THE 'SECOND' SPECTRE...

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The SPECTRE, as you're surely all aware, was created by JERRY SIEGEL and BERNARD BAILEY in 1940 for MORE FUN COMICS #52.  (Fun?  The adventures of a dead guy?  Yeah, I can't stop laughing.)  Tough policeman JIM CORRIGAN is murdered by some hoodlums, but his spirit wreaks vengeance on his killers in a grisly, supernatural fashion.  An entity known as 'The Voice' (whom the reader presumes to be GOD, though is never specifically identified as such) then charges him with the task of eliminating all evil on Earth.  That's basically all you need to know about him, if you didn't know it already.

 

However, did you know there was another Spectre, a British one, who appeared in a comic called SMASH! back in the 1960s?  If you're American, the chances are you didn't.  JIM JORDAN was a newspaper reporter for the DAILY GLOBE, who had apparently been killed whilst in pursuit of a story.  However, he survived, and, operating from a secret hideout under his memorial statue in an old cemetery (similar to WILL EISNER's The SPIRIT), he fought crime using a variety of gadgets and a bulletproof vest which helped foster the illusion that "At Night Stalks... The Spectre!"

The strip started in Smash! #144 and lasted for nineteen weekly issues, ending in #162 when the comic jettisoned its MARVEL reprints (in 1969) and was relaunched as a more 'traditional' periodical for boys in much the same mould as VALIANT, a comic which had been on the go since 1962.

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(Something I've never understood is why Americans usually spell the word as 'specter', but, in the case of the DC COMICS character, use the British spelling.  Can anyone enlighten me?)