On 1992 miniseries Armageddon: Inferno

If you happened to find a copy of 1992's Armageddon: Inferno 2001 #1 in a back issue bin today, you would have no idea that the story it would begin, one that would span four monthly issues, was a fairly pivotal one in the history of the first superhero team, the Justice Society of America.

The logo and title link it to Armageddon 2001, DC's1991 crossover event storyline that spanned some dozen annuals and two bookend issues and centered on the new hero Waverider travelling back in time to try to determine which superhero would become a despotic masked villain in his future.

And, of course, the image on the cover of the first issue prominently features Waverider...as does the corner box, a sure indication of who a book's star is meant to be. The Justice Society, meanwhile, wouldn't make the cover until the fourth and final issue.

Even once one starts reading the series, it doesn't seem like it's meant to be any sort of Justice Society story.  They are briefly mentioned in the second issue, when Superman suggests to Waverider that their old headquarters is no longer in use, and thus could make for a good place to host a gathering of superheroes. Other than that, they don't appear until the third issue.

Rather, the focus of the book seems to be to gather a whole bunch of DC's most popular characters, as well as some fan-favorite ones who might have been out of the spotlight for quite some time, and a murderers' row of artists to draw them. 

In fact, that seems to be the major selling point of the book, and the JSoA's return from the limbo they had been stuck in for a half-dozen years or so is somewhat incidental.

Writer Jon Ostrander and primary pencil artist Luke McDonnell spend only nine pages setting the whole adventure up, moving quite fleetly to introduce the premise. 

Waverider follows a disturbance in the timestream to a strange ritual in a Wyoming desert, where a dozen diverse people summon an extra-dimensional entity they call Abraxis. A bolt of lightning seems to split the sky, but rather than fading, it remains, and the slit of energy opens into a titanic staring eye. This is, a voice in a red-rimmed, tail-less dialogue balloon declares, Abraxis.

Abraxis plans to conquer this dimension by transforming his twelve supplicants and empowering them as his "daemen" servants. He will then send them in groups of three to four different points in time, where they will build for him giant "simulacra" which he can then inhabit. To aid them in their work, he will give them armies of "husks", hordes of all-black figures that evoke the shadow demons of Crisis on Infinite Earths. 

Realizing that his own time-travelling shenanigans—in either Armageddon 2001 or its sequel mini-series Armageddon: The Alien Agenda—seems to have allowed Abraxis to breach the wall between dimensions, Waverider realizes that means he can also stop him.

Using his time powers, he finds the locations in time and space the daemen have went to and then finds the precise heroes he will be able to send to these battlegrounds without causing irreparable harm to the time stream.

They turn out to be about whom you would expect, many of the primary heroes of the DC Universe circa 1992, including the most popular heroes, although Ostrander also includes various period heroes from the past, characters that don't turn up all that often in DC Comics, and a couple of oddball choices, current heroes from points in their own past or, in one case, the future.

The adventures of each of the four teams, which are essentially just fight scenes against the daemen and husks, are each drawn by a different artist, including some big names that one might think would have been featured a little more prominently on the cover, but then, maybe in 1992 comics were still more event-driven and character-driven than artist driven...? (Or DC thought so, at least...?)

Each team is announced on a full-page splash by the artist who will be drawing the sequences featuring them, which I'll scan and share here.

First, there's Arthur Adams drawing present-day heroes Superman, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter, The Flash (Wally West), Power Girl (here wearing her worst costume, the yellow and white one) and Donna Troy (Here going by "Troia", and rocking the shorthair and short skirt look). This team is being sent to a future that I think appeared in a Superman comic I never read. (You know, this line-up wouldn't make a half-bad Justice League if you gave them one more hero to hit the magic number seven...)

Second, Michael Netzer draws World War II-era heroes Sgt. Rock and Easy Company, Johnny "The Navajo Ace" Cloud, the team of Gunner, Sarge and Pooch (although on first mention "Gunner" is spelled "Gunnar") and the modern day Thanagarian Hawkman and Hawkwoman (here outfitted in what I believe are their Hawkworld costumes). This team will fight their battle during World War II, so it's a short commute for most of them.

Third, Walt Simonson draws Orion, Lobo, Green Lantern Guy Gardner, Enemy Ace (!!!) and Starfire in dinosaur times (As you stare in appreciation of Simonson's take on these various characters, do note the zig-zag of reddish orange in the lower left corner; that too is part of Starfire's weird hair trail). 

And, finally, Tom Mandrake draws Batman, The Spectre, a plainclothes Jo Nah/Ultra Boy from the Legion of Super-Heroes, a Firestorm "from his earlier years" and The Creeper "from the recent past"; this team is sent to the recent past. 

