Welcome to the RetroSPAWNtive, a weekly (or biweekly) retrospective on Todd McFarlane’s legendary Image Comic series, Spawn. This series recently broke the Guinness World Record for longest running creator-owned comic book series which is by no easy feat at over 300+ issues and counting. To celebrate this industry-shattering milestone, SYFY put out a documentary on Todd McFarlane’s journey from comics fan to helping build one of the biggest and most important comic book companies of all time. When I saw this documentary last week, I was honestly and genuinely moved by it. Like a lot of people, this year has emotionally kicked the crap out of me, so to see McFarlane talk about his work so passionately really lit a fire under me and inspired me to start this blog to get my work out there. So as a way to pay tribute to McFarlane, I thought it would be really fun to read through all of Spawn. This includes every issue of the main series, the video games, the HBO animated series, and the 1997 movie.
Before I start the retrospective, I just want to tell an abridged version of Todd Mcfarlane’s career and the massive cultural impact that Spawn had on the world.
Todd McFarlane, unlike a lot of other legends in the comics industry, did not start reading comics until his mid-teens, but once he started he was hooked, and he knew that he wanted to make comics. In 1977, at age 16, McFarlane drew his first Spawn drawing. After hundreds of rejection letters from various comic publishers, Mcfarlane was finally accepted to draw back-up stories for Marvel comics. After realizing how much praise Mcfarlane was receiving both internally and externally, Marvel decided to put him on Incredible Hulk and then eventually Amazing Spider-Man. Mcfarlane’s artwork redefined the look of Spider-Man. He didn’t redesign Spider-Man, but instead drew Spider-Man in certain poses that emphasized the “Spider” in Spider-Man as well as making his webbing look more organic rather than the generic look that it had for decades prior. His work on Amazing Spider-Man lead Marvel to decide that it was time to give Mcfarlane his own Spider-Man title where he was both the artist AND the writer. The first issue of this series (simply titled Spider-Man) sold over two million copies which is second only to Jim Lee’s X-Men issue one.
In 1991, Mcfarlane started to notice that people were buying his books for his art rather than the character on the cover. Realizing he and other artists were being grossly underpaid for their work, he teamed-up with six other superstar Marvel artists (Rob Liefeld, Mark Silvestry, Eric Larson, Jim Lee, Jim Valentino, and Whilce Portacio) to create Image Comics, a publisher that makes creators’ rights their first priority. The main rule of Image Comics is that the creator owns 100% of their work. A major comics publisher having this kind of deal was mostly unheard of at the time aside from much smaller publishers like Mirage Studios. The only difference between Image and these smaller publishers is that they wanted to create a superhero universe that would outsell the big two companies, Marvel and DC, while proving that readers are much more interested in the talent behind the books rather than the characters the books were about. And they did just that! Comic book creators are respected much more than they were before Image was founded. And even though Marvel and DC may do better sales-wise today, when Image launched their first wave of books in early 1992, it was an instant hit! Early Image books sold out the day they came out, and eager fans lined up for blocks outside of comic shops to get their books signed. A huge part of this was that Image Comics advertised themselves as the cool alternative to Marvel and DC. Their books had insane art that you couldn’t find anywhere else and storylines that will melt your brain! The most successful of these early books is Spawn.
Spawn follows Al Simmons, a high-rank military operative who dies during a mission and is sent to Hell. After bargaining with the demon, Malbolgia, Simmons is given a chance to say goodbye to his wife. In return, Simmons must become the new Hellspawn, an agent of Hell tasked with punishing the worst of mankind. The only problem is that when Spawn returns to the living, his body is disfigured and it’s been five years since he’s died. Now, fueled by revenge, Al Simmons vowed to use his new found Spawn powers to fight evil and take out Malebolgia.
Like I said earlier, Spawn was an instant hit! With its Hellish motifs that were only enhanced by McFarlane’s spectacular artwork and writing, the book gave off a taboo vibe that screamed “this isn’t a Marvel or DC book”. Yes, both publishers also have demonic characters like Ghost Rider and Etrigan respectively, they wouldn’t dare promote their books to the level that Todd McFarlane and Image Comics did with Spawn.
