At one time, it was the best-selling comic book in the world, and the story that begins in its pages is still being told today…
Your Major Spoilers (Retro) Review of Spawn #1 awaits!
SPAWN #1
Writer: Todd McFarlane
Artist: Todd McFarlane
Colorist: Steve Oliff
Letterer: Tom Orzechowski
Editor: Wanda Kolomy Jec
Publisher: Image Comics
Cover Price: $1.95
Current Near-Mint Pricing: $12.00
Previously in Spawn: Breaking into comics in the mid-1980s, Todd McFarlane quickly made a name for himself with his unique style, as seen in the pages of Infinity, Inc. But his real fame came when he began drawing Amazing Spider-Man in 1988, redefining Spidey’s look (and especially his trademark webbing) for a couple of years, before he requested the option to write his own stories with the launch of the adjectiveless Spider-Man title. In 1991, desiring greater creative control as well as ownership of their characters, McFarlane and six of his popular peers left Marvel Comics to form Image Comics, which would allow McFarlane to tell the stories that he might not have been able to create under the umbrella of Marvel Comics.
We begin on a dark and stormy night in New York City…
With that shocking revelation, our main still-unseen main character reveals that he doesn’t quite remember all of what happened before his rebirth, instead possessing only strange flashes of memory: faces, images, unrelated shards of his past…
The moments between our hero’s reveries are filled with newsreaders (a technique clearly cribbed from the pages of Frank Miller’s ‘The Dark Knight Returns’) giving us the necessary expository back story to flesh out the story-tellers world. Honestly, while McFarlane is no Kurt Busiek, his cadences are at least interesting, and the main character’s fragmented thoughts are quite effective in showing us the narrator’s fractured mental state. As his life and death flash before his eyes, the one image that is strongest of all is the face of a beautiful woman…
In literally selling his soul, Spawn (because, frankly, I don’t have time to keep thinking up ways not to name him) played right into the devil’s diabolical hands, receiving the power to balance the scales at the cost of his memory…
…and maybe a bit more, buuuuut we’ll get to that in a minute. Finally emerging from the shadows, he leaps into the night to find the woman who drove him to escape hell itself, wearing the chains of his sins around his waist…
…although, the question of what is in those pouches is, to my knowledge, an unsolved mystery even to this day. Speaking of mysteries, this issue also introduces the detectives, Sam and Twitch, who are investigating a series of murders that, paradoxically, aren’t being committed by hitmen, but instead inflicted upon hitmen. (I think we are supposed to believe that Spawn has been behind these acts, though this issue doesn’t make that clear.) Of course, as our hero (?) is about to find out, there’s no shortage of crime to go around…
Alighting in the alley, snarling in rage, Spawn is mistaken for “one o’ them Youngbloods”, an early attempt to reinforce the shared-universe nature of the first-wave Image titles, but shows himself to be an entirely differently and more deadly animal (also, he has ankles, so… Not a Youngblood.) Our hell-spawned protagonist quickly defenestrates the would-be rapist before dealing with his cohorts in a much more visceral (and explosive) way.
The expenditure of some of his power not only blows hole in his victim’s skulls, but (metaphorically speaking) his own as well, breaking free some of his lost memories, affording him another look at the face that brought him back from the hoary netherworlds…
Overcome by the rush of emotion, Spawn collapses in the arms of the woman he saved, sobbing in the alley in a moment that even I have to admit is a strong one (albeit a strong moment muted by his full-face hood.) The talking heads return (using the real-life logos for CNN and E! News, I might add, which may or may not be a trademark issue) to explain that the city is noticing it’s strange, brutal new hero, while Spawn himself realizes the identity of his mystery woman: She is his wife! Worse still, somehow five years have passed since his death, and he has no idea how to find her again. Feeling stifled by his new costume, he yanks away his mask, only to find that his memory isn’t the only thing that wasn’t made entirely whole in his resurrection…
Well, if’n I was to hazard a guess, I’d say yer a zombie, Al, or maybe some kinda flesh golem? I’m not sure, to be honest. And, more importantly, the expenditure of your mystical power has moved the counter (literally, by the way, the counter goes from ‘9999’ to ‘9995’ thanks to blowing away the jerk with the glasses, showing us that his power, though greater than human, is still finite) and shortened his time back on Earth. I’ll be honest: This comic is quite a bit better than I remembered, both in terms of the art and the story, and even the flawed parts at least feel intentional. In short, Spawn #1 gets the job done with a modicum of style, introducing the central mystery in a way that makes you want to read more, with strong art to distract you from the uneven pacing, earning 3 out of 5 stars overall. I still dislike the super-saturated hyper-coloring job, but there’s a lot to like in these pages, which proves that either the book or the reviewer have matured in the past two decades…
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