I also just recently learned that Alan Moore and Todd McFarlane had actually collaborated on a second issue of Spawn.

To his credit, Image Comics co-founder and Spawn creator Todd McFarlane must have realized quite early on that, despite the fact that he was now writing and drawing his own massively successful creator-owned series, he was primarily a comics artist and not a comics writer. So less than a year into his new title, he hired not one, not two, not three but four guest writers, each producing an issue apiece, and each of those running back-to-back-to-back-to-back. 

And they weren't just any writers, either. Rather they were probably three of the bigger names in mainstream superhero comics of the time* (two of these, I think, being among the best writers of such comics, even though we've since rightly canceled one of them, and thus "lost" his once admirable body of work), and the fourth one of them being one of the better-known cartoonists responsible for an ambitious and long-lived creator-owned series, of the sort McFarlane and his fellow founders probably looked to as a form of inspiration.

Alan Moore. Neil Gaiman. Frank Miller. Dave Sim. They teamed with McFarlane for issues #8-11 of the series, providing the phenomenally popular artist-turned-writer/artist with some important building blocks for his comic, characters and elements that would continue to inform what became the Spawn franchise for years...decades, even**. (I just checked, and the latest issue of Spawn listed on comics.org is Spawn #368, so the main title has since surpassed Sim's 300-issue run of Cerebus, although McFarlane wouldn't personally write and/or draw all of those issues. Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon, by the way, seems to be closing in on Cerebus, the latest issue of that series listed on comics.org being this past July's #277.)

Looking at the table of contents of Spawn Compendium 1, the massive 1,000+ page tome collecting the first 50 issues of McFarlane's series, I noticed other guest-writers from these first years of the series. There was a three-issue arc by Grant Morrison, two issues by letterer Tom Orzechowski and an Andrew Grossberg, a second issue by Alan Moore and an issue by a writer named Julia Simmons. 

That second issue by Moore was 1995's Spawn #37, another done-in-one collaboration with McFarlane handling the art. I must have so thoroughly stopped paying attention to Spawn by that point that I don't remember even hearing about Moore returning for an issue that year and thus didn't realize it even existed until I perused the Compendium (Of course, I had just started college that fall, so what might have been going on with Image Comics then wasn't exactly high on my list of priorities at the time).

Since I had checked out the collection anyway, I figured I might as well read that issue as well. And, of course, write about it here.

First, I suppose I should note that it is not as good as Moore's Spawn #8, which I just reread after reading this. That first issue was something of a side story, starring Billy Kincaid, the ice cream man/child killer that Spawn killed in Spawn #5 (the last issue of the series I had bought before the guest-writers, the one that finally made teenage me realize, "Say, this isn't actually a very good comic, is it?").

Kincaid awakens in a bizarre Hell of sorts, which, like Dante's, is comprised of circles. Along with a band of others in his circumstances, he journeys through the setting, dreaming every time he sleeps of Spawn killing him, and finally meeting the demon "The Vindicator, one o' the five famous Phlebiac Brothers," who gives him a more guided tour, recruits him into Hell's army and introduces him to Spawn's devil figure.

It's basically 22 pages of wildly imaginative world-building, it's only one weakness—depending on how one feels about McFarlane's art or Orzechowski's letters, I guess—being the ending, in which the childish word "Ca-ca" is used instead of "Shit" at a pretty pivotal moment, a moment that basically provides the moral or punchline to Moore's interpretation of Spawn's mythology. (I don't see a Comics Code Authority stamp on those early covers of Spawn, so I wonder if saying "Ca-Ca" instead of "Shit" was McFarlane or Moore self-censoring, perhaps aware of how many younger readers must have been fans of Spawn at the time...? Although, those first few issues sure are violent, so I don't know...)

Spawn himself doesn't really appear in Moore's first issue, save for in Kincaid's nightmares of his dealing with the character at the end of his natural life. ("i dream about it all night long," he says, in the all lower-case signature lettering Orzechowski gives him, "the sound of the chains. the cloak flapping. spikes. skulls.")

In contrast, Spawn is on-panel throughout much of Moore's second issue, although the story Moore is telling actually has its own protagonist, The Freak, and Spawn is more of a guest-star in his own comic. Notably, I think Moore could have told this particular story with just about any other superhero or crime-fighting character.

Moore and McFarlane introduce The Freak gradually over four panels on the first page: A longshot of him, his body in silhouette, at the entrance of a rubble-filled alley; a close-up of his hands gesturing; a close-up of his bare feet; a close-up of his gritted-teeth grin.

The whole time he is babbling, Orzechowski giving him his own distinct dialogue bubble shape and lettering as well, some of the capital letters that form his words being smaller than the others, and thus not quite lining up right.

His dialogue mostly reads like free verse poetry, and, while it's not great poetry, it's remarkable just how much work Moore must have put into this otherwise somewhat clever but fairly straightforward (and, honestly, rather British) plot.

The Freak will talk incessantly throughout the book, sometimes seeming to narrate to the reader, sometimes seeming to be talking directly to Spawn or another character, but always in quite colorful (and, honestly, mostly purple) imagery.

