As the living embodiment of God's vengeance, the Spectre is one of DC's most powerful characters - and traditionally, he's the most blood-drenched and violent too. However, despite many of his extreme, R-rated kills, the Spectre's fearsome reputation came from a real-life altercation.

Created in 1940 by Jerry Siegel and Bernard Bailey, the Spectre is (usually) the alter ego of police detective Jim Corrigan. After he is killed in the line of duty, Corrigan is bonded with the Spectre, the heavenly Spirit of Vengeance sworn to punish evil-doers everywhere. With near-omnipotent powers, the Spectre has found endless ways to punish his victims, whether it's burning them alive, summoning sharks to eat them in their beds, or imprisoning them to drown in a pillar of water. However, all these vicious punishments began with a single event in the seventies.

The Spectre Changed After a Real-Life Mugging

The Spectre returned as the lead feature in Adventure Comics in 1974, where writer Michael Fleischer and artist Jim Aparo brought the ghostly hero back to his vicious roots. According to Les Daniels’ DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World’s Favorite Comic Book Heroes, this run of stories actually came about following a real-life incident: "The Spectre was given a new lease on life after editor Joe Orlando was mugged and decided the world needed a really relentless super hero." A veteran of the classic EC horror comics, Joe Orlando was certainly no stranger to darkly violent tales with an ironic twist, but it wasn’t long before trouble started: "The character came back with a vengeance ... and quickly became a cause of controversy. Orlando plotted the stories with writer Michael Fleisher, and they emphasized the gruesome fates of criminals who ran afoul of the Spectre."

Spectre's Ultra-Violence Was a Poor Fit for DC

The stories certainly read like the ultimate revenge fantasy, as Jim Corrigan winds up investigating several crimes where individuals have committed horrible acts. The Spectre then shows up and deals out some horrible punishment, like chopping them in half with a pair of giant scissors or turning his victims to glass only to then shatter them into a million pieces. Eventually, the stories proved to be too weird for DC Comics readers of the seventies, and the Spectre feature was ultimately pulled from Adventure Comics. However, Spectre came back again and again, with stories in 2006's Tales of the Unexpected (from David Lapham, Eric Battle, and Prentis Rollins) giving the Spectre a new host, and adding far more actual gore to his attacks in images so visceral, we can't show the worst of them here. Unlike most heroes, Spectre faces people who could never pose him any harm, using godlike power to pluck out their greatest fear and use it to kill them.

The Spectre's rebirth as a truly horrifying character came from real-life violence, as the ghostly character became a very literal embodiment of vengeance. While today, the Spectre is depicted more like a benevolent cosmic god than Freddy Krueger, he has a long history of sickening attacks on criminals - apparently in response to a crime that made DC staff decide Batman and Superman weren't going far enough.

Source: DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World’s Favorite Comic Book Heroes by Les Daniels