Weird Adventure Comics #436, the Gasmen... and the Spectre!

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon. 

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Everyone knows this is the site that can't help revolutionising the internet. A mere 11 years ago, I did it by publishing a review of this issue that, at no point, actually involved me reviewing the issue, as I blathered on about virtually everything except the comic.

So, after recent requests, in the same manner as Russell T Davies has returned to Doctor Who, I've decided to return to this issue.

But because I still can't be bothered to do a proper review, I'm launching the daring experiment of tackling it as a read-along experience dictated upon my phone.

That means you can read along with it too.

What can go wrong?

Everything can go wrong.

Can this madness succeed?

Yes, it can - just so long as everyone who ever encounters this post has a copy of the comic to read along with.

Which I'm sure everyone does.

After all, how could it be possible for anyone in the world not to have that?

So, let's get stuck in.

First, it's the splash page... 

...and it's just a replica of the cover but not as good.

It does, however, tell us this tale's called The Gasmen and... The Spectre and it's written by Michael Fleisher, and drawn by Jim Aparo who I'm assuming also does the inking, colouring and lettering, as is his habit.

It also credits Russell Carley for script continuity, whatever that is.

We also have a caption telling us the Spectre is hard-boiled detective Jim Corrigan on a mission to eliminate all evil from the world.

Mostly by killing people one at a time.

This may be a lengthy mission.

Page 2.

A car show at the New York Coliseum [sic] where a father takes photos of attractive women while pretending to be taking photos of cars.

Unfortunately, it's at this point a bunch of men walk in, wearing gas masks and promptly gas everyone, including a young girl whose mother looks old enough to be her grandmother.

It does strike me the father has the same face that all Jim Aparo men do - and so does the mother. Jim, clearly, never saw a face he couldn't recycle.

Page 3.

Everyone at the show's dead while, at the offices of Newsbeat magazine, an unnamed reporter's trying - and failing - to get his editor to accept an article about something that's seemingly incredible.

Page 4.

We learn the reporter's called Earl and is yet another character with that face. However, he distinguishes himself by wearing glasses.

The editor, however, for his way to be recognisable, has a chubbier version of the face.

He's not happy because Earl's proposed article is about an angry ghost flying around New York, in his underpants, and killing crooks. To him, this sounds unlikely.

That conversation's cut short when a woman barges in and tells the pair about the car show massacre. The editor tells Earl to get down there and to stop going on about ghosts in underpants.

Page 5.

Jim Corrigan's at the Coliseum and pondering the situation. He's told that everyone was killed by the same gas the Germans used in World War II. It's never explained how the man who tells him this knows this.

Earl shows up and asks what's happened. Jim Corrigan's pointlessly rude to him.

Page 6.

At last, we meet the man to blame for all of this. 

He's a German in a World War II uniform who lives in an abandoned observatory on a cliff. I am struck that this set-up feels very Golden Age to me. This might be shrewd writing by Fleisher to reflect the WWII nature of the villain or it might just be the way Fleisher writes.

Readers of his work for Atlas comics'll be pleased to know that, so far, there's no sign of cannibalism.

The German's underlings are clearly not military personnel and think him a loon, merely acting like soldiers, in order to humour him.

Page 7.

At the mayor's office, we discover the German is called Field Marshall Offal. I'm willing to bet no German has ever had the surname Offal.

Impressively, for a tale from the mid-1970s, Offal's demanding New York gives him one billion dollars or he'll launch another gas attack. It's good to see he's not demanding a sum that, in 1974, is massive but, in 2021, would seem pitiful, Dr Evil style.

Not so impressively, he wants it in $1,000 bills, which means, by my reckoning, the city will have to give him a million bank notes. Isn't that a little impractical? Where, exactly, is he going to keep one million bank notes? For that matter, how's he going to count it, to make sure they've not short-changed him?

We then get a joke I don't understand about the Watergate burglars not having that sort of money. I'm sure it made more sense to people at the time, especially ones who weren't ten years old and British and were, therefore, more familiar with the financial details of that scandal.

Next page.

It's a house ad for some of DC's publications this month. There are eight books in total. Of them, I've read the Kamandi and Witching Hour issues. The Jonah Hex cover looks the classiest.

Page 8.

The mayor decides he has to give in to Offal's demands.

Jim Corrigan tells him that'll just encourage more gas attacks.

