The Spectre's career began in the late 1930s, when hard-boiled police detective Jim Corrigan was murdered. His spirit refused to pass into the afterlife, however, and, in the guise of a chalk-white man in a green cloak, it sought bloody revenge against Corrigan's murderers in a grim, supernatural fashion.
During the mid-1940s, the popularity of superhero comics began to decline, and the Spectre suffered as a result. He was reduced to playing the role of "guardian angel" to a bumbling character called "Percival Popp, the Super Cop." The character had formerly been part of the Justice Society of America featured in All-Star Comics, but he was replaced in 1944.
When the Silver Age of comic books arrived in the 1960s, the Spectre was re-written and returned to the role of an avenging undead spirit. Under the authorship of Michael Fleisher, his power was vastly increased, and at times he approached the level of omnipotence.
Among the many changes made to DC Comics' characters during the later half of the 1980s (following the Crisis on Infinite Earths), the Spectre was largely de-powered; under the authorship of Doug Moench, he became nearly a generic mystical figure, with Corrigan joining an occult detective agency.
Eventually, Moench was replaced by former theologian John Ostrander, who chose to re-examine the Spectre in his aspects both as the embodied Avenging Wrath of the Murdered Dead and as a brutal 1930s policeman.
Ostrander placed the Spectre in complex, ambiguous situations — what vengeance should be wrought upon a woman who killed her abusive husband in his sleep, for instance. Other notable dilemmas included the tiny (fictional) nation of Vlatava (faced with endless cycles of civil war and ethnic cleansing and retribution and blood feuds that had endured for centuries, the Spectre responded by judging the whole nation guilty and killing the entire population except two politicians), the pending execution of a wrongfully-convicted man (his death sentence was commuted to life in prison after the Spectre threatened to kill the entire population of the state of New York in retribution), and a 90-year-old woman who had spent her entire life trying to atone for the single murder she had secretly committed in the 1920s (the Spectre found her on her deathbed).
Ostrander also retconned several new concepts into the Spectre's history: he was originally meant to exist as the embodiment of the Wrath of God, and Jim Corrigan was but the latest human spirit assigned to guide him while he existed on Earth. It was also shown that the Spectre was a fallen angel who had participated in Lucifer's rebellion, but then repented, and that serving as the embodiment of God's anger was its penance.
Eventually, Corrigan's soul found peace. He relinquished the Spectre, and went on to the afterlife. The role of the Spectre was later assumed by Hal Jordan, the spirit of the former Green Lantern.
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