Corrigan's loutish behaviour in his debut seemed a little more thuggish than I recall from later entries in the series so perhaps that's why it stands out so much to me.  Though I'd be surprised to find that it's something Siegel gave any amount of thought to, one could in retrospect, attribute some interesting character development to Jim Corrigan due to the way that he seemed to become a somewhat softer guy after being murdered.  Corrigan becomes a bit more likable; The Spectre becomes more vengeful.

She seemed delighted by my reaching out and sharing that. As I suspected, she had long lost the comic her letter had appeared in and mostly forgotten it, and wouldn't have been able to track it down even if she had remembered, so seeing just that again was an unexpected joy, let alone the story she had requested but never seen!

I'm glad that people appreciated my diversion from the topic. I've got a personal reason to appreciate this kind of investigation and outreach, since I made a good friend thanks to his contacting me based on a 20 year old letter in Brave & Bold that led to us both meeting and establishing an ongoing personal contact with Jim Aparo. 

And now back to the Spectre! Your reviews so far are a blast, and I'll be along through the bitter end (I don't think that the Percival Popp stories are all that awful, and demonstrate an interesting evolution in the premise, an evolution representative of many Golden Age super-hero strips that struggled to adapt to a shift in reader preferences)!

One of the neat little things I liked about this story was a simple shot of the Spectre "surfing" atop the roof of a speeding car. Baily fails to take full advantage of such a visually arresting image by rendering it in a tiny panel from a distant overhead perspective, but seeing the Spectre in a standing, unperturbed stance, with his arms crossed, when a normal human would be blown off triggers a dissonance that very effectively reinforces the supernatural qualities of this character.

I think that we might assume that at this early point in the character's genesis, even Siegel himself is not yet sure of whether Corrigan and the Spectre are one and the same, or whether Corrigan merely plays as "host" to an existing spiritual entity.

Throughout the history of this character, the situation has been played both ways by various writers.

If I recall, it won't be long before The Spectre will be known in a more "public" sense, and that was always a shame, as his horror story nature--being someone not known to the average man--was his advantage as a character in universe. Like what is often said of the vampire, their greatest strength is that people do not believe in him (and/or know about him in any sense), thus he has free reign to attack the living. The same would apply to The Spectre, and in a superhero world (admittedly a young superhero world at that time) he really put the "other" in "otherworldly", a truly unique character among the great Golden Age heroes.




Well, The Spectre is of the world beyond, and unlike Drs. Fate and Strange, his very being is so removed from the corporeal realm that his powers, how he just knows how to use or modify them means he's an actual part of that aforementioned world beyond and needs no books, spells or devices (amulets, talismans, etc.), despite the fact he appears to have a physical form. In other words, his knowledge comes from the fact that he's not "practicing" magic, he is (in a sense) magic.



How different the idea of justice--particularly justice from the American perspective--was in that era. It was not uncommon for fictional characters to play judge, jury and executioner without a moment of spiritual conflict or hesitation. What's more interesting is that in this period, the reader often found himself on the same ideological page as the more lethal heroes--unlike the past 25+ years of comics, where some have complained on and on and on about how violent the Punisher and certain versions of Batman were.

More Fun Comics #57 (July, 1940)

 
Synopsis: After spending weeks attempting to locate the source of a “disturbance” detected by the instruments in his laboratory, Prof. Dale Ericks finally succeeds in building a device through which he now receives “a soothing, urgent voice” speaking to him through “the depths of infinity”. Offering a great reward for his services, the voice instructs Ericks on the building of a machine which will transport the scientist to his location. The device is built, Ericks dissolves and rematerializes in space, and arrives at, yes, you guessed it, Zor’s castle we last visited in More Fun 55.

There, he comes face to face with Zor himself, still imprisoned; still immobile. However, Zor is able to communicate with Ericks telepathically and commands him to switch off the Paralysis Ray responsible for his predicament. Ericks complies and immediately asks for his reward. Guess who gets to switch places with Zor for eternity? Freed, Zor vows vengeance against Jim Corrigan. Now, where’d he put that top hat?



Wasting no time in carrying out his threat, Zor arrives outside the home of Sergeant Dexter, a man with whom Jim Corrigan “often quarrel”. Dexter stares into Zor’s eyes as the powerful being stares at him through his window and then “death shoots forth from the orbs in the form of bullets”. So, yes, bullets shot out of Zor’s eyes. Dexter dies, Zor phones Wayne Grant (Corrigan’s ex-room-mate and partner of sorts on the police force), tells him he’s Dexter (whether he can impersonate his voice or Grant can’t tell the difference between the two isn’t clear), tells him it’s important that come over, and when Grant arrives, hypnotizes the officer into believing that he’s just witnessed Corrigan’s murder of Sgt. Dexter.

