Weird Adventure Comics #436, the Gasmen... and the Spectre!

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon. 

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Everyone knows this is the site that can't help revolutionising the internet. A mere 11 years ago, I did it by publishing a review of this issue that, at no point, actually involved me reviewing the issue, as I blathered on about virtually everything except the comic.

So, after recent requests, in the same manner as Russell T Davies has returned to Doctor Who, I've decided to return to this issue.

But because I still can't be bothered to do a proper review, I'm launching the daring experiment of tackling it as a read-along experience dictated upon my phone.

That means you can read along with it too.

What can go wrong?

Everything can go wrong.

Can this madness succeed?

Yes, it can - just so long as everyone who ever encounters this post has a copy of the comic to read along with.

Which I'm sure everyone does.

After all, how could it be possible for anyone in the world not to have that?

So, let's get stuck in.

First, it's the splash page... 

...and it's just a replica of the cover but not as good.

It does, however, tell us this tale's called The Gasmen and... The Spectre and it's written by Michael Fleisher, and drawn by Jim Aparo who I'm assuming also does the inking, colouring and lettering, as is his habit.

It also credits Russell Carley for script continuity, whatever that is.

We also have a caption telling us the Spectre is hard-boiled detective Jim Corrigan on a mission to eliminate all evil from the world.

Mostly by killing people one at a time.

This may be a lengthy mission.

Page 2.

A car show at the New York Coliseum [sic] where a father takes photos of attractive women while pretending to be taking photos of cars.

Unfortunately, it's at this point a bunch of men walk in, wearing gas masks and promptly gas everyone, including a young girl whose mother looks old enough to be her grandmother.

It does strike me the father has the same face that all Jim Aparo men do - and so does the mother. Jim, clearly, never saw a face he couldn't recycle.

Page 3.

Everyone at the show's dead while, at the offices of Newsbeat magazine, an unnamed reporter's trying - and failing - to get his editor to accept an article about something that's seemingly incredible.

Page 4.

We learn the reporter's called Earl and is yet another character with that face. However, he distinguishes himself by wearing glasses.

The editor, however, for his way to be recognisable, has a chubbier version of the face.

He's not happy because Earl's proposed article is about an angry ghost flying around New York, in his underpants, and killing crooks. To him, this sounds unlikely.

That conversation's cut short when a woman barges in and tells the pair about the car show massacre. The editor tells Earl to get down there and to stop going on about ghosts in underpants.

Page 5.

Jim Corrigan's at the Coliseum and pondering the situation. He's told that everyone was killed by the same gas the Germans used in World War II. It's never explained how the man who tells him this knows this.

Earl shows up and asks what's happened. Jim Corrigan's pointlessly rude to him.

Page 6.

At last, we meet the man to blame for all of this. 

He's a German in a World War II uniform who lives in an abandoned observatory on a cliff. I am struck that this set-up feels very Golden Age to me. This might be shrewd writing by Fleisher to reflect the WWII nature of the villain or it might just be the way Fleisher writes.

Readers of his work for Atlas comics'll be pleased to know that, so far, there's no sign of cannibalism.

The German's underlings are clearly not military personnel and think him a loon, merely acting like soldiers, in order to humour him.

Page 7.

At the mayor's office, we discover the German is called Field Marshall Offal. I'm willing to bet no German has ever had the surname Offal.

Impressively, for a tale from the mid-1970s, Offal's demanding New York gives him one billion dollars or he'll launch another gas attack. It's good to see he's not demanding a sum that, in 1974, is massive but, in 2021, would seem pitiful, Dr Evil style.

Not so impressively, he wants it in $1,000 bills, which means, by my reckoning, the city will have to give him a million bank notes. Isn't that a little impractical? Where, exactly, is he going to keep one million bank notes? For that matter, how's he going to count it, to make sure they've not short-changed him?

We then get a joke I don't understand about the Watergate burglars not having that sort of money. I'm sure it made more sense to people at the time, especially ones who weren't ten years old and British and were, therefore, more familiar with the financial details of that scandal.

Next page.

It's a house ad for some of DC's publications this month. There are eight books in total. Of them, I've read the Kamandi and Witching Hour issues. The Jonah Hex cover looks the classiest.

Page 8.

The mayor decides he has to give in to Offal's demands.

Jim Corrigan tells him that'll just encourage more gas attacks.

But the mayor's a spineless jellyfish about it all, thus guaranteeing he's going to have to hand over a billion dollars to crooks, on a regular basis, from now on.

However, Jim requests the man let him deliver the money to the extortionists, and the mayor agrees, seemingly never considering Jim might just run off with it. It seems to me that one billion dollars is a lot of temptation to put in a man's hands.

