Just for the sake of completeness, here there is Sgt. Rock gleefully killing Nazis in the 1967 with the approval of the CCA! 

Love Grandenetti's art, but why did so many artists have trouble drawing children?

Also: the whole approach here--script, art, coloring--seems to show them looking at the book as a mystery title, not a superhero one.

The Spectre #10 (June 1969)

Story #3 "How Much Can a Guy Take?"


Story: Jack Miller
Artist: Jack Sparling

Synopsis: Allie Johnson shines shoes for a living while a gangster named Nichols seems to make his living by mercilessly taunting his old schoolmate who once showed enough promise to become a doctor or lawyer. Not anymore. Now Allie Johnson can barely provide the basic necessities for his wife and two kids even in their rundown apartment. However, there's a way out.

Recently, Nichols' taunts have been centered around his briefcase - an article which, should Johnson ever get his hands on it, would restore the prospects of the downtrodden soul.

"If you had this black bag, Allie -- your money troubles would be over for good!", one day, "Hey Allie... wouldn't it be great if I dropped dead this very minute... then... then... all you'd have to do is reach out... and grab the black bag... and no one'd ever be the wiser?"

Nichols derision continues to embed itself within his target's psyche.

Soon enough, Johnson decides to steal the bag even if Nichols does make good his threat to chop his arm off should be try. Breaking into Nichols apartment one evening, Johnson grabs the satchel but awakens its owner in the process. Grabbing the gangster's gun from the stand upon which it rests, Johnson threatens to shoot if Nichols makes another move. Scoffing at the would-be thief, Nichols calls what he perceives to be Johnson's bluff. Johnson draws back the hammer on his weapon and is interrupted by a powerful gust of green smoke as it blows into the room. The Spectre makes his presence known.

"Just take a look inside the bag... the bag you wanted so desperately, you were to die -- or kill -- to get!"

Opening the briefcase, Johnson sees nothing. Prompted, however, by The Spectre he checks behind its lining where he discovers that the bag itself has been crafted from solid gold mesh and as a possession Nichols came about through criminal means, has a reward on it which the ghostly guardian suggests he takes.


"B-but... I don't deserve the reward... I was going to kill... I'm as bad as... he is!"

"No, Allie... your words prove your basic decency... but even a good and decent man can be driven to commit a crime!"

So Johnson gets his reward and turning his attention to the fleeing Nichols, The Spectre makes sure that he gets his.

"As for you, Nichols... by mercilessly taunting Allie, you have proved that an evil man is driven, by his own viciousness, to destroy himself! Your life is forfeit! I am here to claim it!"

Nichols falls into some sort of psychedelic swirl and is off to who knows where.



Thoughts: Given how poorly handled continuity continues to be here, I can't imagine that Miller's tale was constructed to serve as a contrast to the previous one penned by Steve Skeates. I therefore find it interesting that The Spectre actually seems to correct at least one significant mistake he made in "Hit and Run". In that piece, The Spectre decides to stand aside and let events unfold before he casts judgement on his charge. As I noted then, this reactive approach cost Johnny Shull his life. Here though, The Spectre doesn't wait to find out whether or not Johnson intends to pull the trigger on Nichols, but instead intervenes before the young man can act. One would think that preventing Johnson from acting defeats the purpose of being able to judge him, but given how events unfolded in the previous narrative, it's easy to understand his caution. Though it's probably coincidence, I noticed that the word 'driven' is presented in bold when The Spectre advises Johnson that "an evil man is driven, by his own viciousness, to destroy himself!" Not that Shull was evil, but if someone were to emphasis the word driven in speech so soon after he witnessed someone driving into a lamp post and killing himself, I'd have to wonder what sort of connections are going on in the speaker's head.

Continuity isn't, on the other hand, as neatly adhered to when it comes to The Spectre's decision to shrug off the fact that Johnson did intend to kill Nichols. Spec's murder of a killer in issue eight was framed as a sin and he knows this. It's a large part of the reason why he's being punished with these stories. If The Spectre is supposed to be learning the rules of The Voice from these encounters, then you sort of have to wonder just how those rules are supposed to work. Kill a criminal as he's about to shoot someone in the back and you're punished; kill a criminal for tormenting you and you get a reward - something isn't lining up here.

And speaking of The Spectre taking a life, he clearly kills Nichols at tale's end. No idea why this is suddenly ok. Or perhaps it isn't and we can take it from the lack of a Spectre #11 on the stands that he's failed in his desire to continue with his mission.  

I also can't help but wonder whether readers weren't asking themselves 'How much can a guy take?' with this succession of Spectre on the sideline tales.  They feel like little bonus stories which might come after a 22 page feature, but just stapled together like this, the title can't help but feel like a collection of leftovers.

eh.  What are they gonna do?  Cancel the title?

The Spectre #10 (June 1969)

Story #4 "Will the Real Killer Please Rise?"

