MYTHCOMICS: "THE SEARCH FOR GOD" (THE SPECTRE #57-62, 1997-98)

The DC character The Spectre, despite being one of the more interesting characters originated by Jerry Siegel after his breakthrough conception of Superman, has never been particularly successful in any of his incarnations. This may be because the character extended the superhero's devotion to justice-- with its concomitant eschewing of domestic commitments-- into the realm of a perpetually vengeful spirit. Other Golden Age heroes occasionally took the lives of their enemies in the heat of battle, but the Spectre never had that excuse, being almost omnipotent and given to smiting evildoers with extreme prejudice. The fact that Spectre had died by criminal violence, and that he was given such powers by some entity in the Judeo-Christian heaven, may have made both him and his mission unrelatable for the average reader. It remains a minor mystery as to why this basically unsuccessful character was revived by DC in the mid-1960s, without any of the focus on divine vengeance. A 1970s series by Michael Fleischer and Jim Aparo took the opposing tack, but this still did not succeed, though the grotesque EC-style executions of crooks made the stories popular with the fan contingent.

I have not read the entire sixty-two issues of the character's nineties revival by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake, but I perused enough individual issues to get the general sense of the creators' take on the franchise. I debated whether or not to read all of the online stories before devoting a post to the concluding six-part arc. I decided not to do so, since in theory the arc should be able to stand as a mythcomic whatever else the authors did in the course of the series.

Ostrander was probably dominantly responsible for seeking ways to "justify the ways of the Spectre to fans." He formulated the notion that Spectre was the incarnation of "the Wrath of God," or specifically that of the Judeo-Christian God Spectre's alter ego Jim Corrigan had grown up with. However, unlike Siegel and Fleischer Ostrander also sought to place the avenging apparition in situations where a clear-cut choice between good and evil was not available. One such conundrum crops up at the end of issue #56 sparks a conflict between the persona of the Spectre and that of his "vessel" Jim Corrigan. Spectre seeks out adjudication with the powers of Heaven, only to find the Pearly Gates wide open and all of Heaven's inhabitants, including the reigning deity, gone.

Spectre plays detective, trying to find God in all of his "usual haunts." The unquiet spirit Deadman provides the first inkling that God's presence may be a matter of perspective, since Deadman believes that his own deity Rama Kushna is the actual being in charge of things. Spectre then seeks out the mythological domains of two pagan belief-systems, and gets no answer. He gets a better clue, though, from Jack Kirby-- or, more specifically, from an ambiguous deific force, "the Source," invented by Kirby for his NEW GODS series.

The Source only gives the Spectre a vague oracle, which leads the Ghostly Guardian into ambivalent contacts with a race of aliens who deem their "hive-mind" to be their deity, and with the spirit of the Earth-Goddess, who complains a lot about mortals murdering the biosphere. But Gaea directs Spectre to seek the answer in the history of Jim Corrigan. 

The Spectre learns assorted new aspects of Jim Corrigan's early existence, all of which culminate in both Spectre and Corrigan experiencing a "Job moment."

In answer to this demand for justice from God, the hero and his alter ego get a very different answer than did the postulant from the Book of Job. A being claiming to be God manifests, looking for all the world like a moronic version of the Greco-Roman Cronos/Saturn, claiming that he simply ate everyone in Heaven. After Corrigan defies God, the demented deity sends him on another voyage of discovery. Corrigan sees yet more sinfulness in his lineage, such as a grandfather who participated in a murderous rage upon Cherokee Indians (not exempted from their own sinfulness, since Ostrander specifies that these were slave-holding Indians). 

This second katabasis actually allows Corrigan an "aha" realization about the nature of evil, which allows him to banish the vision of the imbecile God and to return to the side of his sometimes confessor Father Craemer. Craemer supplies Corrigan with the gloss to the Search for God: "What you have done is confront your image of God and found your old beliefs are not enough." However, because the magazine was on DC's chopping block-- which Ostrander and Mandrake certainly knew when beginning this arc-- there's no time for Corrigan to embrace any new visions of deity. The detective decides it's finally time to "give up the ghost"-- that is, separating himself from the Spectre in order that Corrigan can go to his eternal rest-- assuming, of course, that the perception of Heaven's non-existence was just a bump in the road of the Ghostly Guardian and his alter ego.