Grant reports the murder but, in deference to Corrigan, neglects to incriminate his friend. Claiming that he has “no suspicion” as to who committed the crime, he pays the detective a visit and demands to know why he killed Dexter. Having no idea what his former room-mate is talking about, Corrigan vanishes before Grant’s eyes and… well, kinda just hovers above him as The Spectre for a moment before returning to the floor presumably still invisible to the officer. It’s kind of weird the way he turns into The Spectre, becomes invisible, but just stands in another part of the room. His musing aloud “I wonder where Wayne got the idea that I killed Dexter” serves as Zor’s cue to enter the room and confess his culpability in the matter. The Spectre rushes Zor, the two increase in size and transport off to some other dimension where they throw comets at one another, and Zor achieves the upper hand due to The Spectre’s “lack of psychical knowledge”. You know, I can’t really explain their battle better than that. While The Spectre generally exercises a bit of artistry when doling out punishment to common killers, with Zor he becomes, well, pretty much a pugilist engaged in a barroom brawl. There’s no finesse, no dark magic – just grappling and throwing things around. “What’s that over there? A comet? I think I’ll chuck that at his head” basically.

 

Zor doesn’t press his advantage instead choosing to head off to the San Pueblo Prison where Pedro Gonzales “a merciless killer” is about to hang. And he sort of does and sort of doesn’t. With the trap door under his feet sprung, Gonzales just hovers above the gaping chasm for a moment before being pulled through the prison roof, his hands still bound behind his back, until he finds his benefactor making his introduction.

“Whether you continue to live depends upon how well you perform my orders! One slip - and you’ll wish a million times that I had permitted you to die a comparatively peaceful death!!”

So what does Zor want from Gonzales? Only what he wanted last time – to gain his revenge against Jim Corrigan by kidnapping Clarice Winston. Gonzales accomplishes this and in so doing, triggers an “instinct” in The Spectre alerting him to Clarice’s predicament. The Spectre zones in on her whereabouts but finds himself impeded by an invisible barrier preventing him from getting close to the young woman. Which is a pity, because Clarice has been tied to a log and sent drifting towards a waterfall. Zor mocks his nemesis and The Spectre flies off “thru dimensional space” to request aid from The Voice. The Voice suggests that His servant remember that “all evil has an instinctive aversion to ectobane!” which causes The Spectre to visit the country of Lugania where ectobane grows as a “mystic tree”. Building a casket with the wood from these trees, The Spectre returns to the scene of Clarice’s imminent demise where the mere presence of the ectobane casket renders Zor helpless. Once more, Zor finds himself helplessly frozen in place as The Spectre contends with the sight of Clarice going over the waterfall by “smil[ing] mockingly at the sight”. Why so confident? Because this is a guy who can and does cause the water to flow backwards, thus sending his former fiancée back to safety. Oh right, and Gonzales is still there. He pulls a knife on The Spectre and now he’s a tree. 



As for Zor?

The Spectre places him in his casket and sends him “off to the far-flung depths of the universe… doomed to drift aimlessly through eternity”.



And Clarice?

Back in bed once again assuming that the preceding events have been a dream.

OK, but what about Wayne Grant?

“What a headache! I can’t remember a thing that happened before I came into this room!”

Doesn’t that raise a ton of questions and leave a lot of loose strings laying about?

THE END

Thoughts: I wonder what happens with the search for Sgt. Dexter’s killer from here. Sure, Grant doesn’t seem to recall the image Zor placed in his mind of Corrigan shooting the fellow so Corrigan’s off the hook, but is this another unsolved murder for the city? Criminals reduced to jabbering idiots, a pile of bones, human pulp found inside the crushed remains of automobiles – are they just taking this in stride? Who’s the poor sap tasked with figuring all this stuff out? I doubt The Spectre figures it’s his problem, which is kind of a shame since I think Prof. Ericks might still be frozen in place in Zor’s castle eighty years later.

And that’s the thing with some of these Spectre tales – no victim is really avenged or redeemed. Put Superman or Batman in these stories and I suspect we’d get some assurance that Sgt. Duffy’s widow and son at least, will be looked after by tale’s end or that Erick’s would be freed from the fate Zor had planned for him, but with The Spectre, it seems like that his “mission to remain earthbound until all evil has been stamped off this Earth” reiterated at the end of this story doesn’t have much to do with going back to check on the human collateral damage.

Even Clarice when rescued by The Spectre is simply dumped back in bed as if being given a breather before her next kidnapping. And what’s with her “I guess it was all a dream” at the end? Is The Spectre exerting some mild hypnotic influence over her leading her to believe that such a conclusion seems reasonable or is she just an imbecile? She was unconscious the first time Corrigan used his powers around her, so I think it’s fair to let her off the hook then, but I mean, this isn’t even the first time she’s encountered Zor or The Spectre (who she saw at the end of issue 54 and remarked “I must be dreaming” despite standing outside wide awake on her lawn at the time of the comment). Does she even know what dreaming means?