The second half of this first issue features Mandrake's sequence, which lasts 11 pages. Its event will be repeated in each of the other three sequences not drawn by McDonnell.  

1.) The heroes will gather. 

2.) Ostrander will do a decent job of introducing most of them in a way that feels quite natural to them. (Case in point, Starfire is in the midst of using her energy bolts to keep Lobo and Guy Gardner from fighting one another when Orion boom tubes in with the line "I have the word--it is battle!" And then Hans Von Hammer appears, dueling with a huge pterosaur while brooding about "the killer skies"; Enemy Ace doesn't really interact with the superheroes at all and, interestingly, thinks they and the bad guys and the prehistoric reptiles are all part of a nightmare he's having).

3.) They will fight the daemen, each of which Ostrander seems to have done far more work on than was probably necessary, given that this series is the only place they will ever appear, as he gives them each a civilian name, backstory and motivation for selling their souls as well as a new, demonic name and a super-power of some sort that makes them a threat to the heroes they face. I suspect the designs for each of these villains was likely provided by the artists, given how much they seem to reflect the stylistic sensibilities of whoever is drawing them (My favorites are Mandrake's Zhazor, who looks vaguely  Nazgul-like and throws bolts of flame; Netzer's Feth Sudol, who can transform himself into groups of different scary black animals; and Adams' Arquol, who can transform into a variety of cool vehicles; Adams' Inztuk has a somewhat generic eye-beam power, but his design, featuring a Styracosaurus head atop a humanoid body, is pretty cool). 

4.) Abraxis will inhabit the simulacrum. (Abraxis is also a pretty great design, which every artist draws the hell out of; he's a black-colored giant with diabolical horns and fangs that looks a little like Chernabog from Fantastia's "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence blended with a Thanos-like supervillain). 

As you can probably imagine, each of these extended fight sequences are great, and it's hard to overstate how fun it is to see these particular artists drawing these weird groupings of characters, most of whom seem to have been chosen by asking the artists which characters they might most like to draw (In fact, I wonder if that's how Ostrander went about assembling the characters to be featured). 

By the third issue, The Spectre sends a duplicate of himself to confront Waverider in the timestream to tell him the plan doesn't seem to be working, and suggest that they throw another group of heroes at Abraxis in his home dimension, thus stretching the demon/supervillain's attention across five conflicts in two different dimensions to further weakine him.

When Waverider says that he has already recruited all of the heroes he can without endangering the timestream, The Spectre volunteers a group of superheroes who area already outside of time and space: The Justice Society of America, who are still in some limbo dimension fighting Ragnarok from the events of 1986's Last Days of the Justice Society of America. 

Ostrander also writes a sequence from the point-of-view of one of the natives on Abraxis' home world, a hairy hominid that looks like he could be an ancestor to modern homo sapiens. Because Abraxis feeds on souls, he basically treats the native population of his world as cattle, their reproduction providing him with new souls. They are ruled by their most base instincts, and have no real concept of things like bravery, selflessness or heroism...at least, not until the Justice Society appears and awakens a light within them.

Dick Giordano pencils the Justice Society sequences in the fourth issue, so there's one more name to add to the who's who of this particular art team. 

That final issue includes four more splashes from Adams, Mandrake, Netzer and Simonson, each showing their assigned team of heroes battling Abraxis and his minions. These echo the splashes from the first issue, but each is a little stronger, I think, as it shows the heroes in triumphant action, rather than simply posing for a group shot. 

They are all great, but this one's my favorite:

As I noted on Bluesky when I was rereading this, I love that image of Orion manhandling the poor daemon's face. And Abraxis' melodramatic, operatic posing. And, especially, Guy's boots. I don't think anyone has ever drawn Guy's old giant boots better than Simonson does here. 

Naturally, the good guys win, and Abraxis is defeated, never to threaten the DC Universe again (Which is maybe unfortunate, given what a cool design he has). The modern-day heroes are all debriefing in the JSoA's old HQ, where they had met prior to embarking on this mission, when Superman laments the fate of the Justice Society, and Flash says, "Jay--all of them--deserve better!"

"You're correct, Flash," a voice says from off-panel. It belongs to Waverider, who appears suddenly, and the Justice Society materializes right behind him.

"It would be small thanks to such heroes as they to consign the Justice Society back to limbo," Waverider says. "That is why the daemen now fight the eternal battle of Ragnarok and the Justice Society is here instead."

The last panel is a big one, filling most of the last page, and in it, McDonnell draws all the modern day heroes from the series chatting with the newly returned Justice Society. Ostrander pens four narration boxes, the last of which reads, "Every once in a while, the good guys actually win."

