After the break, check out the latest episode of Comic Books Are Burning In Hell, with your road dogs Matt Seneca, Joe "The Animal" McCulloch, Chris Mautner & Tucker Stone!
This week, we get together to take a look at Vertigo Visions: Phantom Stranger, Rachel Pollack and Chris Weston's Time Breakers and the legal problem-causing Spectre comics by Jim Aparo and Michael Fleisher. It's a scary episode!
You can take a look at a lot of the books (but not these ones!) we talk about on this show on our Bookshop page. If you purchase any of the books, the podcast will receive an affiliate fee, which will go towards paying the monthly hosting fee for the podcast, and, because it is Bookshop, will also go to support indie booksellers. On Twitter, you can keep up with the boys at @factualopinion, @snubpollard, @mattseneca and @cmautner.
I need to get ahold of those Fleisher Spectre stories --- I've read a few but not a enough. The thing about Fleischer is that while almost everyone else in 1970s comics was trying to be Stan Lee (certainly true of Thomas, Conway, Wein, Wolfman, etc) Fleischer seemed wholy untouched by that. He was an old school pulp storyteller -- he would have fit in with EC comics or the the other post-war genre comics. He did stories with clear characters, beginning middles and ends. NO interest in world-building or continuity. This made his refreshing -- although he also clearly, as we can now say without fear of a lawsuit, bugfuck crazy
Posted by: Jeet Heer | 2020.12.24 at 01:00
Do you guys know why this isn’t showing up in the Apple Podcast feed?
Posted by: Tylet | 2020.12.30 at 17:49
Hi Tylet--i can see it in my feed on Apple. It is under a different name: "Guy Davis Gets Strange, Rachel Pollack Tells Time, The Spectre Kills Everything" is the title there.
Posted by: Tucker Stone | 2020.12.30 at 19:17
Jeet--not to nitpick on you too hard, but Fleisher seemed pretty pleased with himself for using continuity at DC in advance of basically everybody else, during the time period when Marvel was using continuity to show them all up. If you can track down the reprint issues, you can see both he and Levitz singling out that aspect of these comics for praise.
Posted by: Tucker Stone | 2020.12.30 at 19:20
Tucker, oh sorry thought this was a different episode. Thanks for responding!
Posted by: Tyler | 2020.12.30 at 20:42
So, having finally gotten around to reading the full run of Fleisher's Spectre, I still stand by my original assessment that the stories work well because they are stand-alone morality tales. Contra Paul Levitz, the continuity in those comics is extremely rudimentary -- not just compared to the convoluted epics done at Marvel by Thomas/Wolfman/Starlin & co (who did stories that spanned many issues and titles and required extensive footnoting) but even DC titles like Kirby's Forth World books (four interlocking titles telling a common converging story across 50 odd issues before the plug was pulled) or O'Neil/Adams' Batman (which had a lot of worldbuilding and continued stories with Ra's al Ghul).
By contrast, the continuity on the spectre is rudimentary -- the girlfriend is a Lois Lane type and the reporter has the same function as the police detective in The Fugitive, as a structural counterpoint to the main character who is outside the law. The Spectre stories are great but they really don't add to DC continuity.
Posted by: Jeet Heer | 2021.02.01 at 19:27