Calling Up The Spectre With Ostrander & Mandrake
Long time co-creators John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake (GrimJack, Firestorm) joined forces once more in the early 90s to give a fresh treatment to a character started way back when Superman was young, the Spectre. With the fantastic art of Tom Mandrake and the rich, labyrinthine writing of John Ostrander, The Spectre series they created may well be some of the finest comic book creating the world is likely to see. Tom and John graciously agreed to re-visit their work in an interview, and what follows is the result of that discussion. So now, brave readers-enter the uncanny world of The Spectre-if you dare!
Kevin Noel Olson: The artwork in this series seems as much based on classical artists as comic forerunners. It is sometimes reminiscent of Dore, sometimes of Bosch, but always and unquestionably the brilliance of Tom Mandrake. Was the classical feel of the artwork a conscious decision, or a personal stylistic vision? The scenes in the book are colorful, yet steeped in contrasting blacks and dark tones. This effectively adds to the creepiness of the subject matter. Can you remember any unique techniques used in drawing The Spectre?
Tom Mandrake: Yes, the visual references to artists like Dore and Bosch, any artist who dealt with the question of the artistic representation of the Christian concepts of Heaven and Hell, angels and demons was intentional. One of the hardest aspects of The Spectre for me was the question of how to create a believable, horrifying hell that would still get by in mainstream comics. You walk a fine line when drawing hell, demons and tortured souls, falling off to the wrong side makes it look silly and juvenile.
There are also nods to lesser known but personal favorite artists like Gordon Grant. Grant was a master drawing sailing ships of all kinds and I leaned on his knowledge for the flying pirate ships.
Our run on The Spectre was long and gave me the time to explore all types of artistic techniques and along with the classic inking tools, flexible nib pens, brushes and technical pens I used fingerprints, toothpicks, twigs, rubber cement, sponges, rubber bands...almost anything that would inspire an idea about a new technique or way to re-imagine an old one.
kno: When reading about Jim Corrigan in his detective mode, we get a sense of his hard-boiled, down-to-Earth policeman manner and how this ‘just-the-facts’ personality meshes with the most ethereal concepts of supernatural justice in the character-sort of Philip Marlowe meets Christopher Marlowe’s Faust. The melding of detective noir and gothic eeriness brought forth an intriguing dichotomy. Were there influential models or the treatment of Jim Corrigan’¬s character?
John Ostrander: Early Dick Tracy stories for one.(For those who don't know or don't remember, Dick Tracy was a comic strip created by the late Chester Gould back in the late 30's, as I recall; same time era as the Spectre.) In those days Tracy was extremely hard nosed and violent and as likely to shoot you as to question you. I'd also read a lot of hard-boiled detective fiction from the era and seen a lot of the films and the noir films. I wanted to infuse the book with some of that sensibility. The biggest change we made was not in the Spectre himself but in our portrayal of Corrigan.
KNO: Jean-Paul Satre once said, “Hell is other people.” You’¬ve shown that, for Jim Corrigan, hell is a far more personal engagement. It seems that The Spectre spends his time punishing Corrigan more than anyone else. Is that reading something into your work?
JO: I don't think the Spectre is punishing Corrigan per se. At the start, they really are partners, Corrigan and the primal Spectre force. And it's a good fit. As the series progresses, however, Corrigan undergoes a change, largely influenced by his relationship with Amy. He winds up confronting who he is, both as the Spectre AND as Corrigan. The Spectre force does not change; I don't think it's capable of change. Corrigan, however, is and does. It does create a separation which, in turn, leads to Corrigan putting down the burden of being the Spectre and passing on.
KNO: What did you think of the melding of The Spectre with Hal Jordan? Do you feel Hal Jordan is as intriguing a character as Corrigan, or just a different character altogether?
JO: Different character, different concept, different goals.
KNO: Since his inception, the Spectre has never found a comfortable fit in the world of superheroes, and seems largely ignored in certain periods of comic book history. As supernatural characters go (Phantom Stranger notwithstanding), it seems Etrigan the Demon, Dr. Fate, Swamp Thing, and Deadman all fit more easily into the puzzle of the DC universe. In your series, you did not often deal with the world of other superheroes in a large way (a Deadman cameo in an early issue attests to this). Is it The Spectre’s overwhelming powers that make him a sort of pariah in the DC universe, or is there some other intrinsic issue?