But the mayor's a spineless jellyfish about it all, thus guaranteeing he's going to have to hand over a billion dollars to crooks, on a regular basis, from now on.

However, Jim requests the man let him deliver the money to the extortionists, and the mayor agrees, seemingly never considering Jim might just run off with it. It seems to me that one billion dollars is a lot of temptation to put in a man's hands.

And, so, that afternoon, we find Jim in the woods, by his nicely drawn car, with the money, waiting for the villains to arrive.

Jim has the one million bank notes in a middling-sized case he's holding. I would love to know how they got a million bank notes into it. I'm assuming currency compression is one of his magic Spectre powers.

Page 9.

A helicopter shows up and the gas mask clad pilot tells Jim he's coming along with him, or else.

However, they're not alone.

Earl the reporter's been tailing Jim and is determined to follow the helicopter, in his car.

Happily, the helicopter flies away really slowly and makes sure to stay above the road, at all times, so it's possible for Earl to pursue it.

This does remind me that, in Earl's previous appearance in the book, Jim Corrigan kept referring to him as Clark Kent, which mightily confused me as a child. I couldn't work out if he was literally meant to be Clark Kent or not.

Now, as a grown-up, I realise Corrigan was merely being sarcastic and that Superman doesn't exist as anything more than a fictional character in these stories. Just as he doesn't in the Black Orchid stories that are being published around this time.

Does this mean those Black Orchid and Spectre tales take place in the same universe?

I like to think they do.

Page 10.

The helicopter reaches its destination and, here, the pilot decides to kill Corrigan to prevent him from spilling the beans about the hideout's location.

It does make you wonder why he's even taken Corrigan there when he could have just taken the money off him and left him in the woods.

Then again, he could have taken the money off him and not even bothered delivering it to Offal, keeping it for himself.

The man's clearly a fool.

But no sooner is Corrigan hit by a cloud of the fool's deadly fumes than he turns into the Spectre whose green cape merges nicely with the gas. This is what I love about Aparo, he always makes the Spectre look stylish. 

So, that's the end of the pilot, and the ghost goes on the hunt for the big fry.

He finds him inside the observatory and, at the very sight of the deadly do-gooder emerging from a wall, one of the henchmen gasps out loud.

Page 11.

Offal declares the intruder to be a spy and orders him shot.

Tragically, bullets are useless and the ghost slaughters the henchmen by making a pair of dividers grow to huge size and impale them.

Deciding cowardice is the better part of valour, Offal flees and heads along a jetty, towards his motorboat.

As he gets there, he compares himself to Napoleon retreating from Russia, which is a nice bit of characterisation from Fleisher, signalling just how puffed-up, delusional and conceited the man is.

However, it's in vain, as the Spectre appears before him, mentally declaring, "Some men will always choose the path of evil..." which feels an awful lot like the kind of stuff the Shadow loves to spout.

Page 12.

It's the big showdown between the Spectre and Offal.

Not that it's much of a showdown, with the creepy crusader ignoring Offal's demands to be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention, and turning his motorboat into a giant squid that promptly eats the man, making it the third time this issue - when the cover and splash page are taken into account - we've seen him being eaten by the thing.

Page 13.

Earl's finally arrived at the scene and finds the helicopter pilot's been turned to stone and embedded in a cliff face.

Suitably spooked, the reporter goes in search of Corrigan and finds him.

Corrigan's pointlessly rude to him again and, as they depart the story, cuts short Earl's querying of whether he's seen a ghost in underpants lately.

And, with the word, "Nope," ringing in our eyeballs, Jim Corrigan and we wave goodbye to this tale of Heavenly retribution.

How great was all that?

It was muchly great. It's a tale of zero subtlety, sophistication, depth or fleshed-out characterisation, totally devoid of twists and turns. In the final analysis, it's just, "Here are some bad men and here's the Spectre killing them."

In plot terms, there's no need for Earl to be there. He has no impact upon anything.

But he is necessary for mood, in order, to inject some intrigue into events, thanks to his not knowing what's going on.

For that matter, Jim Corrigan isn't really needed in this story either. Given the Spectre's powers, he could, presumably, find and destroy the bad guys, with no involvement at all from his cop alter-ego. However, without him, it'd be a very short story and one damagingly deficient in human involvement.

None of this matters, one way or the other, of course. All that matters is Jim Aparo's showing villains being killed and, sometimes in life, Jim Aparo killing people is all you need.