A turn of the page gives us our first clear view of the character. He's very thin with knotty, sinewy muscles, and he's dressed only in a pair of raggedy jeans and a medallion. He sports a wild mane of long, grayish white hair and overgrown, pointy fingernails, and his face is clearly that of a comic book madman, with bulging eyes, arched and angry eyebrows and a Joker-like toothy grin (On the next page, in which we get a close-up of his face, he's also drooling).

The Freak is set upon by quartet of bad guys, whom McFarlane has drawn to resemble characters one might expect in some sort of post-apocalyptic, Mad Max-inspired movie. They too are shirtless, there are Chapel-like skulls painted on their faces, and their hair is...weird. 

Rather than saying what I really think of these particular designs, I'll just share a picture of them.

I imagine Moore's story called for generic street criminals, but that's not what McFarlane drew (Additionally, and more oddly still, they are armed with various blades, at least one of which looks like some kinda fantasy weapon, with blades extending from both sides of the hilt). Maybe not, though. Moore's first script for Swamp Thing was famously, notoriously detailed, spelling out every single detail he envisioned; I'm not sure if that remained the case fo his later work with unlikely collaborators like the Image guys.

Anyway, because these blade-wielding men are so outlandish looking, it's weird when one of them says, "Looks like Hallowe'en came early," in reference to The Freak, who is obviously more under-dressed than dressed-up, and later, when Spawn says of them "You and your fellow rodents prey upon the homeless and the weak and then go home to mom!" as if they are play-acting at being bad asses.

Anyway, they set upon The Freak, and a huddled figure wrapped in red and wearing a wide-brimmed hat that we saw on the first pages suddenly rises to reveal himself as Spawn. 

The bad guys have literally stepped on Spawn to get to get at The Freak, and so the hell-powered superhero and apparent defender of New York City's homeless sends the would-be killers running, lifting two of them by the neck and throwing them at the other two, and levelling a threat: "Believe me, you know nothing about Hell... ...But I can TEACH you."

The Freak and Spawn shake hands, the wordier of the two saying, "It seems that we are fellow knights; brothers within this putrid, decadent domain of fly-blown shadows...I, sir, am a freak of nature, and proud to be called one."

Spawn asks him why he's in an alley "dressed up like that," which, again, suggests that maybe McFarlane should have The Freak in a costume of some kind, rather than just being mostly naked, like a castaway on a cartoon desert island. And when Spawn then asks, "So what's your story?" The Freak replies "My story? What, you mean my origin?"

There's a double-page splash—the second such splash in the issue's first nine pages—where he explains how his loved ones were killed, at the behest of the villainous "Doctor Delirium", who further experimented on The Freak's mind, turning him into what he is today.

Spawn agrees to help him, and eventually the two infiltrate Doctor Delirium's lab, outfitted with all kinds of weird, sci-fi equipment, and they are then confronted by the doctor's men, one of whom says, "Looks like a couple of the doctor's special projects decided to go walkabout."

The Freak and Spawn fight their way through them, and Spawn jumps through the door of the doctor's office. The Freak confronts the doctor ultimately throwing him out a window to his death while Spawn holds off the doctor's men/the orderlies, gripping them with the living folds of his cape. 

As becomes increasingly clear, The Freak is insane...I mean, he's obviously insane, and talks about his own insanity all the time, but not just "mad" in a comic book kinda way, but actually delusional. The doctor is just a regular doctor, not a supervillain—and, on the penultimate page, on which The Freak's very much still-alive ex-wife talks to someone in an office about his attack on the institution, we learn that it's Dr. DeLorean, not Doctor Delirium. 

After The Freak kills his old doctor, he and Spawn fight their way out through a crowd of policemen—McFarlane's art showing us that The Freak murders at least two or three of them with the gun he took from the doctor, while Spawn brushes them aside with his animated chains; it seems an important detail, as by this point The Freak is gunning down innocent men, and Spawn is helping him do so. It's a purely visual detail, though, and nothing Spawn remarks upon later, so I can't help but wonder if there is here another disconnect between the two creators. 

Debriefing in the sewer after their shared adventure, Spawn tells The Freak, "I'm not your conscience. You did what you had to."

The Freak says he has his next target already picked out, and Spawn walks off with the words, "Well, good luck. Hope you succeed." 

So essentially The Freak is a crazy person who escaped from an institution, and then returned to murder his former doctor, having spun a rather superheroic-like fantasy about his own past and his time in that institution...a fantasy that could have been helped along had McFarlane drawn him with a costume of some kind (That also might have helped explain how and why Spawn got swept up in The Freak's delusions in the first place, as if Spawn had more directly bought into him as a hero figure).

The story makes Spawn look a bit foolish—although, this is Alan Moore and the year is 1995, so what superhero couldn't stand being made to look at least a bit foolish? On the last page, before their farewell, Spawn does finally question The Freak about what just happened, and while it's clear that The Freak is an armed maniac with plans to kill again, Spawn lets him walk. Perhaps Spawn isn't ultimately as foolish as he is morally ambivalent then...?

