Review of Spawn: Creation
Title: Spawn: Creation
Writer/Artist: Todd McFarlane
Publisher: Titan Books
Price: £16.99
This is, as it says on the cover, ‘a deluxe new edition’ of the first five issues of Spawn, and I really didn’t like it.
Spawn was one of the earliest titles from the then newly formed Image Comics, back in 1992. Image had been set up by a number of high-profile comics creators who were unhappy about their treatment in the industry as it was at the time, particularly at Marvel Comics. Todd McFarlane was arguably the most famous of the lot, having made his name from his highly successful Spiderman title, the first issue of which sold around five million, apparently. It’s from things like this that my distaste for McFarlane grew. These five million comics weren’t bought by people who wanted to read them, but as multiple copies by children duped into believing that they were making some sort of canny investment, based on the comics industry whipping them into a frenzy of speculation. How even the gullible could be made to believe that anything that was produced in that quantity could ever become rare enough to be worth more than the cover price is another day’s work. This kind of philosophy, that people should have ‘collectables’ marketed to them, rather that good comics written and drawn for them to read, seems to have been close to the heart of all at Image, and to McFarlane in particular. It sickens me that people will still buy six or ten or more different versions of the same comic, because they have different covers. There is no other branch of the entertainment industry in which this occurs. Imagine if Corgi launched the new Terry Pratchett paperback in six different covers, and really expected his fans to buy them all. Or if you were expected to pay six times the price to see the new Spielberg movie, just because it has several different posters (not the Spielberg is entirely without sin in this, mind you…) What is worse is that these ‘collectors’ often don’t read any of the copies they have, but simply buy the latest ‘hot’ comic, as dictated by the trade journals. If the comics industry is on shaky ground now, it is due to usurious leeches like these, both customers and publishers. But I digress…
As I said, I didn’t like this collection. Leaving aside all my rantings above, it’s still a poor piece of work. The story involves the eponymous Spawn, who we find out is CIA operative and assassin Al Simmons, who died three years before our story starts. He has made a deal with the devil, which involves his returning from the dead because he still loves his wife. There is an extraordinarily long piece of infodumping in part four, where the devil tells Simmons and The Violator all about it. Actually, an extraordinary amount of the storytelling is done in this way, with the various characters soliloquising away to their hearts content, while a trio of TV talking heads fill in the gaps. McFarlane is obviously so poor a storyteller that he cannot rely on the narrative to unfold naturally, and employs this stilted and extremely annoying technique instead. To make following the thread just that little bit more difficult, the letterer seems to have been bored too, as every so often words appear in different colour inks, or five times the size of the surrounding text, or both. Presumably this is meant to lend dramatic tension to the proceedings. It doesn’t.
The art, for which McFarlane is also responsible, does nothing for me, either. At twenty-two pages per comic, far too many of the pages are full page spreads, mostly of Spawn striking various moody and heroic poses. Although McFarlane is presumably a competent artist, his insistence on overloading the page with detail does him no favours. And then there’s the colouring. Bear in mind that in 1992 the comics industry was only just starting to experiment with computerised colouring systems, and probably the very first of these was that of Olyoptics, under the guidance of Steve Oliff. Oliff’s normally sensitive and tasteful sense of colouring seems to have been thrown out the window for this one, however, as he seems determined to fill each page with as much garish colour as will fit. In most cases the colour comes right up to the edge of the page (or ’bleeds,’ as they say in the business), and is composed largely of red, it seems to me.
So there you have it. I didn’t like the writing, or the art, or the lettering, or the colouring. Do I have anything good to say about it? Well, it’s not unreasonably priced, as these things go. But you’d be far better off spending the money on something well written, well drawn, well lettered and well coloured. The shops are full of imaginative and entertaining graphic novels by people who need the money much more than McFarlane. Go look.
(This review first appeared on The Alien Online in April 2002.)
Writer/Artist: Todd McFarlane
Publisher: Titan Books
Price: £16.99
This is, as it says on the cover, ‘a deluxe new edition’ of the first five issues of Spawn, and I really didn’t like it.
Spawn was one of the earliest titles from the then newly formed Image Comics, back in 1992. Image had been set up by a number of high-profile comics creators who were unhappy about their treatment in the industry as it was at the time, particularly at Marvel Comics. Todd McFarlane was arguably the most famous of the lot, having made his name from his highly successful Spiderman title, the first issue of which sold around five million, apparently. It’s from things like this that my distaste for McFarlane grew. These five million comics weren’t bought by people who wanted to read them, but as multiple copies by children duped into believing that they were making some sort of canny investment, based on the comics industry whipping them into a frenzy of speculation. How even the gullible could be made to believe that anything that was produced in that quantity could ever become rare enough to be worth more than the cover price is another day’s work. This kind of philosophy, that people should have ‘collectables’ marketed to them, rather that good comics written and drawn for them to read, seems to have been close to the heart of all at Image, and to McFarlane in particular. It sickens me that people will still buy six or ten or more different versions of the same comic, because they have different covers. There is no other branch of the entertainment industry in which this occurs. Imagine if Corgi launched the new Terry Pratchett paperback in six different covers, and really expected his fans to buy them all. Or if you were expected to pay six times the price to see the new Spielberg movie, just because it has several different posters (not the Spielberg is entirely without sin in this, mind you…) What is worse is that these ‘collectors’ often don’t read any of the copies they have, but simply buy the latest ‘hot’ comic, as dictated by the trade journals. If the comics industry is on shaky ground now, it is due to usurious leeches like these, both customers and publishers. But I digress…
As I said, I didn’t like this collection. Leaving aside all my rantings above, it’s still a poor piece of work. The story involves the eponymous Spawn, who we find out is CIA operative and assassin Al Simmons, who died three years before our story starts. He has made a deal with the devil, which involves his returning from the dead because he still loves his wife. There is an extraordinarily long piece of infodumping in part four, where the devil tells Simmons and The Violator all about it. Actually, an extraordinary amount of the storytelling is done in this way, with the various characters soliloquising away to their hearts content, while a trio of TV talking heads fill in the gaps. McFarlane is obviously so poor a storyteller that he cannot rely on the narrative to unfold naturally, and employs this stilted and extremely annoying technique instead. To make following the thread just that little bit more difficult, the letterer seems to have been bored too, as every so often words appear in different colour inks, or five times the size of the surrounding text, or both. Presumably this is meant to lend dramatic tension to the proceedings. It doesn’t.
The art, for which McFarlane is also responsible, does nothing for me, either. At twenty-two pages per comic, far too many of the pages are full page spreads, mostly of Spawn striking various moody and heroic poses. Although McFarlane is presumably a competent artist, his insistence on overloading the page with detail does him no favours. And then there’s the colouring. Bear in mind that in 1992 the comics industry was only just starting to experiment with computerised colouring systems, and probably the very first of these was that of Olyoptics, under the guidance of Steve Oliff. Oliff’s normally sensitive and tasteful sense of colouring seems to have been thrown out the window for this one, however, as he seems determined to fill each page with as much garish colour as will fit. In most cases the colour comes right up to the edge of the page (or ’bleeds,’ as they say in the business), and is composed largely of red, it seems to me.
So there you have it. I didn’t like the writing, or the art, or the lettering, or the colouring. Do I have anything good to say about it? Well, it’s not unreasonably priced, as these things go. But you’d be far better off spending the money on something well written, well drawn, well lettered and well coloured. The shops are full of imaginative and entertaining graphic novels by people who need the money much more than McFarlane. Go look.
(This review first appeared on The Alien Online in April 2002.)