JO: I think his power levels make it difficult to use him effectively although I will say one of my favorite single issues of anything I've done is the one that included the Joker and Batman. A basic question which must always be posed is this – why doesn't the Spectre crush his opposition immediately? The answer, I think, is that the potential for power is there but Corrigan decided how it was used – and he had a human's perspective. To me, that was always the catch that made it workable -- the power almost of a god but a human's perspective on how to use it.
KNO: Some time during the run of the series DC brought out its Vertigo line, which dealt with more adult subject matter and supernatural struggles not dealt with in DC’s mainstream comics. Were there ever considerations to move The Spectre to the Vertigo line, and would it have been a better fit at all?
JO: There was never any talk of in so far as I know. I'm not sure what would have been different if we had been at Vertigo, to be honest. I loved The Spectre as a package -- from the covers, through the story, right through the letters page. I'm happy we were where we were. Also, we wouldn't have had the same editors and that would have been a heavy loss to the book went,
IMO. Dan Raspler and then Pete Tomasi did great jobs of editing.
KNO: With a run of over 60 issues, the series did have a prodigious run as far as supernatural hero comics go. Meld that with the complex philosophical and religious questions asked often and answered less frequenty, it really is quite impressive. The Spectre is not a punch-and-bloody type of character, in stark contrast to Image’s Spawn. This is the longest-running solo series of The Spectre. What do you think made it more successful than its predecessors?
JO: Corrigan as a character, I think. First and foremost, the biggest and most important change we made on The Spectre was Corrigan's character. We incorporated elements from all the other versions of the Spectre, as much as we could, and really made it into an organic whole. And Tom always had at least one "WOW" visual per issue. He understood the iconography of the character -- there are certain things that you want to see when you pick up a story of the Spectre and they have to be there. Tom ALWAYS delivered. Since Tom also has a strong bent towards horror, that really grounded the series visually that way. He took the CONCEPTS we were dealing with and made them VISUAL. I think we were both inventive and consistent and that made readers want to keep coming back.
KNO: How did you decide to start the project with The Spectre?
JO: Tom and I had been doing FIRESTORM together and I decided to leave after issue 100. Tom wanted to stay but then the Powers-That-Be felt it was time to give Firestorm a rest so Tom suddenly became available. I should mention that I LOVE working with Tom. We know each other so well and work together so well that I always jump at the opportunity to do it again. So we looked around for what characters were available and The Spectre had just come back on the list. Tom and I BOTH loved the character and were in real agreement of how to make the character work. We prevailed on Dan Raspler to nail it for us and we told and sold him on why we would make it work this time.
TM: I love working with John also. You come across few creators with whom you have an unspoken understanding and the whole is greater than the parts. The hard line people tend to draw between writer and artist disappears and you both contribute with ideas, concepts and energy to the others work. Even then, it has to be the right project for all the pistons to fire. I think we both knew how rare this confluence of individuals, project and time can be and it certainly contributed to our staying with The Spectre for 5 years. John and I are great friends but that's not always enough. You can have friends you love who you can't work with. I don't want to gloss over the contributions of the rest of the team either, Carla Feeney was with us as colorist thru the whole run and as with John I had a wonderful creative relationship with Carla. She always seemed to know just what was needed to accentuate my b&w art and Todd Klein, one of the great letterers in the business, was there all the way as well. All these people and elements could've been stymied by a poor editorial team but we were lucky enough to start with Dan Raspler who helped us get the project off the ground, really pushed for us and Peter Tomasi who followed through. They were both always supportive, willing to suggest direction but not demand we follow their vision.
KNO: Can you speak to the reasons the series was eventually cancelled?
JO: Tom and I decided it was time to end the run. Sales were declining a bit, as they usually do when a book has been around for awhile. We could have probably run for another year or so but we wanted to be able to end our run the way we envisioned it without having to hurry and wrap things up all of a sudden. So we told DC and I think the feeling there was that it didn't make sense to have others come on the book right away. Tom and I had become very identified with it so it made sense to give the character a rest and start a new series a little bit later.
