The Spectre, Adventure Comics #439. Alive alive oh.

Now I have a problem. Having said Michael Fleisher’s The Brute was no good in my last review I have to try and work out why his version of the Spectre’s any better.

It’s not as easy a task as I’d like, and I do wonder whether, if this comic said "Atlas" on it instead of “DC”, I’d be much less well-disposed toward it. It shares many of the same weaknesses, dominated by plot to such a degree that characters don’t act like real people - doing what they do merely to enable the plot to follow its decreed course - unnatural dialogue and an unsympathetic “hero” who blunders around remorselessly killing people.

On the plus side, Fleisher shows more imagination in terms of how people get killed than he did there and, unlike the Brute, the Spectre can at least speak and think and not just hang around in a cage for most of a story, going, “Aargh.”

In this issue, Fleisher endeavours to flesh out his cast a little. For the most part in the Spectre tales I’ve read by him, Jim Corrigan’s only been there to arrive at a murder scene and then turn into his alter-ego. Here, we finally get something that resembles a private life as his young lady friend Gwen Sterling tries to get him to marry her.

Why she wants to marry him’s a bit of a mystery. From what we can see, when the Spectre shows up she finds him and his activities terrifying but announces her relief when Jim Corrigan appears. “Oh, Jim!” she declares, “Thank heaven you’re here! It was horrible!” Except she clearly knows Jim and the Spectre are the same person and that it was therefore Jim who was doing the “horrible”. If she’s terrified by the Spectre, why does she feel secure in the presence of his alter-ego? It goes back to Fleisher’s inability to get into his characters heads beyond the needs of the plot.

Regardless, back at his apartment, Jim asks to be released from his mission and again become human.

That wish is granted.

Sadly, it doesn’t occur to God, or whoever it’s meant to be, to tell him.

And so, the next day, Corrigan promptly steps into the path of a bullet, thinking he’s still unkillable. Corrigan’s clearly not the sharpest knife in the drawer. You’d have thought the fact he’s started the day with breakfast might’ve told him he’s alive, unless ghosts are in the habit of eating.

Happily, Jim survives the shooting and, delighted to now be fully corporeal, proposes to the lovely Gwendolyn. Dark clouds are however looming over Chez Corrigan, as gangster Ducky McLaren determines the detective must die.

In terms of character development it’s still limited compared to what we’d been getting from the likes of Spider-Man (even stealing the name of Peter Parker’s girlfriend can’t disguise that) and it wasn’t enough to save the strip from being dropped a couple of issues later to be replaced by the less than stellar Aquaman. I never had the second part of this tale but I assume that, by its conclusion, Corrigan was dead again, possibly having sacrificed himself to save Gwen.

Ultimately, you could argue the Spectre really isn’t all that much better in its writing than the strips Fleisher inflicted on us in those Atlas mags but it does have one very big plus - which is the artwork of Jim Aparo. Whatever the limits of the script, he gave his run on the title an air of class, quality and style that was missing from most Atlas publications.

So, in the end, maybe it just goes to prove what we don’t always like to admit, that in a comic book the pictures matter a whole lot more than the words.

But this is an issue of Adventure Comics not The Spectre and so the travails of Jim Corrigan occupy just half the comic. The other half’s in the form of a serial called The Seven Soldiers of Victory.

It’s an odd thing, having been written in the Golden Age but dusted down and drawn in the Bronze Age. In this instalment, the Green Arrow and Speedy find the astral bodies arguing with Father Time over which phase of the moon should be in the sky tonight. Our heroes sort it all out with a bit of wit and ingenuity before getting a ride home on a comet.

It’s a silly, frivolous tale that really does have “Golden Age” stamped all over it and why it was thought vitally important it be revived I couldn’t say but it’s painless to read and does at least provide a nice contrast to the grim and gritty world of the Spectre.

Action Comics #440. Of Superman and Superdog.

Many and varied are the powers of Superman but clearly his greatest is the ability to make you believe you think the opposite of what you actually do think.

My memory is that, as a kid, I never had much time for the Kryptonian clobberer. The big blue cheese was, after all, a bit square, a bit dull, a bit 2D and had far too many powers for the good of dramatic tension.

The odd thing is that, as I've started to rebuild the comic collection I had back then, what's struck me is how many Superman comics I had. I must've had more Superman issues than comics featuring any other hero.

Such a mystery needs reinvestigation. After all, If I was buying them in industrial quantities, there must've been something about them that grabbed me.

But what?

The obvious first answer is the covers. Just as I had a blind spot to my love of Supes, I seem to have had a blind spot to the existence of Nick Cardy. Until I started re-buying these old issues I'd somehow never heard of him.

I had, however, seen his covers.

And you know what?

They were fantastic.

I knew they were fantastic at the time but I never knew they were all by the same man. Now, it seems incredible to me that one artist could have done so many covers to so many comics to so high a standard. I definitely have to put together a post of my Nick Cardy favourites at some point.

But that's for the future.

For now, we'll have to settle for this one, the cover to Action Comics #440. Has there ever been a more potent cover to a comic book? You can practically feel the weight of the world on Superman's shoulders.

But it takes more than just a pretty picture on the front to make you love a comic. What about the contents?

Well, clearly this is the key to it all. It can't have been easy writing Superman in the 1970s. How do you come up with interesting stories about a hero who can basically do anything but whose tales have to be kept fairly light?

As the likes of Cary Bates and Elliot S! Maggin knew, mostly you do it by confronting Superman with a puzzle or mystery that has to be solved and have him think his way to a solution. It's an irony that the way to get the best out of the world's most physically adept super-hero is to get him dealing with problems primarily with his mind.

This issue is a perfect example as Elliot S! Maggin gives us a bunch of crooks who try to get rid of Superman by convincing him the ghosts of his parents are disappointed in him for having gone native and adopting too many Earth customs. All but disowning him, the "ghosts" order him to go and live on another planet. Needless to say, Superman quickly sees through this ruse and turns the villains' own plot against them.

This elegance, I think, is the clue to the strip's appeal. There's no peril here, no danger, just a slight conundrum. It's such a contrast to the ramped-up drama of the average comic book that it can't help but grab you. It's the super-hero equivalent of sitting on the front lawn, on a sunny day, drinking Earl Grey and nibbling cucumber sandwiches.

Meanwhile, in the back-up strip, the Green Lantern and Black Canary stumble across a super-intelligent stray dog with superpowers. Although we're never told it in this story, it doesn't take a genius to work out it's Krypto, Superboy's old dog. But where's he been and why's he lost his memory?

Come to think of it, why hasn't Superman noticed he's missing and gone looking for him? I always felt Kal-El was somewhat neglectful of his cousin Supergirl - putting her in an orphanage the moment she got to Earth - now he's abandoned his dog? maybe it's time the social services had a word with him.

I'm fairly sure this tale features as back-up strip in another issue of Action Comics from around the same time, although, off the top of my head, I'm not sure which one. Was it a mistake? Were they so proud of it they were determined to reprint it? Was there a deadline problem that meant they had to grab the first story at hand and hope no one noticed?

But who cares, these things happen and it's a cute tale beautifully drawn by the mighty Mike Grell who, for a relative novice, seemed to have been given a fair old workload at the time.