WRATH OF THE SPECTRE: ADVENTURE COMICS #437, 438, 439, 440, WRATH OF THE SPECTRE #4

"THE HUMAN BOMBS AND...THE SPECTRE"
"THE SPECTRE HAUNTS THE MUSEUM OF FEAR"
Script: Michael Fleisher | Art: Ernie Chan & Jim Aparo
Art Continuity: Russell Carley | Letters: Jim Aparo | Colors: Adrienne Roy
Editor: Joe Orlando

Ernie Chan (credited as Ernie Chua) provides guest pencils for two consecutive stories, and the work is excellent. A few years ago I read the majority of the BATMAN and DETECTIVE COMICS issues published in the seventies, and Chan had a long run on the character around that time. He was inked most frequently, as I recall, by Frank McLaughlin during that run, and while the work was good, it can't even begin to compare with Jim Aparo over Chan. Aparo's heavy blacks maintain the visual continuity from previous Spectre chapters, while Chan's layouts lose nothing from the previous all-Aparo chapters.

The stories are more of Fleisher's usual, featuring a gang who turns people into human bombs (and poor Gwen just happens to be one of them), and then a deranged taxidermist who kills people in order to stuff them and add them to his "exhibits". All villains meet suitably grisly ends.

WRATH OF THE SPECTRE: ADVENTURE COMICS #431, 432, 433, 434, 435, 436

The Spectre, created in 1940 by Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel, was revived in 1974 to headline DC's ADVENTURE COMICS anthology series. The Spectre's alter ego, NYPD homicide detective Jim Corrigan, was murdered by gangsters and returned to Earth by God's hand as an avenging ghost, on a mission to rid the world of all evil.

Legend has it that DC editor Joe Orlando was mugged, and decided afterward that he wanted a superhero who could operate outside the law and bring brutal vengeance down on criminals who had otherwise escaped justice. The dormant character of the Spectre was re-tooled to become the vehicle for Orlando's revenge fantasies, in a series written by Michael Fleisher and illustrated masterfully by Jim Aparo.