And, so, that afternoon, we find Jim in the woods, by his nicely drawn car, with the money, waiting for the villains to arrive.

Jim has the one million bank notes in a middling-sized case he's holding. I would love to know how they got a million bank notes into it. I'm assuming currency compression is one of his magic Spectre powers.

Page 9.

A helicopter shows up and the gas mask clad pilot tells Jim he's coming along with him, or else.

However, they're not alone.

Earl the reporter's been tailing Jim and is determined to follow the helicopter, in his car.

Happily, the helicopter flies away really slowly and makes sure to stay above the road, at all times, so it's possible for Earl to pursue it.

This does remind me that, in Earl's previous appearance in the book, Jim Corrigan kept referring to him as Clark Kent, which mightily confused me as a child. I couldn't work out if he was literally meant to be Clark Kent or not.

Now, as a grown-up, I realise Corrigan was merely being sarcastic and that Superman doesn't exist as anything more than a fictional character in these stories. Just as he doesn't in the Black Orchid stories that are being published around this time.

Does this mean those Black Orchid and Spectre tales take place in the same universe?

I like to think they do.

Page 10.

The helicopter reaches its destination and, here, the pilot decides to kill Corrigan to prevent him from spilling the beans about the hideout's location.

It does make you wonder why he's even taken Corrigan there when he could have just taken the money off him and left him in the woods.

Then again, he could have taken the money off him and not even bothered delivering it to Offal, keeping it for himself.

The man's clearly a fool.

But no sooner is Corrigan hit by a cloud of the fool's deadly fumes than he turns into the Spectre whose green cape merges nicely with the gas. This is what I love about Aparo, he always makes the Spectre look stylish. 

So, that's the end of the pilot, and the ghost goes on the hunt for the big fry.

He finds him inside the observatory and, at the very sight of the deadly do-gooder emerging from a wall, one of the henchmen gasps out loud.

Page 11.

Offal declares the intruder to be a spy and orders him shot.

Tragically, bullets are useless and the ghost slaughters the henchmen by making a pair of dividers grow to huge size and impale them.

Deciding cowardice is the better part of valour, Offal flees and heads along a jetty, towards his motorboat.

As he gets there, he compares himself to Napoleon retreating from Russia, which is a nice bit of characterisation from Fleisher, signalling just how puffed-up, delusional and conceited the man is.

However, it's in vain, as the Spectre appears before him, mentally declaring, "Some men will always choose the path of evil..." which feels an awful lot like the kind of stuff the Shadow loves to spout.

Page 12.

It's the big showdown between the Spectre and Offal.

Not that it's much of a showdown, with the creepy crusader ignoring Offal's demands to be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention, and turning his motorboat into a giant squid that promptly eats the man, making it the third time this issue - when the cover and splash page are taken into account - we've seen him being eaten by the thing.

Page 13.

Earl's finally arrived at the scene and finds the helicopter pilot's been turned to stone and embedded in a cliff face.

Suitably spooked, the reporter goes in search of Corrigan and finds him.

Corrigan's pointlessly rude to him again and, as they depart the story, cuts short Earl's querying of whether he's seen a ghost in underpants lately.

And, with the word, "Nope," ringing in our eyeballs, Jim Corrigan and we wave goodbye to this tale of Heavenly retribution.

How great was all that?

It was muchly great. It's a tale of zero subtlety, sophistication, depth or fleshed-out characterisation, totally devoid of twists and turns. In the final analysis, it's just, "Here are some bad men and here's the Spectre killing them."

In plot terms, there's no need for Earl to be there. He has no impact upon anything.

But he is necessary for mood, in order, to inject some intrigue into events, thanks to his not knowing what's going on.

For that matter, Jim Corrigan isn't really needed in this story either. Given the Spectre's powers, he could, presumably, find and destroy the bad guys, with no involvement at all from his cop alter-ego. However, without him, it'd be a very short story and one damagingly deficient in human involvement.

None of this matters, one way or the other, of course. All that matters is Jim Aparo's showing villains being killed and, sometimes in life, Jim Aparo killing people is all you need.

The Top Ten Jim Aparo Spectre Adventure Comics covers.

Hooray! This is going to be the easiest Top Ten I've ever put together - mostly because Jim Aparo only actually did ten Spectre Adventure Comics covers.

It's also going to be easy because I'm not going to bother putting the covers in any kind of order, other than that in which they were first published.

This is because many long-term readers of this blog'll already know what my favourite is. A strong hint would be that it's got plenty of purple in it, proving the Incredible Hulk was right all along and that, in the world of comics, purple and green really do go together.

This was my first exposure to the Spectre. I can even tell you where I got it; a newsagents near Blackpool Pleasure Beach. It was run by a woman with light hair. I don't know what she was called. But how I thrilled as the cowled crusader melted one villain and reduced another to a skeleton.

