The Unofficial Spectre Home Page

This site is dedicated to the memory of Kim Yale--writer, wife, friend, who lost her battle with breast cancer earlier this year. She is missed by her colleagues, her family, her friends, and those of us who knew her from afar and never got the chance to meet her. Click here for Internet resources on breast cancer, and more celebration of Kim's life.

This page is dedicated to the DC Comics title "The Spectre," about a slain 1930's policeman bonded with the wrath of God. Specifically, this page deals with the title's most recent incarnation, a series (re)started in 1992 under the creative team of John Ostrander (writer) and Tom Mandrake (artist). This series has a feel unique to its predecessors and the comic medium as a whole. It was certainly one of comics' most off-beat and risk-taking titles. There is no aspect of gross commerciality, and frankly, the wrath of God is not a highly merchandisable figure. This title compensated by asking big questions--questions for which there often aren't answers--and showing characters with hearts and souls in the midst of powers and responsibilities barely at the edge of human comprehension.

The storytelling was spellbinding, the art shifted from personal and delicate to its more characteristic blood-saturated, flame- and fury-filled panels to suit the mood. As a whole, this was the comic industry's best-kept secret. This story wound through the DC Universe for well over fifty years, and Ostrander and Mandrake gave it a life it never enjoyed before. Though the title itself ended early this year, it was done via creator decision and not editorial mandate; none of the changes wrought by the series's ending were unjustified by character or situation. Sometimes it just makes sense to end, and though it did, and though it was my favorite title, I have no complaints. It ended with purpose and reason and ended well enough that I approve.

Let me know what you want added to this site. It will grow according to its feedback.

Mucho thanks go out to Johanna Draper for helping me with this project from the beginning, to Spidra Webster for the links on Kim's page, to Francois Angers for correcting and verifying some key creator credits, and to the Spectre's creative team, for giving this site a reason to exist.

Other Internet resources of interest:

Dean Zeller's John Ostrander and Kim Yale bibliographies. Tres cool.
rec.arts.comics.dc.universe: Find Spectre discussion here.
There are several UseNet posters who reviewed "The Spectre" in rec.arts.comics.reviews. These include:

All characters, art, indicia, whathaveyou, are copyright DC Comics. No money is being made off of this project in any way, shape, manner, or form. No infringement or disrespect of whatever is intended by anything on this site. If anyone at DC Comics has an objection to any of the material on this page, please let me know as soon as possible.