properly judging the maniac killer to Batman, the Joker expert.

As I alluded to earlier, this turn of events being a bit familiar to something that happened in Grant Morrison's JLA. 

In 1998's JLA #15—so well after this issue of Ostrander and company's Spectre—in the concluding chapter of the "Rock of Ages" story arc, The Joker gets his hands on the philosopher's stone/the Worlogog, a four-dimensional map that gives whoever bears it control over time and space**. So yet again a DC writer has put power over reality itself in the hands of The Joker. 

He doesn't get much of a chance to play with it, though, as the Martian Manhunter uses his mental abilities to telepathically order the information in The Joker's brain, forcing him into a temporary sanity, during which The Joker realizes he's done terrible things. 

I don't think Morrison necessarily swiped this brief scene from Ostrander, any more than I think Ostrander was inspired to create his Killing Joke club by Batman: The Animated Series, but it's interesting to note how often these stories rhyme one another, as various writers over the decades all might come to similar ideas. Like, for example, how scary would it be if a crazy villain like The Joker had god-like powers? 

In a fun little stinger of an ending, The Spectre turns to face the crowd of clubgoers who had dressed up like The Joker and had been patronizing The Killing Joke club. A few weeks later the club has reopened under the name The Wrath of God, a sort of BDSM club with naked people dressed in hooded green cloaks and green underpants, one of them apparently spanking others with a rod and preaching of sin and punishment. 

*In 1997's DC Special Series #27, better known as "Batman vs. The Incredible Hulk", the Shaper-of-Worlds grants The Joker his reality-writing powers at the climax (I wrote at length about that crossover here). And in the 2000 "Emperor Joker" crossover in the Superman line of books, The Joker gained access to Mr. Mxyzptlk's nigh omnipotent powers to alter reality. Those are the stories that immediately leapt to my mind, but perhaps there are others...?

**I read "Rock of Ages" when it was originally released in 1997 and 1998, when I was still in college, and thus relatively early in my exploration of the comics medium...and the DC Universe and its history. I had always just assumed that Grant Morrison had created the Worlogog, as it sure seemed to be of apiece with the sort of big, crazy ideas that punctuated his JLA run. 

It wasn't until 2018 or so that I was reading the collection of Jack Kirby's 1984 Super Powers series that I realized that Kirby had actually created the Worlogog. I practically fell out of my chair when I read the word in that comic. 

I have long since realized that much of which seems big and crazy in Morrison's super-comic writing is basically just old-school comic book craziness—especially that of the Silver Age—repurposed into the more sophisticated, more realistic presentation of more modern comics. (Which I don't think is a bad thing! In fact, it's a great strength, that Morrison doesn't just take characters or plot points from DC history like other writers but also manages to imbue his comics with the spirit of those past comics.)

Oh, and speaking of the Worlogog, it also showed up in the 2019 Teen Titans Go Vs. Teen Titans cartoon crossover, of all places, where it was part of the mechanism allowing for the two universes to intersect. There's even a brief musical number based around its pronunciation.