TM: We had the ending, in general terms, outlined in our original proposal. Without knowing how we were going to get there we did know where we wanted to end up.
KNO: The team of Ostrander and Mandrake lasted throughout the entire run with few exceptions. How did you guys stand each other that long?
JO: Stubborn perversity. (editor’s note-We’re not entirely certain if John meant ‘perseverity’ or not. Perhaps the words are synonymous in this case.)
TM: I never listened to what John was saying.
KNO: There are some heavy-hitting philosophical and religious concepts in the series. One that some may find repulsive and others attractive is The Spectre’¬s absolute knowledge of God, Heaven, Hell, etc. This knowledge would surely drive a mortal man mad, and it certainly seems to wear on Jim Corrigan. In your opinion, is it Corrigan looking into Nietsche’s abyss, or Stapledon’¬s blinding god-light from Starmaker that drives him the most insane? Or are they equally disrupting?
JO: Actually, I DON'T think Corrigan has an absolute knowledge of heaven and God and all. In the final storyline before the end, we had Corrigan searching for God. He found heaven empty and Michael the Archangel dead. The point we were making was not that this was actually Heaven OR God but CORRIGAN'S concept of both. They have to "die" so that Corrigan can let
go. What he took as a given was no longer true.
KNO: My Issue #6 of The Spectre is missing. Do you think this a Ouija board kind of a thing I should be worried about? Were there any strange coincidences ala poltergeists or other Fortean weirdness while you were creating the series?
JO: Well, you might question whatever fates or deities you might believe in as to WHY they don't want you to see issue 6.
TM: I took your copy of #6, I do part time work as a poltergeist.
KNO: Tom, you fiend! I hope the poltergeist thing is working out for you, but I’d like to read that copy..
The Spectre always seemed to deal very odd manners of death for those he punished. The final images are conceptually stunning and chilling. They seem to speak to very primal fears which are intrinsically part of us as human beings. Was there a conscious thought process in which the death would be befitting of the evil perpetrated?
JO: Oh yeah. It was a notion of JUSTICE. It wasn't enough to simply kill the killers. They had to suffer, they had to know fear, they had to have an idea of WHY they were dying. They died deaths that emphatically said, "You have done wrong." The Spectre was into PUNISHMENT as well as Justice.
TM: No question the Spectre believed in "an eye for an eye" kind of vengeance. Without trying to sound TOO sick or bizarre; visualizing The Spectre’s vengeance, he was always one-uping the people he punished, was great fun!
KNO: In some respects, The Spectre seems to recall classics like Swamp Thing (which Tom worked on) and the 70s House of Mystery in atmospheric horror. Where did you draw inspiration for The Spectre?
JO: Don't forget, I also did Wasteland back around then as well. I was really into psychological horror. I felt it shouldn't just make you jump; it should seep into your skin and then stay with you awhile. Also, I was inspired by what Tom drew and I tried to write what he did so well. And Tom frequently creeped ME out!
TM: I always felt compelled to take whatever John suggested and twist it, push it, give him more than he asked for. All the great artists from EC and Warren were strong influences on what I did on The Spectre. Guys like Crandall, Torres, Williamson, Ingles; artists who worked in beautiful black and white with attention to the chiaroscuro, fine crosshatching and classic ink techniques. They created dark, foreboding art that worked wonderfully in b&w or color.
KNO: Comic books of the 90s were plagued with concepts like alternate covers, polybags, overwrought and over-muscled angst-ridden heroes, and other gimmicky ideas to sell comic books. With only a couple of glow-in-the-dark covers that really did make sense rather than being simply part of a gimmick, how did you avoid the sentiments of the period?
JO: Our "gimmick" was stories -- intelligent, thought provoking stories with great characters --people you could feel about and wanted to spend time with. Plus, there were our diverse cover artists, each of whom seemed to tell a story with the cover alone.
TM: We had a wonderful, wide variety of artists do covers on the Spectre. The covers alone would make a great book! I loved the glow in the dark covers and was always glad to get the chance to use them. One of the rare cover gimmicks that actually made sense and related to the material.
KNO: Was there ever pressure to make The Spectre a comic with more accessibility to the broad range of ‘fanboys’¬ in existence at that time?
