The Spectre first appeared in More Fun Comics #52, cover-dated February 1940, created by Siegel and Baily. The premise is explicit in the text: the Voice returns Corrigan's spirit to Earth to annihilate crime, and early stories feature punishment of Old Testament directness, criminals aged to dust, melted, or beheaded by giant scissors.
Siegel gave no detailed account of the conception, leaving critics to source the figure: the avenging angels of scripture, the dybbuk and golem traditions of the Jewish folklore he grew up near, and the pulp era's appetite for horror. Later writers anchored him theologically as the Angel of Vengeance, bonded to a human soul as a check.
The Spectre makes comics' implicit theology explicit: a universe with an active, violent God whose mercy requires a human anchor. Occult and theological readers alike treat the character as an accidental tract on the problem of divine justice, one that never got a comfortable answer.
If the Spectre is the wrath of God given a badge, what exactly does he do to the theology of the universe he haunts, and who authorized the imagination of vengeance part?