The very next month, DC would launch a new ongoing Justice Society of America series by writer Len Strazewski and pencil artist Mike Parobeck, though it would only last ten issues before being cancelled. That book has never been collected, and I've never been able to find it in back issue bins, so I've never actually read it (and I keep hoping DC will collect it at some point). 

As for Waverider and the Armageddon-branding, well, the character would remain a mainstay in the DC Universe, but never got his own series again, and was mostly employed when a narrative called for time-travel or a character to explain time travel. Following the previously mentioned Armageddon 2001 and Armageddon: Alien Agenda, this was the last time DC used that title and/or logo. Inferno has never been collected...and neither have those other Armageddon books.  I know I've said this repeatedly before, but I hope DC will eventually collect Armageddon 2001 into a couple of DC Finest collections...maybe they can throw the sequels into one of them. 

The Spectre in the DC Universe Pt. 1

As previously mentioned, the Spectre by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake Omnibus contains commentary on each issue by Ostrander. In discussing issue #21, he addresses something that I had often thought about, back in 1992 when I first read an issue of the series, and again last month while reading through the first half of the series in the omnibus.

Ostrander:

I've sometimes been asked why The Specte wasn't part of Vertigo, which was an imprint of DC known mostly for its supernatural/mystical titles and its blue-ribbon creators. The answer, if memory serves, is because we preceded it. Karen Berger, the line's senior editor, was not our editor. We were in a different editorial group. Sometimes it's that simple. 

Ostrander's memory does indeed serve. Vertigo launched in January of 1993, the month that Spectre #4 hit stands. Of course, it's the different editor thing that probably actually kept Spectre from getting a Vertigo logo on its cover, as the mature readers imprint's initial offerings—Animal Man, Doom Patrol, Hellblazer, Sandman, Shade, The Changing Man and Swamp Thing*—were all in-progress series. The oldest of these was Swamp Thing, with #129 being the first Vertigo-branded issue, and the youngest was Shade, which was already on issue #33 the month Vertigo launched. 

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). 

Thinking about it now, I'm not sure how much different Ostrander and Mandrake's Spectre might have been if it was a Vertigo book. 

I guess the characters would probably swear (One of them, police lieutenant Nate Kane, has a charming habit of saying "Balzac!" like a swear word). 

And Mandrake would be able to draw nipples on the various topless ladies who appear in these stories (Madame Xanadu, for example, performs a ritual stripped to the waist at one point. One demon is drawn as a naked woman from the waist up and a snake from the waist down. And when we see human souls, they are always naked. Mandrake uses tricks of light and posing to make sure that a strand of hair falls just so over a woman's breast, for example, or that shadows fall over them to offer a degree of concealment).

Oh, and maybe we would be less likely to see Superman playing a substantial role in one of the stories, I guess...?

Maybe the characters gathered at the funeral that Jim Corrigan/The Spectre threw for himself in 1998's The Spectre #62, the last issue of the series wouldn't have included electric Superman, hook-handed Aquaman and the Martian Manhunter. (The image above is from that issue, by the way, and is thus not actually included in the first omnibus, but it seemed like a good one to use for this post, given all the DCU characters in it). 

Swearing and nudity aside, I think The Spectre actually benefits from being set in the mainstream DCU. Given the character's long history—he debuted in 1940, was a founding member of comics' first super-team the Justice Society of America in the pages of All-Star Comics, and starred in a pair of ongoing series, one in the 1960s and another in the1980s—he's entwined in the history of the DC Universe in a way that, say, Animal Man and Swamp Thing aren't. And it's not like Jack Kirby's 1970's Sandman was on the Justice League, or Steve Ditko's Shade was wrestling the Anti-Monitor in Crisis on Infinite Earths. 

Of course, being a Vertigo book didn't necessarily preclude the appearances of superhero characters from throughout the broader DC line of comics. The wall around the imprint was also rather porous and, of course, the original Vertigo books all started out as ones presumably set in the DCU (Which can be disconcerting to later readers, who might pick up a Vertigo-branded collection and find Dream of The Endless visiting JLI headquarters and meeting Martian Manhunter, or Richard Case drawing Booster Gold and Blue Beetle in the pages of Doom Patrol). 

I wanted to explore the book as a book within the DC line, specifically how it interacted with the wider DC Universe setting, how it pulled guest-stars and supporting cast members from DC comics history and even featured some of what we now think of Vertigo characters...and reflecting aspects of the Vertigo books back into the DCU.

MADAME XANADU

In The Spectre #2, "Crimes of Passion", Siegel-Baley General Hospitals' staff social worker Amy Beitermann is trying to learn more about Jim Corrigan, who she briefly met at the hospital—and then witnessed him getting repeatedly shot in a drive-by shooting, the bullets all passing harmlessly through him. 

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!)