It's bracing to behold the DC version of the God of Abraham depicted as something like Twain's "malevolent thug." Of course Ostrander and Mandrake must supply a mitigation of this vision, because they're playing with DC's toys, and therefore must leave the doors open for whatever the next author wants to do with God, Heaven, the Spectre or Jim Corrigan. For all I know, Corrigan may have been revived one or more times by now. So "The Search for God" must be an exploration not of any final vision of deity but of all the contingent factors that may go into forming that vision. Nevertheless, this "Search" is a pretty good metaphysical primer on religious relativism and moral ambivalence-- certainly not the sort of thing the Golden Age character was intended to explore.

DEATHBIRD DESCENDS

On the passing of Harlan Ellison this week, I wrote:

_____

I never met Ellison, though I saw him when he spoke at a local convention, maybe in the 1980s. He worked the crowd really well, saying that everyone in our city was "bug***k*, which got great applause, though I'm sure he said the same damn thing anywhere else he spoke. He read his story "All the Lies That Were My Life," which I didn't care for, but his reading was riveting. I saw him a couple more times at San Diego Comicon, usually teamed with Peter David, with whom he had worked out a cute routine of pretend animosity.

DAVID: "I'm just being puckish."

ELLISON: "Well, puck you."

His sixties classic tales made a big impression on me, particularly "Deathbird" and "Repent, Harlequin." I was still writing occasional reviews for COMICS JOURNAL when he and Gary Groth were sued by Michael Fleischer because of remarks Ellison had made about Fleischer in a JOURNAL interview. Personally, I think Fleischer was less offended by what Ellison had said than by the fact that a JOURNAL reviewer had just torpedoed Fleischer's prose book CHASING HAIRY around the same time. I felt like I had a ringside seat as Groth and Ellison became deadly enemies after Fleischer's suit was dismissed. The feud was incredibly convoluted, involving other players like Peter David and Charles Platt, and the magazine GAUNTLET devoted a long, well-researched essay to the mutual bad behavior of both parties, though all that took place before Ellison sued Groth to block the publication of a book touching on their involvement.

I disagreed with a lot of what both Groth and Ellison wrote, though I sympathize with Ellison's love of popular fiction. He was also an unapologetic "comic book guy" at a time when his compeers in fantastic fiction would not dream of being associated with that tawdry medium. 

I'm tempted to sum up his career with the words, "Not always deep, but never dull."

INTERESTING FLEISCHER QUOTE

From the Michael Fleischer interview in COMICS JOURNAL #56 (1980):
"A lot of people think that a story is the place to be a good citizen.  The place to be a good citizen is not in your stories.  The place to be a good citizen is in your life and in your behavior... a story is an arena for the expression of real feelings, and not for the expression of platitudes or the feelings you think people ought to have."

This is actually a pretty good statement as to why I validate a writer like Frank Miller, even though I wasn't entirely happy with the implications of his 300 graphic novel (as noted in my review of the film-adaptation) and can't begin to understand his perverse political take on the Occupy Movement. 

Now, I will note briefly that what we consider "canonical literature" is often if not always informed by some meditation on moral nature.  Such moral concern causes me to label it the literature of "thematic realism," while those forms leaning more toward kinetic concerns I designate in terms of "thematic escapism."  I won't say that the dividing line between the two is hard and fast; it's more like an equator, approximated rather than physically locatable.

Yet I do feel that great literature is never purely defined by morality, as some critics, like John Gardner and Wayne C. Booth, have implied.  Expressiveness in the Cassirerean sense remains at the heart of both forms of literature.

Food for future thought? We'll see, but at present I'm trying more to work around to a response to Curt Purcell's thoughts on crossovers.  So morality will have to wait for later.