JO: The most I recall were pleas to change the costume and remove the "pixie booties" which we largely ignored. Tom took the collar off the cape and cowl and made little changes here and there but nothing major as I remember. The fans actually seemed very pleased that we worked in some many different "aspects" of the character, using something from just about all the previous runs of the character.
TM: I don't think many people noticed my leaving out that collar and buttons, but I just hated them and decided to quietly remove them. The whole question of the Spectre’s costume is an odd one. As I recall in the Spectre’s origin story by Siegal and Bailey there's a scene where Corrigan is sitting and sewing his costume together! After that he just turns into the Spectre whenever he wants to. I like to think of that little scene as a sign that Corrigan doesn't understand what he is, that in order to justify in his own mind his having a costume he has to pretend to himself that he sewed it together rather than just thinking it into existence. Is that what Siegal and Bailey intended? I have no idea.
KNO: Jim Corrigan faces situations that were not present in other Spectre series, including (but not limited to) causing an innocent man to commit suicide in an early issue, his post-mortem relationship with a woman infected with aids, and later confronts issues such as the religiously-eclectic predecessors of the Jim Corrigan incarnation and the female aspects of God. Did you get letters or complaints about some of the material in The Spectre?
JO: Actually, the most letters we got was when the Spectre wiped out a whole country. Some readers felt he went over the line and I would agree and it was part of the point. The Spectre WAS out of control at that point; he was grieving over Amy's death, in denial, and not handling it well. There were always people who would dislike this or that aspect of a story but, for the most part, I felt (and feel) that our readers were a pretty literate and brainy bunch and they had come to the Spectre BECAUSE we were exploring different issues. (That and Tom's kickass art!) Also, I wasn't really into preaching this answer or that -- I was into exploring the questions and people were able to make up their own minds. I wasn't telling them WHAT or HOW to think, just offering ideas for consideration. The readers then took off from that and what THEY would write in then made the letters page such interesting reading, IMO. The letters weren't ONLY about the story or the art; they were also about the issues raised and I loved that.
KNO: John and Tom, did you two originally work together on First's excellent Grimjack series, and did your friendship start there, or did you work on other
things before that?
JO: I knew of Tom's WORK before we worked together on GrimJack but we had never met or spoken with each other. Tom had become available right at the time when we needed a new artist. The GJ editor wasn't sure that Tom would even be interested; he was working for DC and First was one of the "independents". I convinced him to at least call. I think what helped was that Tom had gone to Kubert School with GJ's creator Tim Truman. I knew that Tom's sense of storytelling, his characterization, his use of shadows and blacks to help convey the mood, would fit right in with what I wanted for the book. Tom went on to have the longest run on GrimJack of ANY artist and we told some of the biggest stories -- including when we killed John Gaunt off. And when we put him in bowling shoes. The editor of Firestorm got me to stay on the book longer than I intended by offering to make Tom the artist on it. Tom and I were working so well together by then that it really made things effortless. That's when Tom also began some experiments that would fully blossom as his art style on Spectre.
TM: I was coming off a run on The Batman and GJ looked like fun! John and I clicked right off the bat. GrimJack is one of the best (first?) truly grim and gritty characters to appear in the early '80s and much of what I was experimenting with artistically on GrimJack really came together on The Spectre.
KNO: Are there plans to ever re-visit the Jim Corrigan Spectre, and would you do so if you could?
JO: No plans and I'm somewhat divided on the idea. On the one hand, I absolutely loved doing the book and it's some of my best work ever. On the other hand, can you ever really go home again after you've left? Would it only be a disappointment to those who loved the series? We made an impact with what we did; maybe its best to leave that stand. Tom and I have other things we want to do together, one of which I hope you'll see soon.
TM: I would love to do one more Corrigan/Spectre story with John. Not a continuing series, more like a graphic novel or mini. Going home again is great as long as you don't expect it to be the same place or pressure yourself to be the same person.
KNO: On that note, I think it would be worthwhile to mention that there is a graphic novel collected from the series called The Spectre: Crimes and Punishments John and Tom, thank you both for making this interview and The Spectre series incredible. Any of your future endeavors will be awaited with great anticipation.
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