DEADMAN

In The Spectre #5, "A Rage in Hell," a carful of kidnappers are caught in a deadly car crash, which spells doom for their victim: They have secreted a little boy in a grave with an air tube until their ransom was met, although a rainstorm is now threatening to drown him. The only people who could reveal his location are now all dead. 

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.

SHATHAN

In that same issue, The Spectre leaves "the land of the recently departed" for Hell, where he calls forth the "LORD OF LIES!" and is answered by a huge, red, horned figure: "Who so calls upon Shathan The Eternal?" 

Now, "Shathan" sounds like an overly careful, rather comic book-y way to use the devil in a comic book story without actually saying the name "Satan", similar to Marvel re-naming their Satan "Mephisto" or DC pitting Superman against a "Lord Satanus", but don't blame Ostrander for adding a couple of H's to "Satan"—the character was actually the creation of Gardner Fox and Murphy Anderson in 1966's Showcase #61.

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."

If you want to read of that fight, and The Spectre's first fight with Shathan's servant Azmodus from Showcase #60 (Azmodus is our next entry on this list), they have been collected in September's DC Finest: The Spectre: The Wrath of The Spectre and 2020's The Spectre: The Wrath of The Spectre Omnibus and, if you can still find it, 2012's Showcase Presents: The Spectre.

Here, The Spectre and Shathan fight in Hell, a brutal battle involving size-changing and shape-changing but ultimately ends with The Spectre plunging his fist into Shathan's chest and pulling out his "heart", the soul of the recently dead kidnapper that The Spectre had descended to Hell in search of in the first place.

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."

This is kinda sorta the role that Azmodus played in those old Showcase issue. Introduced as an evil opposite of The Spectre, he too rather resembled a sort of cartoon devil, oddly dressed in yellow (You can see him on this cover).

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. 

He will play a major role in this half of the series, fighting The Spectre on another plane not unlike the battle he had with him in that long ago Showcase story (This he does to keep The Spectre busy while Amy is imperiled in the real world by a human killer). Later, we will learn of Azmodus' origins and relationship to The Spectre, and, as this collection nears its final pages, The Spectre has a climactic battle with Azmodus in Hell. 

FATHER RICHARD CRAEMER 

After the serial killer called The Reaver attacks and then impersonates the priest at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in order to commit his latest murders, the church receives a new priest in The Spectre #13, "Righteousness": Father Richard Cramer. 

I actually didn't recognize him upon his first introduction, not even when, in the next issue, "Wrath of God", he recognizes The Phantom Stranger, the most mysterious of DC's heroes, explaining to him that, "My previous assignment was as chaplain at Belle Reve prison, where they incarcerate a number of criminal metahumans...They also keep extensive files on the subject."

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. 

Craemer will later talk Corrigan/The Spectre down when he seems poised to erase all of humanity from the face of the Earth, after which point he becomes Corrigan's spiritual advisor and friend. 

Craemer appears as a close ally and confidant of the title character throughout the rest of the series. 

COUNT VERTIGO

Did Vlatava sound familiar to you? There's good reason. That's the country that the supervillain Count Vertigo hails from, and, as a member of its royal lineage, sometimes rules or fights to rule. Originally created by Gerry Conway, Trevor Von Eeden and Vince Colletta, he played a significant role in Ostrander's previously mentioned Suicide Squad and is now primarily known as a Green Arrow villain. 

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."

THE PHANTOM STRANGER

DC's ever mysterious figure, whose origins and roles seem to regularly shift, even on the rare occasions where a writer seeks to define them, appears before Craemer in issue #14, "Wrath of God." 

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

When The Phantom Stranger tells Craemer of the history of The Spectre, he starts with this: "There are many sides to the almighty--many names by which God is called...Even his wrath has a name and, in the beginning, it was what became known as 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.)

Eclipso "overreached himself" though, and would not forgive as God did, so he was ultimately "banished into a prison, one that should have lasted for all time, save for the perfidy of man."

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.

NABU

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). 

At the climax of the story of the plagues—"a battle of wonders--of terrors"—it is The Spectre-Force that moves among Egypt like a mist, claiming the lives of every first-born son. Nabu again challenges it, this time wearing the helm of Fate, and he is again defeated, as "the force the Spectre represented was the force that created the Lords of Order".

SUICIDE SQUAD'S AMBAN AND THE HAYOTH 

In The Spectre #15, "Old Blood", the title character visits the Middle East, intent on claiming the life of Kemal Saad, "Head of the Legion of Palestine," who is in Cairo for peace talks with Israel, despite being considered a terrorist by the Israeli government for his past actions. 