 This is one of the few Aparo Spectre stories I never had, and can thus tell you nothing of its contents.

I didn't have this one as a child either. I have, though, read it since. Actually, I can't remember just what happens in it but have no doubt that had I read it when I was ten I'd be able to regale you with exactly how the villain meets his fate.

You can't go wrong with killer shop window dummies - and the Spectre didn't either. The villain thought he was Billy Big Potatoes but soon found himself as roasted as a spud.

Thanks to the twists of Fate, I had two copies of this. I do believe it's the one with the legendary buzz saw sequence.

The Spectre finds himself up against a gas-happy would-be Nazi. Needless to say, gruesome deaths soon follow.

 I've not read this one since childhood but I do recall it introduced me to the word, "Barracuda."

I've not read this one since childhood either but I suspect a museum may have been involved - and stuffed gorillas.

It's time to gasp in horror as Jim Corrigan suddenly finds himself alive again. But for how long?

I didn't have this one either. As it wrapped up the storyline from the previous issue, this was a matter of some concern to me. Happily, I've since read it and am happy to reveal that normal Spectre service is soon restored.

Sadly, after this issue, the Spectre was replaced in the comic by Aquaman. Oh the indignity of it all; to be supplanted by a man who's never melted a villain in his life.

The Spectre - Secret Origins #5.

There's only one concept in this world that's almost as exciting as that of Secret Oranges - and that's the idea of Secret Origins.

Sadly, DC Comics have never had the sense to employ me, and so the former will probably never exist. However, they did, in the 1970s, have the sense to give us the latter.

In Secret Origins #5, we get to meet the Spectre - or at least the man who'll become the Spectre.

Shortly after announcing his engagement to his squeeze, hard-nosed, tough-fisted cop Jim Corrigan and she are kidnapped by gangsters seeking revenge for his earlier interference in their schemes, and he's killed by being flung in the nearest river.

Sadly, instead of going to Heaven, he's sent back to Earth to fight evil, as a ghost, until crime is gone forever from the world.

It's hard to know quite what the appeal of the Secret Origins comics was. For a start, the tales were from the Golden Age, which wasn't always home to the finest quality story-telling. Secondly, I didn't even know who some of the characters were whose origins we were being treated to. I'd never heard of Wildcat and Blackhawk till I read their debut tales - and to be honest, I'd never exactly yearned to know how Aquaman or Robin's careers had got started.

And yet there was something oddly irresistible about them.

And this issue was arguably my favourite.

This was probably because, unlike the other tales I'd read in the series, it was a full-length story and also because it was a version of the Spectre I could recognise at once from the Michael Fleisher/Jim Aparo revival.

The tale starts off feeling oddly sophisticated, almost as though we're watching a movie.

It doesn't take long before it starts to feel more like a Golden Age comic but it never gets silly and it's taut and no-nonsense all the way through.

It's good to see Corrigan dishing out some Wrath of God to the criminals of this world and beginning his career as he means to go on, by reducing a gangster to a skeleton - although it is incongruous to see him sewing his own costume at the tale's finale. Somehow I'd assumed the Spectre would have enough power to magic-up a costume from thin air.

But there is a potency in seeing him first discovering his powers and then cutting his ties with his friends and loved ones before vowing to strike out alone against the forces of evil. You're left in no doubt this is a character who makes Batman look like Bouncing Boy.

Obviously, the reason he never caught on like Bruce Wayne's alter-ego is there for all to see. Right from the start, there's the question of how you can weave tales of drama and tension around a character who can do anything he wants to. But, still, the tale makes it clear that the idea of the Spectre is a haunting concept in more ways than one.

Adventure Comics #431 - the Wrath of the Spectre!

Like any reasonable man, I've always wanted the power to melt people's arms.

Sadly, such are the vicissitudes of life, that I've yet to be granted that ability by whatever higher power it is that controls my destiny.

That being the case, I'll just have to get my pleasure by watching other people do it. 

But who to watch?

If he wanted to, Superman could melt people, with his heat vision - but, like a great big sap, he never does. And I've only ever seen Supergirl melt lions from outer space.

That means it's going to have to be the Spectre.

Adventure Comics #431 was my first introduction to the character - and I loved it; so much so that, from that point on, whenever I saw an issue of Adventure Comics with him in it, I had to buy it. I even had to buy issues he wasn't in.

What was its appeal?

That was simple enough.

It was that it was simple enough.

There were no twists and turns for the Spectre. Nor were there attempts to heroically preserve the lives of those he was fighting. Some bad guys showed up, the Spectre showed up and the bad guys checked out. It was the perfect strip for anyone who's ever wanted revenge on a bus driver for speeding off when he sees you running for his bus.