There are some hiccups in the storytelling though, like all that bizarre equipment Spawn sees when they introduce the institution, and the orderlies referring to the doctor's "special projects", which suggests that maybe the doctor was up to something hinky, and maybe it wasn't all in The Freak's head...?

Anyway, while strong in several aspects, one certainly expects more from Moore, and he and McFarlane don't seem to be on the same page in the telling of this particular story. 

Unlike Moore's first issue, then, I don't think this one is quite as well worth tracking down at this point, some 30 years later. 

The Freak would return in future issues of Spawn, comics.org saying he makes some 13 more appearances in various Spawn books, the latest of which seems to be a 2010 issue of Spawn written by McFarlane. 

That's about twice as many future appearances as The Vindicator made. So, despite the weakness of the story, McFarlane seems to have gotten a decent return on his investment, and I'm sure Moore got a decent enough paycheck for his writing duties.

*************************

And despite having another 40 issues or so of Spawn comics I have never read sitting there in front of me in the Compendium, that's just about as far as I got into the world of '90s Spawn. 

I did see that the very next issue, written by another of those guest writers, Julia Simmons, apparently featured the first appearance of a cybernetically-enhanced gorilla named "Cy-Gor", and so I read that. 

It's not great, and the gorilla only makes a one-panel appearance after much build up, so I kept reading, telling myself I would do so at least until Spawn fights the gorilla, but when I hit the first page of issue #41, half of which is devoted to seven paragraphs of text which is probably some 500-800 words worth of prose, I decided to give up on Spawn again. 

I'm not so interested in cybernetic gorillas that I'll read an essay in a Spawn comic to get to it. (By that point, the character seems to have built himself a throne, started hanging out with a character that looked like McFarlane's version of R. Crumb's Mr. Natural, and there was also a character who wore a weird hat/mask like sorta like the one worn by Dumb Donald from Fat Albert and The Cosby Kids...)

And as for Cy-Gor? Well, he seems to have gotten his own six-issue miniseries in 1999, written by none other than Rick Veitch...!

*Although Gaiman's 1989-1996 Sandman rather quickly deviated from its initial premise as a sort of horror book set in the DC Universe into something far more literate and interested in its own original characters and mythology, I think its origins as such make it a superhero comic, albeit a very odd one. That and, of course, the fact that it began as a reimagining of Jack Kirby's 1974 Sandman series, itself a reimagining of the original Golden Age comics character created by Garnder Fox and Bert Christman (A character that Kirby had also worked on as a much younger man). I forget who first made this argument—my best guess is Mike Sangiacomo, whose writing about comics I would have read in the Cleveland Plain Dealer in the mid-nineties—but a good part of the way Gaimain's Sandman might have took off in the direct comics market was the way in which it adhered to standard superhero comics conventions despite rapidly becoming very much its own thing. Think the monthly-shipping floppies, the shared universe setting, the DCU continuity and guest-stars, the specials and miniseries...there was even a gimmick cover (a glow-in-the-dark one on 1991's Sandman Special) and an imprint-wide crossover event series running through the annuals, 1993's "The Children's Crusade". 

**Although given the later legal fight between McFarlane and Gaiman over the character Angela, I wonder if the future stories that the various Spawn comics got out of her conception were ultimately worthwhile for McFarlane. She, of course, eventually—and rather oddly—ended up a Marvel character, being folded into their Thor mythology, although given the toxic nature of Gaiman's reputation now, I highly doubt we'll ever see Angela again anywhere.

If I had read Haikyu!! as a teenager, could it have improved my mental health?

More than once while reading Haruichi Furudate's Haikyu!! I have wondered if it might have influenced or inspired me when it came to my own high school athletics, had it been around when I was in high school. (Which it most certainly wasn't; I graduated in 1995, and the manga didn't start until 2012.)

Now, my sports were cross country and track, the 400-meter dash being my best event of the latter (Being a very small school, we all ran multiple races). Both sports are very different from volleyball, as while they are technically team sports and they can technically involve elements of strategy, for the most part, what the athlete does and how well they do it is a more individual thing. That is, in cross country and some of the track events, you basically just have to run really fast. There aren't really plays in which you need to work closely together with your teammates to score points or anything like that. 

Haikyu!! is full of characters who embody the virtues of living, breathing, eating and sleeping volleyball; in fact, one of the endearing qualities of protagonist Shoyo Hinata and his rival-turned-teammate Tobio Kageyama that is often played for laughs is that their brains are so full of volleyball there's seemingly little room in them for anything else.

And of the dozens of volleyball players we meet over the course of the series, many of them talk and think about practicing more and training harder in order to get better (Hinata and Kageyama, for example, are yelled at by their team captain to leave the gym and go home at one point, for example). While potentially inspiring, I don't think that would have made me any better of a runner, as, with long distance running, there's really only so much you can do—that is, run—and so much of it you can do, the amount of hours in the day and your body's own physical limits preventing you from doing any more. 