At the behest of Israel, Saad has super-powered security watching over him: The Hayoth, an Israeli super-team that Ostrander had created in 1990 as part of his Suicide Squad run. They are led by Ramban, a Kabbalistic combat magician, and their number here includes Golem and Judith. 

The Spectre makes short work of Golem but has considerably more trouble with Ramban. ("I am a student of The Kabbalah, and the power I invoke is the power that created you," he tells The Spectre at one point).

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.

Fate squats next to the prone figure, asking incredulously, "This is Constantine?"

"He's worse off than I thought--and totally useless for our purposes," The Stranger says. "We'll have to do without him." 

They leave without Constantine seeming to have ever been aware that the were there; in the last panel to feature him, the pool of liquid is colored red, and now looks to be blood. (For what it's worth, Constantine was, at this point, in the "Damnation's Flame" arc of his own book, by writer Garth Ennis and artist Steve Dillon.)

ETRIGAN, THE DEMON

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. 

"You never need me," he says. "You need him."

A short spell later, and a smoking, leering Etrigan crouches before the pair, leveling a lascivious threat at the Doctor while licking his lips: 

And so I walk the world again, a Stranger greets me fair.

With a Fate so sweet that I intend...

...to strip the Doctor bare!

Mandrake draws an amusingly worried reaction on Fate's helmed "face", but the Stranger changes the subject immediately.

"Actually, we've come to settle a question," he tells Etrigan. "Who is stronger, The Demon or...The Spectre?"

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. 

One of the many appealing aspects of this series is seeing Mandrake draw so many different DC characters, and his Etrigan is a particularly great one. He's a hulking brute of a figure, muscled to the point that it approaches deformity in some panels, The Demon seemingly hunching under the weight of his own triceps muscles. Mandrake also gives him a bestial face that suggests a compromise between Jack Kirby's original design and that given to him by Stephen Bissette in the pages of Swamp Thing. 

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).

ZATANNA

And "the sorceress"...? That would be on-again, off-again Justice Leaguer Zatanna. Here The Phantom Stranger and team meet her in The Spectre #16, "Call For Blood," the issue in which the incredibly intersting art team of penciller Jim Aparo and inker Kelley Jones spell Mandrake.

She's in a San Francisco office, wearing a pink business suit. The Stranger tells her "You have recently come to a full understanding of your heritage and power", asking her, "Will you join that power with ours?"

She takes a wand from her desk drawer and holds it aloft, saying "Excuse me while I change." 

Then she stands before them, wearing tight blue pants and boots, a blue vest with a very long collar, and various bits of jewelry, including a big, golden-colored "Z" for a belt buckle. 

This is the costume she wore in the then just recently completed four-issue Zatanna mini-series by writer Lee Marrs and artist Esteban Maroto. I never read it, but quite clearly remember seeing house ads for it, given Maroto's gorgeous artwork. 

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:

True, my verse is barren, but the reason I will tell.

Shakespeare went to Heaven; critics go to Hell.

Bad news, fellow comics critics!

NAIAD

This extremely powerful water elemental is an original creation of John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake's...but not for this book. Rather, they had created her near the end of their Firestorm run. 

A Japanese protestor who was set afire by men working for an oil company, she was reborn by Gaia, the spirit of Earth, as a being composed of water and who was able to control water. 

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.

THE JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA 

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. 

Nightshade, a portal-generating superheroine and "an American intelligence agent", arrived on scene to snag the Spear, which she delivered to Sarge Steel. 

Kobra, by the way, was originally created by Jack Kirby and Steve Sherman in the late 1970s, and then drastically reconfigured by Martin Pasko and Pablo Marcos before the first issue of the short-lived Kobra was released. The character has been a sort of all-purpose villain ever since, fighting various heroes, including Batman and the Outsiders, The Flash, the Suicide Squad and JSA.

Nightshade was originally created by David Kaler and Steve Ditko for Charlton Comics, and she was therefore acquired with the rest of the publisher's characters and integrated into the DCU. Ostrander used her in his Suicide Squad. 

Similarly, Sarge Steel began as a Chalton character, created by Pat Masulli, and upon being imported into the DCU he played a role in Ostrander's Suicide Squad and has been a government and/or intelligence official in one capacity or another ever since.

SUPERMAN

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). 

BATMAN AND COMPANY

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. 

LUCIFER AND COMPANY

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). 

In attendance at his meeting? 

First, there's Beelzebub, who, like Lucifer, exists in the real world, or at least does so in classic demonology and literature. The DC Comics version is always depicted as a fly, usually a huge one, as Mandrake draws him here. He was part of the triumvirate with Lucifer that ruled Hell in Sandman, and he has had various appearances in comics, both from Vertigo and the DCU: Hellblazer, Kid Eternity, Swamp Thing, The Demon, even Supergirl (during Peter David's run, which involved angels and devils) and Batman (in a Doug Moench/Kelley Jones issue wherein The Joker summons Etrigan from Hell, and the Clown Prince of Crime eats the archfiend, who appears as a regularly-sized fly).

