JSA SERIES - THE SPECTRE

Now this was a super hero with a difference! Here was a crime fighter who was a ghostly spirit sent down by The Almighty to thwart evil. Actually, in the hands of Golden Age comic writers, the premise is presented in a more mundane way than it sounds. Detective Jim Corrigan is killed in the line of duty, but the Big Guy won’t let him into heaven because there’s too much crime on Earth to be dealt with, so he brings Jim back to life with a spirit inside him which periodically escapes to capture bad guys. Pretty quirky stuff, but that’s what made the Golden Age so great!

I was familiar with The Spectre long before I had heard of the JSA because the character had been resurrected (he’s a spirit after all) in the Silver Age with his own comic. However, it was the Golden Age stories which really interested me more since they were usually handled with a lighter touch than the later incarnation.

My custom action figure of The Spectre once again starts with a costume from Rauty’s Toy Shop. I wanted a face that would capture the haunted, grim expression of the ghostly crime fighter, but I couldn’t find a 12” figure that quite fit the bill. Then Hasbro came out with a G.I. Joe character called Faces, whose gimmick was that he could disguise himself as Cobra villains. Therefore, the figure came with had a set of masks as accessories. One mask for a character called Zartan exhibited just the right expression, so I painted the mask white and affixed it to an action figure. The short boots were courtesy of a Civil War costume that I had purchased around the same time. The figure already had molded gloves, so the whole figure came together pretty quickly.