And certainly some of the stuff the characters do, like Hinata starting to carry a volleyball around with him constantly so that he is always touching one, in order to become as intimately familiar with the ball as a physical object as possible, wouldn't apply to running sports. 

But the stuff about mental toughness, the joy of the sport, the drive to compete, the passion to excel, a positive mental attitude, team spirit, camaraderie with your teammates? I think all of that stuff, peppered throughout the book and expressed by various characters in various ways at different points? Well, I think all of that would apply to cross country or track...or any sport...or life in general.  

Anyway, repeatedly while making my way through Haikyu!!, I wondered what high school sports might have been like had I read the series when I was 12 or 13 or 14.

And then I hit the panel above, and wondered if having read this manga as a pre-teen might have also helped cure my anxiety disorder? 

(Don't laugh; kids glom onto weird things...I still remember a scene from the original 1987 DuckTales cartoon where the heroes are menaced by a magical cloud that generates images of their worst fears, and the nephews ultimately realize the only way to defeat their fears is to directly confront them, a scene that would often come to mind a teenager and twenty-something; I mean, that's basically what I've read in multiple self-help books about dealing with anxiety as an adult, including the one that finally helped me make a break-through).

The character pictured is Akaashi Keiji, the setter for Fukurodani Academy and the friend and partner of the team's explosively outgoing, voluble ace Kataro Bokuto. 

His thoughts in the narration box are these:

Task focus.

The end result of a game. The referees' judgements. The actions of the opponent.

These are things outside of any one player's control.

What a player can control...

...is their own thoughts and actions.

You can't tell in the image I posted because I edited it so you couldn't see my fingers holding the book open to that page, but Furdate has an attribution for this narration after an asterisk along the bottom of the pane. It reads "Reference: Volleyball Mental Kyoka Method by Eiji Watanabe (Iikyo No Nihonsha)". Given that, perhaps Keiji is quoting the book verbatim...?

At any rate, when I got to that panel it occurred to me immediately that the words can apply to much more than just volleyball, or sports in general. \

There is a great deal in life you can't control and, in fact, there are only a few things you can, including your own thoughts and actions. Focus then, not on what you can't, but what you can; focus on your own thoughts. 

I've heard variations of that my whole life, of course, but not necessarily in comics. What that panel speaks of isn't just volleyball philosophy, but mindfulness in general. It sounds to me, an adult who has read so many self-help books and attended so many hours of therapy, as cognitive behavior therapy boiled down into a couple of sentences.

Could reading Haikyu!! as a kid made me a better, more competitive runner? Maybe. 

Could doing so have made me a healthier, happier human being as an adolescent and adult? It sure sounds like it!

Honestly the only reason EDILW didn't become a Haikyu!! fan blog over the last few months is that my scanner is broken.

So instead of posting about Haikyu!! on here constantly, I satisfied my compulsion to talk about it with someone by direct-messaging the friend who had recommended it in the first place every time there was a particularly dramatic development in the story (which was, in general, at least once per volume). In fact, I imagine I did so often enough that she has probably since come to regret recommending it to me in the first place.

Anyway, the above two panels (remember to read the dialogue in the first one right to left) are from relatively late-ish in the 45-volume series (Volume 36, I think; maybe 37). It's one of the maybe two instances in the series in which manga-ka Haruichi Furudate sounds like he is commenting on the book itself, in a somewhat meta way.

The character is Kenma Kozume, the setter for the Nekoma High's volleyball team. Throughout the series, he's presented as a rather aloof character, one who, at least in his own articulation of his feelings, is somewhat dispassionate about volleyball, a game he started playing mainly because his best friend dragged him into it (This, despite the fact that he is quite excellent at it).

Kenma is an avid gamer, though, and that seems to have influenced his volleyball abilities, as he's an extremely intellectual player who thinks in gaming metaphors. The moment above is actually a big one for the character, as he has an epiphany of sorts, in which he realizes how much he actually loves playing volleyball, and actually says so out loud.

The way he talks about it though, in that first panel, is pretty representative of the entire comic. It's an extremely action-packed, dramatic, epic-length saga of a comics story and yes, it's just about high school volleyball. 

There Kenma is saying exactly what I've felt since about volume two or so; it's just a comic about volleyball, nothing bigger or deeper or grander or more imaginative, but damn is it fun.

Bookshelf #1

When I first started acquiring trade paperback and graphic novels in the mid-nineties, I had organized them by publisher and character (at the time, they were mostly DC books, plus a couple from Mirage Studios and maybe one or two from Dak Horse). As the years went on the organization system changed a bit, and today, which books are on which shelf is determined not just by publisher or character, but also the size of the book, and which city I was living in when I got them (Ashtabula, Columbus or Mentor).

This shelf here, which is actually the top of a three-shelf bookshelf I inherited from a friend when she got a newer, better shelf, is the first one you would encounter if you walked into my current home in Ashtabula. The comics here, those books standing vertically to the left, are all ones I acquired while living in Mentor, and they are where they are mostly because of their size. 