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. 

And, finally, there's Belial, who, like Beelzebub is a "real" demon, and thus has apparently appeared in various comics over the years, but the version here is that which appeared in The Demon comics, first in Matt Wagner's 1987 mini-series and then much more extensively in the 1990-1995 ongoing series launched and primarily written by Alan Grant. Mandrake draws him as he appeared in The Demon, looking much like his son Etrigan, only with far longer, straighter horns and somewhat bigger ears. 

It's only a rather brief scene in which these fiends appear, but it is a welcome orientation of this story in the DC Universe, honoring the emergent mythology of the decade, and suggesting that books as various as Action Comics, The Sandman, The Demon and The Spectre all take place in the same shared setting and are part of some massive, never-ending storyline. 

Next: We wait for The Spectre by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake Omnibus Vol. 2, I guess. 

*Looking at that first class of Vertigo books, I'm struck by how they are mostly reimaginings of relatively obscure superhero IP. There's Arnold Drake, Bob Haney and Bruno Permiani's 1963 Doom Patrol, Dave Wood and Camine Infantino's 1965 Animal Man, Len Wein and Berine Wrightson's 1971 Swamp Thing, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's 1974 The Sandman (itself a radical reinvention of the Golden Age character created by Gardner Fox and Bert Christman) and Steve Ditko's 1977 Shade, The Changing Man. The only new-ish character to star in one of those books was Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette and John Totleben's John Constantine, who spun out of their Swamp Thing to star in the Jamie DeLano-written Hellblazer.

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.

The origins of Mister Terrific Michael Holt

There's no indication on the cover of 1997's The Spectre #54, which was produced by the great Richard Corben, but this issue in writer John Ostrander and artist Tom Mandrake's series would feature the introduction of a new, legacy version of minor Golden Age character Mister Terrific, as well as featuring appearances from various Justice League and Justice Society characters, making it a particularly superhero-heavy issue. The covers of the series, which are typically great, don't always comment directly on the contents within, and this is a pretty good example...although there is a zombie in the issue. 

The story opens with a man standing on a bridge above a train track, sadly regarding a framed headshot of a smiling woman, signed "Love Always, Paula." He lets it drop onto a train below, and is then interrupted by a couple of little kids, one of them holding a gun that looks comically huge in his little hands. 

"Okay, fool-- Give us all your monies if you wanta live!" the boy says, and the man responds. "But what if I don't care if I live?"

Enter Jim Corrigan, from out of nowhere, with harsh words for the kid. The frightened child fires several shots into Corrigan's chest, to no effect (He is, of course, already dead, and has been so for decades). Corrigan's voice changes to a spookier one, rendered by letterer Todd Klein in a jagged dialogue balloon tinted green at the edges, and the font of the lettering gets similarly rough and jagged. Corrigan then transforms into The Spectre, and the children flee in panic.

Once they're alone, The Spectre tells Michael Holt, for of course that's who this man is, that he was drawn there by his thoughts: "Self murder is still murder. And murder is the province of The Spectre."

Holt explains his thoughts, revealing a bit about his background, vague though it is at this point: 

My wife is dead. Car accident tore her out of my life with no warning. All the things I've done with my life--the money I've made, the achievements in sports and science-- --They're nothing without her. I don't know why I should live.

The Spectre shifts back to his Corrigan form and begins to tell Holt of his old friend Terry Sloane, a man who similarly had money and brains, but found himself bored...and was once a victim to kids who tried to rob him, seeking to imitate the heroes of their day, the gangsters of the 1940s.

Sloane's response was to demonstrate to kids that gangsters aren't anyone to look up to or imitate, and he did so by making himself into something far cooler: A superhero, who regularly took down gangsters and revealed them to be the losers they were.

Here artist Mandrake devotes a half a page to the Golden Age Mister Terrific, smiling broadly as he beats up a trio of armed gangster types, a couple of kids in the background cheering him on. 

The Spectre then goes on to tell the story of Mister Terrific's last adventure, somewhat based on 1979's Justice League of America #171-172, by Gerry Conway, Dick Dillin and Frank McLaughlin, although one need not have any familiarity with those comics to follow this, which obviously needed to be altered to fit into the post-Crisis continuity, anyway (Here, for example, the characters share a single Earth rather than hailing from two parallel ones, and a problematic character like The Huntress is absent, though Power Girl is still there).

