Spectre: A Missing Life

Solo 2 (all Richard Corben issue), February 2005, DC Comics

This is a page from an eleven-page story, Spectre: A Missing Life. In the tale's shortness it seems to homage the classic Fleisher and Aparo Spectre stories of the 1970s but brought up to date for the 21st century. It’s the same tortured, slightly aloof loner/outsider, but there is no extravagant “The Omen”-type revenge death, and it is the better for that. The story deals with all the big issues: life and death, good and evil, crime and retribution. I don’t know if there is a spiritual dimension to our existence, but if there is then the one depicted in this eleven-pager is how I would like to think it would operate. And in that sense it is one of my “comfort stories”, one that I have read and re-read many times and which I hope to re-read many times more. I am not sure if it is an age-thing but I find it much more moving now than when I first read it sixteen years ago. Maybe it is from being more conscious of my mortality. There is no happy ending, but there is closure.

The new, as far as I am aware, spin that John Arcudi has given the Spectre is that, “The Sixth Sense"-like, Corrigan can see the dead. Strictly speaking they are the undead who are still on earth as a form of purgatory for unatoned sins. And, “An American Werewolf in London"-like, these dead are in varying forms of decomposition. Now if you were to choose an artist in the history of comics to draw a story featuring the undead in states of decomposition then two names immediately spring to mind. One of them is Richard Corben (no prizes for guessing the Wright answer for the second artist). Would the story be just as good if another artist had drawn it? This is one of those hypotheticals that are pointless. The story and art are now one cohesive inextricable whole.

What I especially like about this page is that the word-ballooned version is a one-page story complete in itself, with an important life lesson to boot: don’t leave things too late because you do not know what is around the corner.

When I first became aware in 2016 that the Corbens were selling their artwork personally via their website I emailed Mrs Corben to ask if they had yet sold off the pages to this story, but was told that they had long gone. In January of 2018 I left a comment on the one other page (as of this writing) from this tale that is on CAF. (There are no dud pages in this story but In my opinion that page is even better than this one.) Then in September of 2019 this page turned up on eBay with a “Buy It Now" price of less than a grand, or the option of making the seller an offer. Apart from checking to make sure the seller was not in the possession of any other pages from this story I could not tap the keys of the the BIN option fast enough. Thank you “Sien”. In the late summer of 2020 I messaged Mrs Corben again to let her know that I had sourced a page from the story I had enquired about four years earlier and to ask her to pass on my thanks to her husband for the work and craftsmanship he had put into the page’s execution. I consider it an honour to be the present custodian of it.

Richard Corben was a famously modest and private person. Mike Mignola said on his IG that he did not really know him and thought very few did. Far be it for me to claim to be more aware than one of his regular collaborators as to how Richard Corben thought or felt but I just know the Corbens fully appreciated the reverence and affection their fans had for his work and by extension, because the work was often so very personal, for them. And this was reciprocated in a number of ways; the most obvious being that he never "phoned in" a job, but would strive to interpret his ideas or those of the writer he was working with in the most interestingly imaginative way of which he was capable. The body of work he left behind is evidence of this. He was special.