The big one on the far left, Gregory Benton's B+F (Adhouse, 2014) was simply too big to fit on a normally sized bookshelf, as are the handful of books next to it. You can't tell from this image, but some of the books here, like Michael DeForge's Ant Colony (Drawn and Quarterly, 2014) and Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero (Drawn and Quarterly, 2017), Karl Stevens' Failure (Alternative Comics, 2013) and Dean Trippe's Something Terrible (Iron Circus Comics, 2017), are so wide that they wouldn't fit in a normally sized bookshelf either, as the shelf wouldn't be deep enough.

The books in a pile on the far right, laying horizontally, are not comics, but are all prose. They comprise my cryptozoology library, which I had to find room for somewhere, as, like, 99% of my bookshelves are full of comics now.

No one ever told me that Grant Morrison wrote Spawn.

It wasn't until I was writing about the first two Batman/Spawn crossovers (here and here) for the blog that I discovered Grant Morrison had written a Spawn arc in 1993 and 1994. I was looking at what was going on in the title around the time of the crossovers, and was quite surprised to see Morrison's name in the credits, as the writer has long since become one of my favorite super-comics writers (Thanks mostly to his JLA run that started a few years later, at which point I started actively hunting down their past work while looking forward to their new work.)

I had, at that point, dropped Spawn and, after returning for the guest-writer stunt run of issues #8-11, I stopped paying attention to the series altogether. I suppose if I did know that Morrison was going to take over the book for three issues back then, it wouldn't have really moved me to spend any of the little money I had to spend on comics back then on the arc. 

At that point, I only knew Morrison as a pretty great Batman writer with a pair of graphic novels to his name, Arkham Asylum and Batman: Gothic being the only work of theirs that I had read at that point (I think; I wouldn't read his Animal Man or Doom Patrol until much later). His presence wouldn't have excited me like having the writers of Watchmen, Sandman, Cerebus and The Dark Knight Returns guest-write an issue. 

Curious if I could find the Morrison-written issues now, 31 years later, I was pleasantly surprised to find my library system had something called Spawn Compendium 1, a 1000+-page doorstop published in 2021 that collected the first 50 issues of the series (Which, in addition to an arc by Morrison, also included a second issue guest-written by Alan Moore, 1995's #37...which I also intend to write about in the near future. Sorry readers with no interest in Spawn!*).

(Oh, and if you're wondering, I did briefly consider reading and maybe reviewing my way through the whole compendium, but a flip-through convinced me I wouldn't enjoy doing so at this point. While Todd McFarlane's art has some virtues I can still appreciate, I don't really enjoy it that much, and I find many of his designs off-putting. I'm also not a fan of the coloring or the lettering, which feel very '90s to me in a bad way. Still, I think this is a pretty nice package for anyone interested in the early years of the character and comic, and I appreciated the opportunity to re-read the Dave Sim-written issue without messing with my longboxes, for example, or finding the Morrison issues and later Moore issue. If I have any complaint about the collection, it's that it doesn't reproduce the covers between issues, making navigating it a little hard and, besides, some of those covers are really great...although this one remains my favorite.)

So anyway, Grant Morrison wrote three issues of Spawn in the early '90s! How did the visionary superhero comic book writer handle one of the dark characters most emblematic of the decade? Let's find out, shall we?

Morrison wrote issues #16-18, collaborating not with McFarlane, but with pencil artist Greg Capullo, who was here making his debut on the character, inked by Dan Panosian, Art Thibert and Mark Pennington. McFarlane, who I imagine was busy drawing Spawn/Batman #1, didn't even contribute covers; those are by Capullo too. 

The story arc revolves around two different militaries' interest in Spawn. The first is the U.S. military, which Spawn apparently worked for in some capacity back when he was still Al Simmons, and was still alive (In the handful of Spawn comics I've read, Spawn/Simmons is, kinda like the '90s Wolverine, dealing with a fractured memory, so that his own history with black ops government work is mysterious even to him). 

The second is the army of Heaven, represented by warrior angels, which seems to have been a concept introduced by (now rightly canceled) guest-writer Neil Gaiman in his Spawn #9, which introduced the mostly naked angelic character Angela, over whom he and McFarlane would go on to argue about in court for years (But let's not get into that here).

The former is interested in part due to Simmons' work for them, and in part because they want to weaponize Hell, which they have learned is composed of a substance called "psychoplasm", which can be shaped by the human mind, usually to respond to its worst fears. The latter in interested as part of the eternal war between Heaven and Hell, and Spawn is a kinda sorta warrior for Hell ("Spawn" is, of course, short for "Hellspawn"); that's where he gets his magical super-powers, after all.

The first issue opens with a seven-page sequence in which a pair of soldiers are sent into a place called "Simmonsville". "Private joke," explains Jason Wynn to army officer Major Vale, who he is sort of explaining/selling the place to, in a series of narration boxes that run over the action.

