Monday, November 22, 2021

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.





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