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With Hal Jordan no longer being the Spectre, and returning to his roots as a pompous jackass the Green Lantern, the Astral Avenger was left without a host. The Spectre went down into the depths of forgotten characters for a time until DC decided to start on their Infinite Crisis routine. This had been elaborated on and crossed over in everything from Batman to Colonics Monthly, and all of it culminated in all of the little aspects–Jason Todd coming back¹, Hal becoming a Green Lantern again, all of that– and especially in the multiple mini-series called Countdown to Infinite Crisis.

While some of these are good, we’re gonna focus on ONE of these in particular. For obvious reasons.

Day of Vengeance

This is a sequel of sorts of the wonderful Day of Judgment that brought us Hal-Spectre and is generally considered one of the poorer Spectre ideas by Spectre fans, and one of the best by Green Lantern fans (who only read it because they have a hard-on for Hal or something. I have my own thoughts on that–none of them actually involve fans having a hard-on for the character.) as well as the Spectre story that introduced us to the idea that everything you learned in the past stories really doesn’t matter.

Anyway, this begins like any decent Spectre story–The Spectre, hostless, doing what he does best: delivering righteous vengeance on horrible sinners. Horrible sinners like adulterers. Yeah. The Spectre is boiling people on the inside (I don’t think he actually did that, but he should.) because a guy sleeps with a woman who isn’t his wife. Why is that? you might be asking. Well, it’s like that. The Spectre, sans a host, is also essentially without a “moral compass”. He’s simply a moon-faced bastard who exists to deliver justice and vengeance on people who violate the laws of man and God. Specially God, since men are some dirty bastards.

But, he’s going around doing this, when he’s met with an old friend. Can you guess? I bet you can’t–unless you read the story.

ECLIPSO!

Yeah, that’s right. The guy who, in previous stories, was both bitching at Spectre for being a usurper of his title, and controlled by some guy who thought it was a good idea to get tattoos all over himself and rule Kahndaq with Black Adam, has decided to team up with The Spectre. How? Well, at some point, Jean Loring² gets possession of the black diamond that houses Eclipso, and the former spirit of Wrath decides to take control of the poor insane woman. Eclipso Loring then seduces The Spectre and convinces him that it would be a good idea to kill everyone who uses magic. Now, normally The Spectre might go, “Wait–hold on.” and think about this, but he’s latched on to Eclipso Loring to the point where s/he has become his moral anchor, and his quasi-spiritual lover. I don’t know, I don’t understand it.

Anyway, so Spectre goes to town on these people in a way that is completely like The Spectre.

Madame Xanadu is blinded, so that she can no longer see her cards.
The Phantom Stranger is turned into a mouse. [I know that sounds kind of lame, but The Phantom Stranger is awesome one of the most powerful people in the DCU. It's accepted that it would be almost impossible to kill him simply because there's just so much power in him.]
Kahndaq is sent various plagues because Black Adam is, hello, pure magic.
Some other people are killed, and other things happen, but let’s go to the big scenes.

Ragman, Enchantress, Blue Devil and a bunch of others get together and form a group called Shadowpact in an effort to deal with The Spectre and Eclipso Loring and to keep them from destroying every single solitary magic thing ever. Suffice to say they didn’t work it out. All of the spirits in Ragman’s… rags… were burned out trying to redeem Eclipso, and eventually they all just wound up calling in Captain Marvel. They decided, at that point, to channel all of their energy into Billy and he wound up becoming HUGE and the Spectre went HUGE to match.

The two of them traded blows while Mordru is busy taunting the wizard Shazam. Of course, after a while, Billy loses (like they all do) and Spectre goes and kills Shazam.

Yeah, that’s right.

HE KILLS SHAZAM.

That sends The Rock of Eternity and all of the sins out and about and Billy, Mary, and Freddie all end up losing their powers.

This also crosses over in JSA a few times. The crossover mainly deals with the battle in Kahndaq, though I believe Spectre sends Jakeem and the Thunderbolt into the Jakeem’s pen, which causes a major fuck-up in that dimension.

In keeping with this, Day of Vengeance: Infinite Crisis Special shows The Spectre battling Nabu… again. But this time, the Spectre decided to just go ahead and kill the guy. This effectively ended that age of magic and we entered into a new one–one where all the rules are changed and everything gets all weird and people have to write new stories to explain it. But at the same time, The Presence finally notices what The Spectre’s doing and says, “Well, hey, maybe I oughta actually pay attention.” and decides to shove the Spectre–screaming a repentance–into the body of Crispus Allen.

Crispus Allen was a member of the Gotham City Police Department who wound up killed at the hands of a fellow named Jim Corrigan (I know, right?) who also happened to be Crispus’s's’s's’s's [that's totally necessary, shut up.] partner.

This leads us to…

Infinite Crisis Aftermath: The Spectre

This is a three-issue mini series that details Crispus Allen coming to terms with the fact that he has a giant fucking ghost who delivers vengeance tied to his soul until such a time that he decides to go ahead and not have it. Allen isn’t sure how to react to all of this, but all he knows is that he can’t be seen, and wants Corrigan dead.