Author: Jack Miller
Artist: Jack Sparling

Synopsis: Though ventriloquist Vargo admits that "I once hated them all... maybe even enough to knock 'em off" he claims to have no involvement in the recent death of one of his now ex-cricus troupe who chose to kick him out of their circus act due to his "petty thefts". If Vargo is innocent - a claim The Spectre highly doubts since his Journal of Judgement seems to confirm his guilt - then our hero had better act fast to discover who sent the letter vowing to kill the tattooed man of the group, Slade before that threat is carried out.

Convinced of Vargo's culpability, The Spectre resolves to spend the night with him (watching him, I mean). There is a catch though - The Spectre decides to read Vargo's mind to remove any doubts which might linger around his guilt or innocence.

"This can't be! I can read no guilty thoughts beyond his words! No... not a single evil thought in his brain! Could I have been wrong about him?"

Vargo, whom The Spectre hasn't bothered to conceal his presence from, taunts the astral avenger and goes to sleep as our champion waits. Nothing. At dawn, The Spectre leaves convinced that Slade has nothing to fear.

"I was right about one thing," The Spectre advises the reader, "Slade no longer had anything to worry about".

We see a body of Slade laying before The Spectre who is at a loss to identify his killer. To make matters worse, ex-circus Fat Lady Sarah Frame has received a threatening letter.



That night, The Spectre stands in the wings as Vargo and his puppet go through their act.

Vargo: Oh, stop pretending to be so clever, Victor!
Dummy: I'm cleverer than you, Vargo! In fact, sometimes, I think you ought to be sitting on my knee!

Silently critiquing his show as being "about as funny as a graveyard at midnight" (which, coming from The Spectre, might actually be intended as a compliment) the grim ghost prepares to follow Vargo to Frame's apartment. Vargo however, has other plans.

" Huh? H-he's heading straight back to his motel!"

Suspecting some sort of trick, The Spectre confronts the ventriloquist and challenges him to confess. Vargo merely laughs and requests that The Spectre not leave his side seeing as how he might later need an alibi when she's murdered. Vargo goes to sleep, The Spectre once more scans his mind only to detect "the sleep of an innocent baby... not a dream... not a single evil thought in his head!" Pacing the room, The Spectre wracks his brain trying to solve this riddle. Absent-mindedly lifting the box designed to carry his puppet, The Spectre suddenly has it all figured out.

Cut to, Sarah Frame's apartment where Vargo's dummy leaps towards his intended victim before being caught in mid-flight by The Spectre. Only, it's not Victor, but Vargo who has disguised himself care of having his "double-jointed legs doubled up at the knee, and strapped, to reduce his height!"


"B-But... what about the other Vargo?"

Good question, Sarah.

Turns out that Vargo had a life-sized dummy of himself made (or simply made it himself, it's not revealed) that included a "transistorized motor that simulated his breathing and heart beat".

"It was Vargo himself, of course, in the box who not only threw his voice but controlled the dummy's movements with this little control unit! No wonder I couldn't read your thoughts... or your dreams... there just weren't any!"

Thoughts: You know, I actually like this one. For one thing, it is a Spectre story and not somebody else's in which he plays the maitre' d. Nice little mystery and there's something about the flair and arrogance of stage magicians which makes me like them as adversaries. Despite The Spectre just last issue opining that "[Fredrick] Foost does not appear to be a villain... indeed, he is but a wandering performer, a stage magician" someone must agree with me, since during this short revival period alone, the hero has gone up against three such performers (the top hat and tails type, I'm not including those more steeped in the black arts). Given his run in's with stage magicians, I'm surprised that The Spectre hasn't been keeping an eye on them wherever he can.

However, there's a lot wrong about this piece. The villain's plan works for as long as it does only because The Spectre is an idiot. I could see Vargo hypnotizing himself so as to not actually be aware of the crimes he is carrying out, thus explaining The Spectre being unable to do detect his guilt, but having him realize at tale's end that he couldn't tell the difference between the thoughts of an innocent man and a puppet is embarrassing. I mean, Vargo may as well have just stuffed a bunch of pillows under his bedsheets and placed a styrofoam head with a happy face on it on his pillow and had The Spectre read that thing's thoughts to prove his innocence. Shouldn't "Vargo has no thoughts - good or evil - in his head, just complete silence" been a tip off.

Staying by Vargo's side all night isn't the worst plan in the world, but neither is it the best. Wouldn't it have been wiser to stay close to his intended victims instead? Especially if there were some doubt as to the killer's identity? Or is The Spectre's mission to protect only those people to be murdered by Vargo specifically? And why is The Spectre so sure that "there's nothing to worry about" after one night of watching Vargo? What if Vargo isn't the killer and someone else is? What if Vargo is the killer but simply has no intention of killing his targets on those particular evenings?

