The Spectre

The Spectre by Ostrander & Mandrake, collected as a pack of 2 oversized omnibus volumes and cheaper than buying them one by one. John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake took on The Spectre in 1992, after acclaimed runs on Suicide Squad and Batman, and made it DC's most serious book about judgement. Ostrander writes theology rather than superheroics: the Spectre has unlimited power and no idea how to use it well, and the run is largely about the difference between vengeance and justice. Mandrake's art is genuinely frightening, and the book is far stranger than anything DC was publishing under its main line. The second Spectre omnibus completes Ostrander and Mandrake's run, one of the longest and least compromising books DC published in the nineties. The back half is where Ostrander stops asking whether the Spectre is right and starts asking whether Jim Corrigan deserves to exist at all. The original series proposal is a genuinely interesting document, it shows how much of the run was planned from the start.

John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake took on The Spectre in 1992, after acclaimed runs on Suicide Squad and Batman, and made it DC's most serious book about judgement. Ostrander writes theology rather than superheroics: the Spectre has unlimited power and no idea how to use it well, and the run is largely about the difference between vengeance and justice. Mandrake's art is genuinely frightening, and the book is far stranger than anything DC was publishing under its main line.

The second Spectre omnibus completes Ostrander and Mandrake's run, one of the longest and least compromising books DC published in the nineties. The back half is where Ostrander stops asking whether the Spectre is right and starts asking whether Jim Corrigan deserves to exist at all. The original series proposal is a genuinely interesting document, it shows how much of the run was planned from the start.

Jim Corrigan is a dead detective and the Spectre is what he came back as, and in the 1970s that meant murderers being turned into wood and fed through a bandsaw. Fleisher and Aparo wrote the most extreme superhero comics the Code ever allowed, and DC cancelled the run for it.