This is, or so it claims on the cover, "a deluxe new edition" of the first five issues of Spawn, but I for one was not impressed.

Back in 1992, Spawn was one of the earliest titles from the then newly-formed Image Comics. 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 by Marvel. 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 copies, although the bulk of 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.

This kind of philosophy, that people should have "collectables" marketed to them, rather than 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. And Spawn has always been his flagship title so it's really no surprise then that the "deluxe edition" has nothing in the way of extra features or content, apart from a two-page introduction by the man himself and a hardback cover. Big deal.

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 really CIA operative and assassin Al Simmons - who died three years before our story starts. He still loves his wife and has made a deal with the devil, which involves his returning from the dead. 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 seems to be be a poor storyteller indeed, if he cannot rely on the narrative to unfold naturally and must employ this stilted and extremely annoying technique instead. And 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 a competent artist, his insistence on overloading the page with excessive 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.

Writer/Artist: Todd McFarlane
Publisher: Titan (UK)
Date: January 2002
Price: £16.99
Format: Hb
ISBN: 1840234202
Review originally on The Alien Online