JOHN OSTRANDER: The Way I Were
For me, it seemed like this week was all about returning home. The news about GrimJack appearing here on ComicMix was broken… well, here on ComicMix. And DC published the first issue of my new Suicide Squad miniseries (Elayne also has a stake in this since her husband, Robin Riggs, is providing wonderful inks over Javi Pina’s pencils for the series). This is my first new issue of Squad in – well, in a long long time.
It’s interesting coming back to a series after a lengthy absence. When I began scripting GrimJack: Killer Instinct a while back, my concern was – would I get Gaunt’s voice right after so long? Not to worry – it was right there – as was Amanda Waller’s over on Squad.
I’ll be writing more about GrimJack as we get closer to the publication date. (October 2, if you’ve forgotten and, by the way, you’ll be able to see it here on ComicMix for free. Always bears repeating.) Today I’m going to talk instead about one other book with which I was closely connected and which, after a lot of thought, I don’t think I’d want to return to on a regular basis.
The Spectre.
Tom Mandrake and I had a longish run on that series which some people at the time said couldn’t be done. For those of you who don’t know the character, he was created in the late 1930s by Jerry Siegel – co-creator of Superman – and Bernard Baily. Jim Steranko once said the Spectre had the toughest origin in comics – he had to die to get his powers. The Spectre was also the strongest character in the DCU – perhaps in all comics. Only God was stronger and He?She had better be eating His/Her Wheaties.
The concept: the Spectre was Plainclothes Police Detective Jim Corrigan who ran afoul of some gangsters and was dumped into an oil can of cement and dumped in the river. At the gates of Heaven, Corrigan just can’t let it go. The Voice (aka God) lets Corrigan return as a crime fighting ghost who can take an almost human form. His powers were magical – almost divine – and he meted out big time justice. Never more so in a series of stories by Mike Fleischer and Jim Aparo. The vengeance meted out was often horrific.
The Spectre then went through a bunch of different permutations depending on who was writing him when Tom Mandrake and I got him. We had just come off a stint on Firestorm together and were looking for another project and both of us loved the potential of the Spectre. We had very clear ideas of what we should and should not do with him.
There’s an exciting new trend in comics these days. Comic book writers are actually being hired to write comic books. 
Tick…tick…the countdown clock on the wall here at the Big ComicMix Broadcast Central shows less than 16 days until we launch Phase Two here on ComicMix. There is so much is coming together in the next 2+ weeks and we are itching to share it all. First, though, let’s cover a few things from our To Do List:
The giant ticking clock on the wall here at ComicMix tells us that a mere 17 days remain until we launch Phase Two, but before then there are a lot of questions to be answered! For example, how will co-creators Timothy Truman and John Ostrander bring their GrimJack series to a huge new audience as well as their scores of established fans? They tell The Big ComicMix Broadcast just how it will all work – and get us geared up for brand-new WEEKLY visits with the Man From Cynosure, FREE OF CHARGE!
These are the Days of Awe. While that sounds like a World Wrestling event, it is, in fact, the ten-day period between Rosh Hashonah (New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). It’s a time to consider the previous twelve months, make amends, and resolve to do better in the year ahead.
With its 41st anniversary just a week past, the saying “Star Trek Lives!” has never been more true.
Now it’s our turn to examine the Big ComicMix News here at the Big ComicMix Broadcast as Editor-In-Chief Mike Gold spells it out, right from the horse’s mouth and direct from that now famous panel at Baltimore this past weekend!
Some ups and some downs this week in our little pop culture playground. DC takes a few steps back with some scheduling issues and then brings Jim Shooter back in the spotlight, while the internet seems to be crammed with some very taste time wasters.