That action? The soldiers enter a creepily empty small town, when out of the ground rise a pair of demons, giant, bent creatures with big bug eyes, cartoonishly wide mouths with long, lower jaws and tongues, thin arms and claw-tipped fingers. Capullo draws them as clear members of the same species as McFarlane's Violator, the first denizen of Hell introduced into the series. 

These are revealed on a two-page splash that requires one to turn the book sideways to see properly.

As Wynn explains, Simmmonsville is apparently composed of the psychoplasm Wynn was given after contacting some entities from Hell, and it is built of memories of places Simmons had lived in before. The two demons proceed to gorily kill the soldiers, one of them dragging the last surviving soldier into a nearby house, slamming the front door behind him, and then we see a fountain of blood shoot out of the chimney. 

"Cut to New York City", a narration box says, and there we see Spawn crouching on a gargoyle which is too weird looking to imagine even on a Gotham City building, as he gathers his voluminous cape dramatically behind him and rain falls. 

The narration box says that "he broods," while other narration boxes stylized so as to suggest they are Spawn's thoughts speak of various questions about his life and death, like who killed him, how it is that he has a body now and who it is that's buried in Al Simmons' grave.

He is interrupted from his brooding by a pair of young men who have cornered a homeless man in an alley. One holds a can of gasoline, the other a lighter, and the latter tells the homeless man, "We're just a couple of concerned citizens tryin' to do something about the homeless problem...We call it the 'Burn a Bum' scheme."

And yes, this is the exact same situation that Frank Miller had Spawn intervene in during Spawn/Batman #1, which would see publication a few months after this. Apparently bad guys attempting to set homeless people on fire was a regular problem Spawn had to address (Here he does so by breaking one guy's hand and sending the other one flying with an uppercut).

Meanwhile, in a mysterious skyscraper in Manhattan, two women in business suits who are apparently angels from Heaven discuss "the Earthbound Hellspawn who defeated Angela recently", and their new orders, received over the phone, "to create our own solider to destroy the creature."

These characters are, by the way, named Gabrielle and Michaela, names that are only mildly more creative for angels-posing-as-women than that of "Angela." (The former appeared in the Gaiman/McFarlane issue, #9, by the way; Angela checks in with her at her office before she begins her hunt for Spawn.)

How does Heaven go about making a soldier? Here they have a satellite, which they have apparently taken control of by possessing the astronauts stationed there (Their bald heads are split open at the top, a starburst of energy pouring out of them and forming a sort of halo, and their eyes similarly emanate light). These now speak in a special stylized font and dialogue balloons, of which there are so many in this book. 

They proceed to abduct Wynn—who has just finished a Kingpin-like workout, fighting a couple of ninjas he hired to train with—a terrifying-looking event that finds him being beamed up through the ceiling, his body seemingly liquefying in the process.

In one splash panel, he is transformed into a "soldier of light," "the elemental fire of Heaven" now burning inside him. As Capullo draws Wynn in this panel, he looks like a typical, Superman-like caped strongman character, albeit with a longer cape, and all golden yellow. In fact, he looks rather exactly like the version of the original Superman that emerges from the sun in the 853rd Century near the end of the Morrison-written DC One Million, minus the chest symbol and spit curl.

That design only lasts for that one panel though, as he gets a hilariously dumb redesign and a new name on the very next page:

Yes, he is now "ANTI-SPAWN!" and he has a goofy costume covered with crosses and spikes and honestly looks something like what have been an early sketch of McFarlane's on his way to coming up with the final Spawn design. 

You can't tell from this particular image, a result of Capullo having the character in a crouched pose, as if ducking under the huge dialogue bubble naming him, but he's wearing a belt buckle that features the Spawn emoji symbol, the one that appeared on the cover of Spawn/Batman alongside the bat-symbol, only with a red strike-through circle around it, like the Ghostbusters symbol...but for Spawn. ("Anti-Spawn" is a cooler name than "Spawnbuster" and feels more appropriately superhero melodramatic. Creating an extremely obvious evil opposite of Spawn also seems both very classic superhero comics and very Morrison-esque.)

This new character doesn't make the cover of the next issue though; that's reserved for a pretty generic Spawn-posing-in-a-sewer cover (Did Spawn readers ever have trouble telling if they've read a particular issue or not, based solely on the covers? I don't know that this was necessarily the start of that trend, but the covers I've been looking at sure seem to be rather early ones where the comic book just features a character posing, rather than any information particular to that issue. I know we've gotten tons of such potrait/post covers in the 21st century, particularly from Marvel, but I feel like it was maybe still an outlier in 1994...?)

This issue opens with the Spawn mythology's devil, "The Malbolgia" (which is how its spelled in issue #17; the next issue box at the end of #16 had promised "Malebolgia", with an "e"; I think the spelling with the "e" is the more standard one). He looks a little like a heavy metal kid's version of the devil, somewhat like the other demons, but with a big pair of horns and a mane of long, stringy, gray hair. 

Interestingly, Morrison's script doesn't call him the or a devil, but "the bad god," which is an interesting way to describe a/the devil, and calls to mind dualistic religious beliefs of earlier in the last millennium (Because the lettering in that narration box is all caps, there's no way to tell if Morrison meant to refer to him as "the bad god" with a lower-case "g", or "the bad God" with an upper-case "g", a rather significant difference, really). 