In Adventure Comics #431, a gang's robbed a security van, their leader gratuitously killing the guards in the process.

It's not long before the Spectre's on their trail and killing them in outré ways. The first one he sends plummeting off a cliff, the second he melts and the third he reduces to a skeleton.

Looking at it now, it's obvious the tale lacks a certain... ...drama. No obstacles get in our hero's way and his alter-ego of Jim Corrigan is left so totally undeveloped as a character that he might as well have stayed in his grave.

Clearly that didn't bother me as a child. All I cared about was the Spectre was cool - and he was cool because Jim Aparo made him look cool. If ever there was a strip Aparo was born to draw it was the Spectre, a character who was like Batman with the dial turned up to 11.

And if ever there was a strip Michael Fleisher was born to write it was the Spectre, the perfect vehicle for his love of inflicting death on everyone he encountered.

In all honesty, his writing's no more sophisticated or ambitious here than it was on all those terrible Atlas titles he inflicted on us but, being given a character who was perfect for his weird misanthropy, and an artist who knew exactly what to do with it, somehow meant it didn't seem to matter.

Sheffield's Most Wanted. Part 8: Batman meets the Spectre. Brave and the Bold #116.

Once more Steve Does Comics casts off the icy grip of the grave, whips out its Ouija and returns from beyond the veil to look at another comic I always wanted as a kid but never owned.

This time it's the meeting of DC's two finest men of mystery, as Batman teams up with the Spectre to fight whatever forces it is they're up against.

As a kid, I loved Batman and I loved the Spectre. Thanks to The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, I also loved murderous multi-armed goddesses. I loved Jim Aparo and I loved 100 page comics. So, when you put all that together on one cover, how was I ever not going to be drawn to The Brave and the Bold #116?

Although I never had it as a kid, I read this tale a few months ago, online, and was somewhat disappointed with it, as Batman and the Spectre acted like old buddies and even knew each other's secret identities. It has to be said the Spectre presented here seemed far removed from the totally unknown Vengeance of God character I knew from the Michael Fleisher Adventure Comics tales.

But then, I don't suppose that version of the character would even have wasted his time teaming up with Batman.

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.

Adventure Comics #436. The Gasmen and... the Spectre.

I don't suppose any nostalgic trawl through the waters of the 1970s can be complete without me posting this cover; (Weird) Adventure Comics #436.

As far as I'm concerned, the 1970s were when the comic book cover reached its peak as an art from, after it had lost its previous naiveté and before it'd be reduced to the status of banal pin-up bearing no relation to the contents within. This was an era when a comic had to compete for attention with a million and one other items on the news stands and therefore had to be eye catching. And you won't get a finer example of how to get noticed than Jim Aparo's cover for The Gasmen and the Spectre. It's not just Aparo's elegant and beautifully composed pencils and inks that do the trick, it's also one of the best coloured covers I've ever seen. I don't have a clue who was responsible for that (even GCD can't help me) but they deserve some sort of medal for it.

The Spectre's short stint in Adventure Comics was an odd sort of thing, always a triumph of style over substance. After all, it had the most linear plots of all time; bad guys kill some people, the Spectre shows up and kills the bad guys. There was an attempt to add a bit more depth to it by giving Jim Corrigan a girlfriend (despite him being dead) and having a bespectacled reporter follow him around but, really, despite these attempts, the appeal of the book lay in two things. One, Jim Aparo's superb, moody art and, two, the baroque means by which the Spectre would kill his quarry.

My favourite method of course has to be in Adventure Comics #435 where our ghostly friend turns a crook into wood and chops him up with a buzz saw. In retrospect, I can see why this might've given some parents concerns about what their children were reading. Awww but who cares? The run was great and easily the best handling of the character ever.

I was never certain if Jim Corrigan and the Spectre were meant to be the same character. I mean, I knew Corrigan turned into the Spectre but there seemed to be no correlation between the way Corrigan thought, acted and related to the world and the way the Spectre did. For that matter was Jim Corrigan adopting the guise of the Spectre or was the Spectre adopting the guise of Jim Corrigan? It was all too philosophically complex for me.

I also always wondered how Corrigan kept his job, bearing in mind he was a homicide cop who never actually solved any cases. I actually did worry at one point about the prospect that he might get the sack. It didn't seem to occur to me that, being a ghost, Corrigan didn't actually need any sort of job. Oh the innocence of youth.

Appreciation also has to go to the back-up strip of the time, featuring Aquaman. I was never an Aquaman fan, seeing him as a watered-down imitation of Marvel's much more interesting Sub-Mariner but the thing looked so good here, thanks to Mike Grell, that, for once, I was interested.