During The Spectre's story, Mister Terrific is murdered aboard the JLA satellite, apparently by The Flash Jay Garrick...who was actually possessed by a villain named The Spirit King. In the aftermath, as the JSA pursued the villain to Earth, Garrick went looking for The Spectre, and the two heroes catch up with the villain in Doctor Fate's tower in Salem, where  The Spirit King has now taken control of Fate and defeated and captured the other heroes (Green Lantern Alan Scott, Hawkman and Power Girl, if you're interested).

When The Spectre and Flash arrive, they find themselves in a trap set by The Spirit King, who, being a ghost, is untouchable by either The Flash or Spectre ("You have no power over me, Spectre!" the villain gloats. "Your authority ends at the grave! And I have stepped beyond it!").

It gets worse. The Spirit King has apparently made a deal with the demon Shaitan, acting as a portal for the evil entity to cross over onto Earth. And then the corpse of Mister Terrific joins the battle, shambling towards The Flash. So there's the zombie that Corben's cover seems to promise. (It's unclear to me just how it is that Sloane's corpse became quite so skeletal and desiccated in the short time since he had apparently died, but whatever, Mandrake draws a great zombie).

Ultimately the day is saved when the ghost of Mister Terrific appears, and, being a ghost, is able to lay his hands—and, more importantly, his fists—on his fellow ghost The Spirit King. He punches him into the portal Shaitan was attempting to come through, which The Spectre seals, saving the JSA and, perhaps, the whole world. 

After a few words with his teammates, the ghost of Mister Terrific fades away, leaving the glowing words of his slogan, "Fair Play" hanging in the air.

The story told, Holt wonders why exactly The Spectre told it to him.

The Spectre answers, with a bit of a speech that would prove transformative for Michael Holt and, indirectly, the future JSA and the DC Universe as a whole. He switches back to Corrigan mid-way through, which is why the language shifts accordingly: 

A void exists and needs to be filled.

No one can ever be replaced. Not your wife, not Terry Sloane, but their passing leaves a void that needs to be filled.

You feel the void your wife has left...

Mr. Terrific filled a purpose and that purpose isn't filled by Superman or Batman or even The Spectre.

He worked at the street level. He reached kids that might have otherwise gone bad. Replaced "gangsta" role models with one that stressed "Fair Play."

There is a need to for that kinda hero today, get me? Maybe, if you fill a void that's out there, you can ease the one that's inside you.

You game? 

Indeed, Holt is. 

The scene shifts to a basketball court, where the kids who tried to rob Holt in the opening scene are reporting back to some obviously older (and far taller) young men, who are belittling their failure to bring back any money, and threatening them with a beating.

And then Holt shows up, now wearing a big pair of sunglasses and a leather jacket with the words "Fair Play" emblazoned on the back, the logo mirroring the one that the original Mister Terrific wore on his torso. He sure threw that costume together pretty quickly!

He confidently introduces himself with a seemingly new too-cool-for-school personality: "You can just call me Mr. Terrific--cause that's what I am." He's also carrying a basketball. After he easily beats up the two armed bad guys ("I'm not afraid to die, so I'm not afraid of you!" he says to one, who points a gun at the back of his head), he shoots the basketball from afar, and of course he makes the shot, complete with a "SWISH!" sound effect. 

Then The Spectre arrives, sweeping up the older kids in his cloak and promising to punish them now for murders they may commit in the future, at which point Holt gets in his face, saying he'll take responsibility for them, and citing "Fair Play" to the Spectre. 

The Spectre concedes the point and flies away, thinking to himself about how the confrontation was a ruse, that the kids "needed to see their hero seemingly strong enough to face down even The Spectre...it will build your reputation and burnish a legend."

It's a pretty great comic, as are most issues of Ostrander and Mandrake's Spectre series, and, if you can find it in a back issue bin or if you read it online from Kindle, it's a pretty good starting point for getting into the book (Like too much of that volume of The Spectre, it's never been collected). 

Leaning towards horror and constantly dabbling with moral quandaries, this series was one of handful from the '90s that seemed to straddle the DC Universe and the sort of content from the Vertigo imprint, although this issue felt a little special in just how full of superheroes it was, the colorful, muscular figures rendered in Mandrake's spooky, sketchy style.

Now, of course, the issue is best known for introducing the new Mister Terrific, who would, a few years later, join the new JSA team and become a DCU mainstay, even headlining his own short-lived solo title in 2011 as part of DC's "New 52" initiative. 

As you can see in the images above, the character bears relatively little resemblance to the more familiar version from the 1999-2006 JSA series, though. Obviously, that's visual, as he would adopt the distinctive black T-shaped mask, the black, white and red costume and the hovering robot "T-Spheres" later, as his background in science and athletics would be fleshed out to the point where we learn he was an Olympic athlete and genius-level intellect (one of the smartest people in the world, actually). Oh and, perhaps oddly given that he was introduced in an issue of The Spectre where the embodiment of the Wrath of God told him a story about ghosts, zombies and demons, we would eventually learn that he is an atheist. 