Now, this is one of my BIGGEST problems with Crispus as The Spectre. I understand that, following the murder of Nabu, there’s a new age of Magic. However, The Spectre a direct aspect of God, and one would think he’d be beyond the aspects of earth-bound magic (at least, I assume it’s earth-bound) and the rules required by it despite being magic himself. At least, he says he’s generally magic in Day of Vengeance.

All of the prior Spectres–pre-Corrigan, Corrigan, Asmodel, Hal, all of them could easily be seen by anyone. The only who had any sort of problem with being seen was Hal, and that was because everyone was so convinced he was still dead that they refused to see that he was alive until his solo series started (convenient, eh?).

But no one could see Crispus until he turned into The Spectre and decided to kill a guy with money.

In Aftermath here, as I said, Crispus comes to terms with what’s happened. He goes and in the three issues delivers vengeance and hates himself for what he’s doing, all the while wondering why the hell he’s not being led to Corrigan. I mean, after all, this guy did kill him. That’s vengeance, yeah?

No. Turns out that Allen’s kid kills Jim Corrigan, and The Spectre has to deliver vengeance…on his own son. Yeah. It’s a touching moment. By “touching” I mean, “really not necessary.” Crispus could have refused, could have denied the Spectre right then, but he didn’t. And he killed his son. The Spectre then told Crispus that he would give Allen one year to decide if they wanted to make their bond permanent³ or not.

52 and Tales of the Unexpected

52 as many of you know, was DC’s attempt to squeeze out every bit of money it could from its fans by promising to actually tell you a story with a new issue every week for 52 weeks. Well, The Spectre made a special appearance in that.

Ralph Dibny was walking around with what he thought to be the helmet of Dr. Fate, looking into various things and being the cool, widowed detective that he is/was. Along the way, he ran across The Spectre, who pointed out that SINCE HE DIDN’T HAVE A SOUL BONDED TO HIM, HE COULD NOT ACT ON EARTH–something that seemed to escape everyone during the Day Of minis.

Anyway, The Spectre promises Ralph answers to stuff if he completes a task. Ralph fails, The Spectre says, “tough” and thus ends that.

In Tales of the Unexpected, Crispus decides to go ahead and be the full-time vengeance maker. However, they decide to stick him inside this slummy apartment and have him deal with that stuff–murdering people left and right in a very Wrath of the Spectre with even less taste way.

Don’t get me wrong, please, don’t get me wrong. I think Crispus is a great Spectre compared to Hal. Hal spent all of his time whining about he wanted to redeem himself. How he was more than vengeance and murder and all of that. Crispus hates what he’s doing, but at the same time does it because he was a cop and is essentially bound to justice. And that’s what the Spectre is.

The issues show Allen, walking from room to room, investigating things like a regular…investigator (sue me) and attempting to piece everything together in each issue, hoping to understand what brings him to this place and these people. He’s still a cop, and he still acts like it. Though there’s the whole “no one can see me” thing that bugged me.

Then he’d see something, turn into The Spectre and have someone eaten alive by dead rats or remove their eyes and mouth.

I hope that Allen stays The Spectre longer than Hal did. I’d like to see him develop, and eventually be seen by someone when he isn’t setting people on fire.

Kingdom Come

One of the best Elseworld stories out there, Kingdom Come tells the story of Norman McCay in a depressing future where there are so many metahumans that they just take turns beating the ever-loving shit out of each other. Superman has retreated to his fortress of Solitude, Batman has taken to robots, The Flash has merged with the Speed Force.

And then there’s The Spectre.

Since this was made in the 1990s, The Spectre is still Jim Corrigan, but he’s not wearing anything under his cloak (or, at least, that’s the impression I’m given.). Jim has grown detached from humanity, needed ANOTHER mortal anchor so that he may view things properly. That anchor becomes Norman McCay.

Norman and The Spectre watch as events unfold, The Spectre chiming in with expository dialogue whenever needed and eventually the story climaxes and everyone lives happily ever after…kinda…sorta…not really.

This is one of the stories that I really…really don’t want to spoil anything. You all should just read it. It’s done by Alex Ross and Mark Waid, so you know, at the very least, you’re gonna see very human-looking metahumans [rim shot].

Conclusion?

There may be other Elseworlds where The Spectre plays a key part, but I haven’t read them. As far as everything else goes, that’s pretty much all she wrote. I understand that I could summed this up in fewer than five posts, but I wanted to space it out as much as I could. That I’m writing so much now is because I’m a windbag.

When and if they decide to continue with The Spectre, I’ll either edit the information into this or create another section as needed. I would certainly prefer there to be more of this character. He’s a compelling character, and one who never ceases to entertain me.

I’m surprised you people have been reading this–if you have. Thanks for your time.

1. Yeah, I know it was basically while Infinite Crisis was going on, but it’s one of the small aspects of it. He didn’t HAVE to come back. There wasn’t any need. But that’s a whole ‘nother thing. [↩]
2. Go read Identity Crisis. Right now. I’ll wait. [↩]
3. …Yeah, seriously. These two are bonded at the soul. No one else got this whole “one year” treatment. Bullshit. [↩]