This bad god, however you spell his name, taunts Spawn for a few pages, having found the title character in a graveyard, where he just dug up his own grave and is shocked to find a skeleton in a suit within it, which he somehow recognizes as his own body, causing some existential confusion. He plucks Spawn up in a giant yellow clawed fist and then deposits him in Simmonsville, "a doorway into my realm, a gate that stands open onto Hell."

Then the angels on the satellite shoot a comet down to Simmonsville, and there, standing in a cloud of foot-obscuring smoke, crackling with energy, is Anti-Spawn, now standing at his full height and giving us a good look at his belt...and his weirdly-muscled thighs, which seem to include muscle groups previously unknown on Earth (Although this is an Image comic circa the mid-nineties, I guess, and those comics were full of such weird muscles). 

He points at Spawn and calls him out, like a professional wrestler filming a promo: "HELLSPAWN! I've come for you!"

He proceeds to shoot a beam from his fist at Spawn, hurling him through a stained-glass window, visible in a nicely-drawn background that seems unusually detailed for Capullo here, given how often the panels don't feature any backgrounds at all.

Spawn then teleports to the Bowery in New York, but Anti-Spawn follows and the fight continues. And keeps continuing into the next and final issue. 

Anti-Spawn is about to finish off Spawn, using the glowing energy blade that has sprouted from his right hand, when he's surprised by a "WHAAANG", the sound of one of the local homeless guys that Spawn hangs out with striking the back of his spiked helmet with a pipe.

The mob of assembled men wielding two-by-fours and broken bottles (one of whom looks uncannily like Harvey Pekar), tell the villain that "This is our turf and we stick together" and "You got a beef with Spawn you got a beef with all of us."

Before Anti-Spawn can make good on his promise to tear them all apart, Spawn recovers and the fight continues, Spawn ultimate destroying his new foe with a series of dumber and dumber one-liners.

"Welcome to the real world, bastard!" Spawn says, blasting his foe on either side of his head at point-blank range with green energy from his hands. Okay, that sounds fine, I guess. But he keeps going.

"Have a nice day," Spawn says, putting his fist through Anti-Spawn's head with a "TSCHH!"

And then, as Anti-Spawn screams in pain, molten light bubbling and leaking from his head wounds, gurling "I'll kill you...", Spawn responds by blasting him with green energy through the torso, and the line, "Tell me about it."

Man, shut up, Spawn. 

In the aftermath, Spawn meets a character who refers back to the events of Gaiman's issue, he then travels to Simmonsville to tear it all down by shooting it with a really big gun like the sort Cable and Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee's Image characters used to tote around and then shooting Major Vale through the eye with a pistol, as Vale seems to have had something to do with Simmons' murder (The gun in Spawn's hands seems to change type and size panel to panel in this weirdly-drawn sequence). 

And then Spawn uses his magic powers to preserve one positive memory out of those that Simmonsville was built from, and decides to store it "somewhere safe," secretly, magically giving it to his ex-wife Wanda, briefly seen in a tiny nightgown staring out her bedroom window at the rain.

She can't see him, but Spawn is lurking outside, perched in the leaf-less branches of a dead tree. 

"The window goes dark," Spawn's melodramatic narration says, and it gets even more melodramatic over the course of the arc's last two panels: 

The world goes dark.

But that's okay. I'm used to it. 

DARKNESS IS MY HOME NOW.

That last line appears over another splash page, which Capullo drew sideways, so one needs to turn the book again to see right-side up; it pictures a mask-less Spawn, the lower half of his face in darkness save for his green, almond-shaped eyes and gritted white teeth, as he seemingly leaps toward the reader, a bolt of lightning in the black sky behind him.

It's completely ridiculous, but also reads as completely sincere; over-the-top, but in a way that is appropriate for the character, the milieu and the series...or at least as I understand them from the dozen or so issues I've read. 

It's obviously not the best Morrison super-comic I've read (although it was interesting to see Morrison's depiction of angels as super-aliens here, a few years before he would introduce the angel Zauriel in a JLA arc that would prove to be one of my favorite superhero comics stories ever), but it may be the best Spawn comic I've ever read, up there with Alan Moore's Spawn #8 (which doesn't actually feature the Spawn character) and Miller's Spawn/Batman (although much of the fun of that story was the degree to which Miller made fun of Spawn and, of course, Batman). 

Though the art leaves something to be desired in several patches—the Capullo of the mid-nineties is obviously not the Capullo we've seen drawing Batman over the course of the last 15 years or so—it honors McFarlane's visual imagination and the characters and world McFarlane had been building over the previous few years. One imagines that Spawn readers of those early years wanted the art to look as much like McFarlane's as possible. 

All in all, if you're a Grant Morrison fan, I think it's well worth tracking down. 

