![]() ![]() There are some cool scenes of him splitting off from Jim Corrigan like an amoeba, though. The Spectre mostly uses his powers to read minds, and on several occasions, shrink so that he can walk through telephone lines. Or these stories could have been straight up horror stories, with the villains as the focal character, and the Spectre only intervening to give them their comeuppance in some gruesome way, which was a direction the series would in fact, take in the 1970s. ![]() This could still have been handled well, the stories could have at least had fun showing off Spec’s powers after all, Plastic Man mostly faced ordinary foes, but it was fun to watch how he inventively used his powers. There is no fun in seeing an omnipotent supernatural being battling crooked fur manufacturers (twice!) or ordinary hijackers. Once the novelty wore off, story after story was the same tiresome cops and robbers affair, but with a superhero in it. ![]() The Spectre’s very uniqueness trapped him in a rut. This was an origin story, once all that mushy stuff was out of the way, readers wanted to see fights, fights and more fights, human drama and characterization be damned! So without this great emotional hook, all that was left was a typical superhero series, only this time with a hero, who since he literally could do almost anything, could not in any way be rooted for, be endangered or be identified with. Obviously, this kind of tragedy is a great basis for a series, but in 1940s superhero comics, such ideas and emotional complexity were unheard of. But still, having a ghost as the protagonist of a story? And even more so, as a hero in a medium widely considered to be for children? (In “More Fun Comics” no less.) And clearly the countless numbers of horror stories about killers who met justice at the hands of their victims’ ghosts intended for us to sympathize with the ghosts and not the killers. Schuyler Miller’s Over the River also featured monsters or characters who become monsters as the obvious reader identification figures. Hyde, and short stories such as Lovecraft’s The Outsider (and plenty of others, but naming them would give away some excellent twist-ending stories), Robert Bloch’s The Cloak and P. Novels featuring chapters where the monsters become the narrating voice had occurred, notably Frankenstein and Dr. While the concept of a dead man who returns to earth to wreak revenge on the living dates back millennia, rarely had it actually been used in stories where the avenging wraith in question was the hero of the story. It is the latter usage of the phrase which describes Jerry Siegel and Bernard Baily’s The Spectre to a T. ![]()
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