But yes, I like this one regardless. The whole "sometimes, I think you ought to be sitting on my knee" is just subtle enough to pass unnoticed by the reader though, once again, if they haven't started to suspect the dummy by this point it's probably only because the story hasn't been playing fair with them.

Corrigan's absence in these yarns has never been more noticeable than it is here. Had he been included, Miller would almost certainly been forced to explain why The Spectre doesn't keep watch over the suspected killer while Corrigan doesn't do the same with the intended victim. I guess though, that with this being a sort of rite of passage for The Spectre, these investigations have to be carried out without anyone's help.

Sparling's artwork nicely accentuates a craziness on Vargo's part which is never referenced in the script. There's something disturbing about the maniacal grin on the face of the dummy as it's placed in its box that in hindsight is pretty chilling. Wide-eyes, wide-grin - this is the face of someone who can't wait but go out and murder somebody. At the time, it's just a puppet, but once you go back after knowing that it's actually Vargo, it is effectively startling. It adds a certain dimension to the character which explains why he seems so nonplussed by having The Spectre show up unexpectedly in his room and almost convinces you that such a nut would be capable of building such a robot. The Spectre is also colored green for this story (with a few exceptions where he looks the way you'd expect) and it's a nice effect, but it does feel its shorthand for "The Spectre is invisible" which he isn't.

Had this series continued along this path, I would have welcomed more stories from this team.

One more thing...

This issue closes with a 'Fact File' on The Spectre. Once again recounting his origin and history up to that point, it makes note of The Spectre once being sidelined within his own series - by Percvial Popp during his More Fun days. As I said though, this text piece contains his history up to the present and here's how it ends:

"In issue No.9 of The Spectre, The Astral Avenger was taken to task for killing a mortal by the Being who created him, and sentenced to do penitence by passing judgement over the lives of those people whose names appeared in "The Book of Judgement," a mystic volume which was bestowed upon him. The effect was to once again make The Spectre a subordinate character in his own strip. The next issue was the last in the series. There's a lesson there... Somewhere!"




Wow, what a frank assessment of this change and what a blunt method of announcing that the series is now over. Weird too, that the title is already being referred to as an artifact of the past while its still on the stands. My guess is DC knew the title was at an end by the time issue nine came out since that one doesn't include a letter page. Not exactly scientific reasoning, but the lack of such a column seems to suggest that DC didn't see much point in encouraging readers to write with their assessment of the series since they had already passed judgement on the title. It might have felt a little deceitful to suggest that one had a chance at getting their letter published if they wrote at this point, hence its excision.

OK, so that's that for The Spectre's own title. I suppose ten issues plus three issues of Showcase isn't bad, but it's not great either, especially considering the fact that it never settled into its own groove for more than an issue or two. The Spectre will pop once more during this period.

This read like a deliberate, quick and dirty change of pace--like a filler during a situation where the main story was not ready for publication. I understand your point about the story resembling the blackouts used on Night Gallery, but The Spectre's version of that story format was nonsensical and lacked the occasional wit mixed with genuine horror that Night Gallery would employ just a year after this story's publication.



Yes, the art was nice--not really Spectre artwork, but still able to catch the eye, with the lack of "clean" line work.




Sure thing. At this period of DC history, editors and writers of long-running anthology titles were jumping on the horror bandwagon--specifically gothic horror made wildly popular by the Dark Shadows soap opera, so almost overnight in 1968, House of Mystery made the dramatic shift to this kind of horror (#174 from June, 1968), Unexpected (arguably #109 from November, 1968),and House of Secrets--after a three year publishing hiatus (#81 from September, 1969), among many new horror titles to come. Gothic horror would also make its way into superhero titles such as the last years of the original Teen Titans, so in a way, The Spectre's storytelling "neighborhood" was gaining new residents that were nowhere to be seen at the beginning of the 1960s.





While the plot--showing the downfall of Felix as his (apparent) fate from not seeing some bigger picture was sort of interesting (not in a god way), Grandenetti's art is really, really rough with serious issues with basic anatomy; check out the size of young Felix's head in relation to his undersized, almost dwarf-ish arms. How that was not corrected by Roussos before publication is a mystery. I've seen Grandenetti's work in many comics, and it was rarely on the error-filled level seen in this issue.







Exactly; Felix was a victim of abuse and neglect from the start, and without proper parental guidance (including the father openly repenting to his son for the abuse), Felix was--like many a real life child in similar circumstances--doomed to fail in one way or another. So, he should not be seen from the "never learned his lesson" judgemental perspective, but as a victim spun out of any internal or nonexistent external control.

It seems as if Friedrich was trying his hand at the kind of "One way or another, you'll get yours" kind of fate-as-horrific-avenger stories one would have found in Warren's Creepy and Eerie of the era, only in the Warren stories, the lead character is such an immoral being that he usually (and richly) deserves his fate. In the grand scheme of this Specre story, Felix is not so deserving of his end.



That's an interesting observation.