Spectre, Spectre, Burning Bright

Bonus content is great, isn’t it? Quite a while ago (February) I picked up a DVD copy of a DC animated movie, Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths. After one buddy of mine, after seeing it on my bookshelf, inadvertently spoiled part of it by asking about certain third-act character motivations, upon which occasion I had to admit I hadn’t watched it yet, and then after another buddy of mine saw it on the shelf and asked to borrow it and I had to admit once again I hadn’t watched it yet, I finally watched it over this past weekend. In and of itself, it’s a good movie, slightly unsatisfying in its resolution perhaps (although that’s an inherently unsolvable problem which I’ll get back to in a bit) but by and large a fun popcorn flick aimed squarely at the sensibilities of an overgrown adolescent like me. It’s bright and cartoony, but it’s rated PG-13 because of the violence as well as some sexual innuendo which would only go over the heads of kids too young to have been through the “Your Changing Bodies” unit in health class at school. It’s based loosely on some classic storylines from actual Justice League comic books, but with enough tweaks and new ideas that it’s not exactly a straight adaptation and managed to twist and turn on me in ways I didn’t expect (my one buddy’s spoilery questions notwithstanding). The basic idea is predicated on the assumption of an infinite number of parallel Earths on which all possible arrangements of reality exist, including a world in which the equivalents of Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Green Lantern and cohorts are evil and tyrannize and exploit the world rather than protecting it. That world’s Lex Luthor is a good guy and he travels to the world of the heroic Justice League to get their help dealing with this superpowered Crime Syndicate. I’ve mentioned before my love of alternate universe stories and the “Mirror, Mirror” variant in particular, so this is unquestionably Right Up My Alley. But while it’s a great high concept, it’s tough to hang a compelling story on it. A lot of these kind of scenarios end up servicing plots in which a character from one universe ends up accidentally in the other and it all becomes a quest to get home. Crisis on Two Earths makes travel between the universes something essentially available at will, so the conflict is literally good Superman versus evil twin Ultraman, and good Batman versus evil twin Owlman, and there’s a certain inevitability to the resulting stalemate. There’s also the interesting question of whether the Justice League, if they prevail, should go home, or stick around to make sure evil stays defeated, which again is philosophically interesting but doesn’t necessarily lend itself well to actual resolution that doesn’t end up feeling the tiniest bit like a cheat. I won’t give away how the animated movie in particular (or any other instance from the comics) answers these unanswerable, but again, it wasn’t perfect but didn’t ruin the movie.

So, yeah, worth the purchase price for an afternoon’s entertainment, but not really what I want to talk about right now! Because included as a bonus feature on the disc was an animated short about a completely unrelated character from the DC comics stable: the Spectre.

I say “completely unrelated” but that’s not entirely true, or only true in certain senses. Clearly the Spectre and Superman are related in the sense that they are both fictional characters who have appeared in comics produced by the same publisher over the years. Moreover, they both have long histories stretching back to the WWII-era Golden Age, and both are considered to co-exist in the same universe and have, in fact, run into each other and interacted in various stories over the years. (There is in fact a sanity-challenging amount of interaction and overlap between the Spectre and my beloved Green Lantern, as it happens, but let’s save that for another day.) Arguably, you could say that Superman and the Spectre are both superheroes – and within that argument lies some interesting areas to explore.


Looking purely at the trappings, it might appear fairly cut and dry. The Spectre was once Jim Corrigan, a cop who was murdered but continued to fight crime as a ghost with mystical powers, still able to pass himself off as a man when necessary but also able to guise himself as a chalk-white cadaver in a bright green hood and cloak. OK, so far so good, we’ve got the codename, the costume (including cape!), the secret identity, the origin story, the powers far beyond that of mortal man. Pretty boilerplate superhero stuff. And back in the 1940’s boilerplate was how superheroes were made and how the publishers liked ‘em, selling their monthly adventures at a dime a pop to kids who would read them, love them, and use them to start a campfire.

But years go by, the comic book audience becomes a thing, and differentiating one superhero from another becomes a lot more important. So you could say the Spectre didn’t come into his own until that more creatively rich period of the 1970’s. Which (perhaps coincidentally, perhaps all part of the same larger zeitgeist, no bilingual pun intended) was also around a time when spiritualism was gaining certain critical mass and the first stirrings of Jewish mysticism were beginning, so the hook for the Spectre became that he was actually much more than a ghostly superhero. He was a soul who had been selected to literally serve as the wrath of God, the terrifying Old Testament God who turned people into salt just for looking the wrong way. Way before Kick-Ass, before the Punisher even, the Spectre was the superhero who would straight cold kill you. Clearly, by then, he and Superman had parted ways in a pretty profound way.

(So you can see now how, thematically if nothing else, the Spectre is barely on the same plane as the Justice League, especially in the context of the parallel-evil-universe trope. How do you even go about creating the evil version of God's smite-happy boogeyman?)

Time marched on and eventually they dialed back on the vengeful angel of death and doom aspects of the Spectre, and instead of being an instrument of Yahweh who executed pimps and pushers using various callouts from Exodus and Leviticus, the Spectre became a nebulously supernatural entity who dealt with cosmic supernatural threats. DC no longer published an ongoing Spectre comic book, so he was relegated to being part of the background scenery of the overall shared universe where Superman and Batman live. And through the past two decades or so the cycles of reinvention and reinterpretation and attempted revitalization of the character have come faster and faster to the point where I’m no longer sure I could give an accurate answer to the question of what the Spectre is all about today. (And he was in Blackest Night! I must have glossed over that part.)

So, weird character. Even weirder for the headliner of an animated short. But I will give them due credit: they went with the 70’s version of the Spectre. And it totally freaking OWNS. It makes for a good story, in which Jim Corrigan investigates a high-profile Hollywood murder and then the Spectre visits the various suspects of the presumed conspiracy, not to interrogate them but to straight up murder them right back. In 20 minutes or so the Spectre electrocutes someone in a special effects studio, commits psychokinetic vehicular homicide, and finally slashes someone to ribbons with a whirlwind of hundred dollar bills which are the ill-gotten gains of the original crime. Dark stuff!

And not only did the producers go with the 70’s interpretation of the Spectre, but the true stroke of genius is that they set the story IN THE 70’s. The guys have glorious mustachios and drive Camaros, and the girls wear hotpants. And they made the short itself look like a product of the 70’s! It’s animated in this incredibly retro-stylized way that combines the lighting and camera angles of the kung fu/blaxploitation aesthetics, with the Japanese-influenced character designs that were starting to become prevalent back then (see Starblazers). Even the music, subtle and unobtrusive as it is, reminds me of the soundtracks of the epoch. The end result is just exquisite. If you happen to own the Justice League DVD and haven’t watched the bonus short yet, because you bought it for the main feature, brother get ON that.