Super Hero, Part 2

Dan, you got me thinking a bit about comic book superheroes. I just wanted to add a little something.

When I moved back to SLO in 2000, I took a single box of comics with me. It had my Frank Miller stuff, some of my more beloved Joe Quesada material, my original copies of Kingdom Come, and that was pretty much it. Except for:

The Spectre is one of the Old School DC characters, and that capitalization is deliberate. The character himself has had a few incarnations. Jim Corrigan, an Irish cop in New York, is gunned down by the gangsters he's investigating. Upon dying he's fused with the Spirit of Vengeance, and sent back to earth to find those gangsters and mete out justice.

Somehow they weren't able to give the character any teeth, falling out of repute after WWII. He was brought back in the '80s as the top character in DC's "magic realm" characters: Dr. Fate, Horus, the Demon, Eclipse...

The series of the Spectre that I was a fan of, the series from above, is from the '90s, when they finally found a way to make the character interesting. John Ostrander was the main writer, and he was a biblical scholar and the stories are always about morality (with very little religiosity involved).

The next round they took Jim Corrigan away from the Spectre, and fused Hal Jordan, the erstwhile (at the time) Green Lantern, with the Spirit of Vengeance.

That wasn't so great.

In the series I read and liked, the Spectre's dilemmas were between the super-harsh Spirit of Vengeance and the human aspect of Jim Corrigan as together they dealt with the decisions and actions of the random baddies they'd encounter during the course of the issues.

So what?

The younger Marvel Comics universe has their stable of classic superheroes. They were flawed and filled with angst and generally more interesting. The X-Men is about prejudice for cripes sake.

But for the archetype of comic book superhero? There's only two: Superman and Batman. I liked the Flash and Aquaman and Hawkman and Green Lantern, for sure, but really, there're only two 800 pound gorillas.

Superman can shoot lasers from his eyes, bullets can't hurt him, he has super running speed, he can fly, and can fly through space unharmed. Batman is only a man, which is his draw. The DC universe doesn't mess around with these two guys. They're equals.

The only character they ever really created to give Superman more than he could handle, besides Doomsday, was the silly spoofy character Lobo. Supes and Lobo fought to a draw, and Superman had to trick Lobo into thinking he was dead. I liked the Lobo character, but mainly for this tongue in cheek assholery and the spoof factor. (Lobo spoofed a mix of Wolverine and ultra-violence.)

Again, so what?

Superman and Batman, and issue #22 of The Spectre above. I trucked that issue down to SLO with me. I took it to New York, to Texas, and pulled it out of my box long enough to snap some pictures of it today.

In the issue, Superman is asked to locate and destroy the mysterious Spear of Destiny, an all powerful tool that Hitler had been searching for. The Spectre, who spends most issues going around and finding people in moral quandaries and then (usually) meting out crazy justice, comes to Superman and tells him not to pursue the Spear.

It will corrupt you, he tells Supes. Eff that, is Superman's response paraphrased. He obtains the Spear, does in the Spectre after becoming tainted, and then sets about destroying the entire DC universe, killing just about every famous or not-so famous character, until he realizes how royally he fucked up.

As I was reading it for the first time, I realized there was one character who's fate hadn't been shown during Superman's demolition, and he was an important character. It turned out that after Superman had pretty much destroyed the world, the last guy who could possibly stop him was...

You better say Batman. He has Kryptonite bullets, and is ready to gun down Bog Blue. As the issue winds down, we see this:

The last man standing against world-crushing Superman is Batman, but really it's the Spectre having conjured a drastic vision of Superman destroying the world because he got tainted. It's a goddamned lesson. The Spectre was just messing with Superman.

Superman gets it, and lets the Spectre dispose of the Spear. But the real lesson is for the rest of us: Superman and Batman are equals in the DC universe, and everybody toes the line. The Spectre, back in 1994, could be considered more powerful, but less of a social symbol...

It remains my all-time favorite single issue run-of-the-mill mid-'90s DC Comics comic book. It's better than Aquaman getting his hand chewed off by angry piranhas, which could be #2 on that specialized list. That, or Hal Jordan going into the main battery on Ohm, destroying the Green Lantern Corps and basically kicking off the start of the Zero Hour major crossover. Aquaman and Hal are a distant second and third. [[Sorry for the NERD talk...]]