As the 90s went on and Spawn’s success grew, McFarlane knew that the comics industry was headed for a financial disaster, and he was right. The speculator market for comics was insane during the early to mid nineties. People would buy up multiple copies of issues that had first appearances of characters, major events, and number 1s in hopes that the price of said issues would skyrocket for resale. This speculator bubble eventually did pop and it was devastating for the industry. It was so bad that Marvel almost went bankrupt if it weren’t for them selling off the film rights of their characters to different studios. McFarlane predicted this and had a plan to make sure that Spawn would survive the comics crash. He knew that in order to do so, he had to make Spawn a household name. This required Spawn to be adapted into four other mediums; toys, video games, television and movies. As you can probably guess, Mcfarlane was successful in doing so. He made deals with multiple video game companies to produce Spawn games for multiple platforms, 1997 saw the release of the HBO Spawn animated series as well as a major motion picture from New Line Cinema, and after multiple toy companies rejected him, McFarlane decided to start his own toy company, McFarlane Toys. Over the years, McFarlane Toys has become so popular that he has deals with companies like the NFL, Adult Swim, and even DC Comics to produce toys based on their franchises. All of this did exactly what Todd McFarlane had hoped for and made Spawn a mainstream success.
Going back to video games for just a bit, 2003 saw the highly anticipated release of Soul Calibur 2, a popular fighting game franchise made by Japanese game company, Bandai Namco. One of the biggest additions to this sequel was that they introduced guest characters from other franchises. Depending on which console you got the game for, you would be able to unlock a different character. For PS2, you got Heihachi, a fan favorite character from Tekken, another fighting game franchise from Bandai Namco. For Gamecube, you Link from Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda. And for Xbox, you got to play as Spawn! This was a huge part of keeping Spawn in the public consciousness. If having Spawn as a playable character wasn’t crazy enough, Bandai Namco put him front and center on the boxart. Just think about this for a minute. Spawn, an independent comic book character made in America, as a character and major selling point of a major Japanese fighting game that’s popular world-wide. This cemented Spawn as being an international success! This also wouldn’t be the last time that Spawn would guest star in a popular fighting game.
Today, even though Spawn isn’t as popular as it was in the 90s, it would be wrong to say that he and Todd McFarlane don't have a strong and devoted fanbase. On April 8th, Mcfarlane launched a Kickstarter for a relaunch of the Spawn toy line. The original goal was $100,000 and within hours, the goal was reached. By the end of the campaign, McFarlane was able to raise $3,447,390 with the help of 23,671 backers. As I teased earlier, Spawn was also featured in another fighting game recently; however, Spawn exchanged the battleaxe that he used in the sword-based fights of Soul Calibur 2 for his iconic cape for the bloody beat-downs of 2019’s Mortal Kombat 11! Before this announcement, McFarlane was extremely vocal about getting Spawn into a Mortal Kombat game. When the time came, WB Games and NetherRealm Studios pulled out all the stops to make Spawn fans happy about his inclusion. In addition to giving Spawn a moveset that was faithful to the comics, they also got the fan-favorite Keith David to lend his voice to the character. David had previously voiced the hellish hero in HBO’s animated adaptation. In addition to both the new toy line and Mortal Kombat appearance, McFarlane has been hard at work behind the scenes to direct a brand new Spawn movie from the premiere horror movie production company, Blumhouse films, starring Jaime Foxx as Spawn. McFarlane also plans on creating a new Spawn animated series that is connected to the new film.
So there you have it, a (sort of) brief history of Todd McFarlane and the Spawn franchise! If you want to learn more about Todd Mcfarlane and Image Comics as a whole, I highly recommend the following documentaries; Todd McFarlane: Like Hell I Won’t from SYFY, Robert Kirkman’s Secret History of Comics Episode 6 Image Comics: Declaration of Independents from AMC, and/or Image Revolution which is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video. I hope you join me next week (or the week after I’m still trying to figure out a solid schedule) where I cover Spawn issue 1! I encourage everyone to follow me along on this journey. If you want to read Spawn yourself I will share the link to issue 1 on ComiXology where you can buy each issue digitally for about a dollar. (Also, the first issue is free, so you literally have nothing to lose by checking it out.) Oh, and one more thing. If you couldn’t tell already from the description and the fact that he’s in Mortal Kombat, Spawn is for mature readers only. From what I’ve read, the book is very violent, so if you get squeamish at the sight of blood, I’d skip this title.
And that concludes the introduction of my “RetroSPAWNtive”! I hope you enjoyed and that I interested you into checking out Spawn! If you want to talk to me more about Spawn, feel free to comment down below or hit me up on Twitter (@garf_mossy) or Instagram (@finstergarf).
Comments