He also seems to have drifted pretty far from the initial point of inspiration, that of being a street-level hero focused on being a role model for young people and steering them away from the potential appeal of a life of crime. Of course, that was likely a side-effect of being on the JSA, a team book in which the threats were naturally bigger, more global and less grounded than street crime, as they had to be significant enough to require the attention of a large team of very powerful characters including the android Hourman from the 853rd Century and a Dr. Fate. 

After his introduction in The Spectre #54, the new Mister Terrific next appeared in 1998's The Spectre #62, the last issue of the series. In this issue, Corrigan/The Spectre buries Corrigan's bones and holds a funeral for himself, one attended by characters from throughout the series, and throughout the DC Universe (and, in a few cases, just beyond, like Swamp Thing). At the end, the green cloak of The Spectre floats up into the sky, leaving the naked Corrigan on Earth...at least until a bright light from the sky envelopes him and he disappears.

Mister Terrific's role is quite small. He arrives wearing the same simple costume Mandrake gave his in his first appearance, although at this point he seems to have added gloves with a yellow "T" on them.

"Who are you? Black Lighting?" one attendee asks him when he walks up. 

Later, when Corrigan's surviving JSA allies—Jay Garrick, Alan Scott, Ted Knight and Ted Grant—arrive, Wildcat puts his hands on his hips and asks Holt, "So--yer the new Mr. Terrific, eh?"

"You got a problem with that?" Hold replies. 

Wildcat punches him on the arm: "Nope. Glad to see it. Just do th' name justice, okay? Terry was a friend o' mine."

This new Mister Terrific would, obviously, end up spending a lot of time with Wildcat, Garrick and Scott in the future.

His next appearance was in the pages of 1999's JSA Secret Files & Origins #1. He doesn't appear in any of the special issue's comics stories—he wasn't initially a member of the team, which was being written at the outset by James Robinson and David Goyer, and pencilled by Steven Sadowski. Instead, he appears in one of the profile pages, which, in these specials, would feature an illustration of the character and a few paragraphs of text about the character in question, functioning a little like the old Who's Who pages.

Here, he's drawn by an artist credited as "Grey" and inked by Vince Russel. This is the first published appearance of what would become his standard and best-known costume, the one he'd wear throughout the pages of JSA and the series that followed it, Justice Society of America (And the one that appears in the new Superman movie). The image also shows the first appearance of the "T-Spheres."

Though Grey is the first person to draw it, I'm not sure if they get credit for the design or not; in fact, I'm not sure who designed it (Do let me know if you know). 

The profile on this page, written by Holt's co-creator John Ostrander, fleshes out his past accomplishments, noting that he was "an Olympic decathlon gold medal winner" and that he "created his own cyberwear company which he ultimately sold to the Waynetech Corporation."

It also notes that he "fights in the inner-city for the minds and hearts of the kids there." "The modern Mr. Terrific fights the new 'gangstas' with skill, intelligence, and by just being so damn cool," Ostrander writes. (Interestingly, Ostrander refers to Holt's late wife as "Angela," although we saw the name "Paula" written on her picture in his first appearance).

As for the JSA title proper, Mister Terrific first appears in the fifth issue, written by Robinson and Goyer and penciled by guest artist Derec Aucoin, where he meets Sandy Hawkins and the android Hourman at Tylerco. It's revealed there that he acts as a consultant for Tylerco, and in return they fund a youth center Holt had started. He is, by this point, wearing the costume from Secret Files & Origins.

He then shows up in issue #11, at which point Geoff Johns has replaced Robinson and Goyer's co-writer, and this issue features breakdowns and inks by Michael Bair and pencils and inks by someone credited simply as "Buzz." 

Here Mister Terrific has his T-Spheres for the first time in a story and he talks about his ability to be completely "invisible" to security technology, which made it easy enough for him to break into the Kobra base that the JSA was in the process of infiltrating when they met him.

"We'll have time for intros and initiation parties later," Hawkins tells him and, from this point on, Mister Terrific will be a member of the JSA. 

In his initial appearance in the pages of Ostrander and Mandrakes Spectre, both The Spirit King and the original Mister Terrific talk about coming into their own only once they had died, something that Corrigan seems to meditate on a bit, wondering if he too only really started to make a positive impact on the world once he had died.

Although Jay Garrick assures Terry Sloane's ghost that he was always a valuable member of the team when he was alive, it would seem that Sloane really did have the biggest impact on the DC Universe and the DC comics line after he died: As the inspiration for his far more prominent namesake.