What did Jim Corrigan ever see in this idiot?

I have to say however, that Zor makes a very compelling foe for The Spectre. Though infuriated by the punishment The Spectre inflicted upon him at the end of their last encounter, he doesn’t hesitate to bestow the same fate upon poor Prof. Ericks despite the fact that it was he who freed Zor. A lesser villain might have decided that this little detail had merited him a quick death at least. Also; there’s really nothing that Pedros Gonzales does that Zor can’t do (and indeed, did do the last time he showed up) and so the fact that Zor even uses him as a pawn, suggests that the guy simply enjoys tormenting people. He doesn’t so much save Gonzales from his execution so much as he delays it – a fact which Zor happily divulges to the killer. Gonzales is there not really to help, but because it amuses Zor to let him know that things could get a million times worse for him if he so decrees it. Being turned into a tree at the end (which reminds me of a fate which befell a victim of The Rani in the Doctor Who episode ‘The Mark of the Rani’) just seems sort of anticlimactic after all of this given the impression Zor creates that Gonzales would probably have only wished he could have spent the rest of his life as a tree after Zor got through with him.

Zor is a villain of pure evil but has such a seething rage for others that he comes across as more a sadist than an over the top moustache twirler. It’s a shame that this will be his final appearance until Roy Thomas brings him back for a final bow during his All-Star Squadron run. Of course, the fact that he isn’t used again might be a reflection of the weaknesses of this type of story. As I mentioned in the synopsis, The Spectre’s powers are impressive when used upon ordinary criminals who can’t counter his abilities, but against another supernatural being, it gets kind of silly. The Spectre isn’t really designed for fistfights and brawls but that’s what his battle with Zor reduces him to. An opponent who can’t simply be turned into a pile of bones, mannequin, candle, or whatever because he’s so great either demands that Siegel up his game and devise something even more unusual for his fate or needs to get out of the game. Sadly, the latter path was chosen for Zor.

You can detect Siegel’s boredom with the character before the issue is over through the number of copouts and deux ex machinas he employs in this story. The Spectre loses the first round against Zor due to his “lack of psychical knowledge” but really, he just gets hit with a comet. When Siegel realizes that he’s written himself into a corner by making Zor even more powerful than The Spectre, we are suddenly introduced to ectobane as if it's so obvious an answer that we the reader can hardly fault Siegel from incorporating it into the story. “Ectobane! Why didn’t I think of that before!” remarks The Spectre. But what the hell is Ectobane? Apparently it abounds in the country of Lugania where all you need to do is find a tree and you’re in business! Of course, once it gets within range of Zor, he’s done for. Why bother building him up as more powerful than your hero if he’s going to be defeated so easily (again)?

One more thing…

June, 1940 is the cover date of Fantastic Comics #7. I mention this because I suppose now is as a good a time as any to bring up the character Stardust who comes probably as close as anyone could to serving as answer to the question “What if Jerry Siegel had combined Superman and The Spectre to create one superhero?”



Stardust first appeared in Fantastic Comics #1 (Dec, 1939) and so predates The Spectre by two months. In that debut appearance, he described as “the super crime wiz who is busting spy mobs on a lot of planets!” and as “that master mind of the universe with a mysterious knowledge of criminals [who] travel at amazing speed, on highly accelerated light waves”. So a pseudo-scientific being so powerful his accomplishments would be better said to have been carried out by magic. And he’s merciless. In that first appearance, he throws a small army of criminals out a window but lets them hover in mid-air long enough that they have time to stare into the eye sockets of the skeletons “of innocent people they have killed” which he suspends in front of them. He tells the FBI where the crooks are and that they have “five minutes” to get them down before they fall to their deaths. “Good luck!” he says knowing full well that five minutes won’t be enough time to save them.

Anyhoo…

The reason I specifically cite issue seven here is because in that yarn, Stardust sentences one his foes to spend eternity suspended in ice within a floating prison in space where “you’ll live forever - to think about your crimes!” So one month after Zor received the same fate in More Fun 55, this hybrid Superman/Spectre (though Stardust actually predates The Spectre) was handing out the same penalty.

Stardust surely deserves his own thread so I’ll leave things here before I fall down that rabbit hole. He was created by Fletcher Hanks who, from the way his son Fletcher Hanks, Jr described him, had a lot of demons. Physically abusive to his wife and son and a drunk, he was not well remembered by his son when he was tracked down by Paul Karasik for the publication of I Shall Destroyed all Civilized Planets collection of Hanks, Sr’s work in 2007. I mention these rather sordid details just to provide a bit of a glimpse of the sort of mind that created this nastier, more sadistic Spectre at the same time that Siegel and Baily were doing their thing.