*So I recently noticed a drastic drop in my per-post readership a few weeks ago. This is right around the time I attached new URL everydayislikewednesday.com to the blog, which had been everydayislikewednesday.blogspot.com for the last 19 years. That's also when I wrote the first Spawn-related post. Did I screw something up by messing with the address? Or does my regular readership just have no interest in Spawn at all? I guess we'll see...!

Godzilla Vs. The Marvel Universe viewing guide

The Godzilla vs. The Marvel Universe trade paperback, released September 30, collects the half-dozen Godzilla vs.... series of one-shots Marvel published earlier this year. In addition to pitting the King of the Monsters against a different Marvel hero or hero team, each issue had a different creative team and was set in a different decade of Marvel history...somewhat surprisingly, each also seemed to at least attempt to feature an appropriate version of Godzilla for that decade.

It's not just that the artists seem to draw that decade's particular version of Godzilla (the differences in Godzilla's appearances in each issue, for example, seem to owe as much to which Godzilla suit they are using as reference as to their individual styles) or use era-appropriate enemies. The scripts also sometimes refer to specific human characters and plot points from the movies and, in at least one case, the comic is a direct sequel to a particular movie, referring to that film's plot, its unique depiction of Godzilla and picking up where the film left off (In that particular case, I'm not sure certain aspects of the comic make all that much sense if you haven't seen the Godzilla film it references).

Curiously, some of the comics seem to be Marvel continuity (or, at least, like they could be), some are emphatically not. One story refers to the events of the previous story, for example, while characters who we are told are dead in one book appear alive in a later one. 

Some of the books refer so directly to the events of other Marvel comics, particularly the 1980s-set Spider-Man issue, that the writer and editor include various asterisks and editorial boxes referring to particular issues of Secret Wars and Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man.

None of the comics similarly refer to the movies being referenced though, perhaps assuming all of the readers have seen all of the Godzilla films. 

Which seems somewhat unlikely, really. So I figured maybe I could help out. 

Below then are the various films referenced throughout the Godzilla vs. The Marvel Universe collection. Please note that there will obviously be spoilers for the comics discussed (including some of which are rather delightful surprises) and if you're wondering whether I liked each comic or not, I will of course have a more traditional EDILW review of it in the next installment of A Month of Wednesdays.

Godzilla vs. Fantastic Four by Ryan North, John Romita Jr. and Scott Hanna This1960s-set story opens with a flashback to the events of 1954's original Gojira/Godzilla, Reed Richards' narration saying that he and the Fantastic Four had rushed to Tokyo to help after Godzilla's original attack there, but were too late. (The continuity here doesn't really work though, does it, since the FF didn't debut until 1961, huh...?).

Reed has this to say of the events of the film: 

Thankfully, the brilliant Dr. Daisuke Serizawa and his oxygen destroyer had managed to defeat the deadly beast--at the cost of his own life.

I would have loved to have collaborated with a mind like his...

Serizawa, played by Akihiko Hirata, was one of the main characters in the original film, a mysterious scientist who was part of the Gojira's love triangle who, as Reed mentions, invented the weapon that killed Godzilla: the oxygen destroyer, a weapon so potent that it completely skeletonized the monster.

 (As an aside, because Godzilla was skeletonized at the end of the original film, I always assumed that the Godzilla that appeared in 1955's Godzilla Raids Again and throughout the rest of the Showa cycle* was a second Godzilla. Here Johnny Storm mentions that "it seems that defeat might not have been as permanent as we thought," given that Godzilla is now attacking New York, and, perhaps because I was reading a Marvel comic, it hit me that much later films like 1999's Godzilla 2000: Millennium, 2001's Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack and 2023's Godzilla Minus One would make much of Godzilla's healing factor; could the original Godzilla perhaps have simply re-grew its body around its skeleton between Gojira and Godzilla Raids Again, Wolverine-style...?).

Reed's line kind of elides the events of the film's climax though. Serizawa didn't just die in the process of using the oxygen destroyer against Godzilla, he took his own life. Worried that once his weapon was used, the governments of the world would want to add it to their apocalyptic arsenals, perhaps attempting to force its secrets from him, he agreed to use it against Godzilla only after fist burning his own notes.

Then, he cut the breathing tube providing him with air while he was underwater, drowning himself.

After the FF battle Godzilla, who has appeared in New York City, ultimately KO-ing him with a city's worth of electricity (Godzilla's vulnerability to electricity seemed to vary in the early Showa films, depending on the movie), the city and, indeed, the whole planet, is faced with an even more terrible threat: Galactus' new herald, King Ghidorah!

King Ghidorah was introduced in 1964's Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster. The three-headed, two-tailed, winged golden dragon would go on to become Godzilla's most regular foe, appearing in three more Showa films, and appearing in one Heisei film and two Millennium films, as well as Legendary/Warner Bros.' American "Monsterverse" film, 2019's Godzilla: King of the Monsters. 

Godzilla vs. Hulk by Gerry Duggan, Giuseppe Camuncoli and Daniele Orlandini The biggest outlier of this suite of stories, the Hulk issue is set in the 1970s, but seems to have its own, discrete continuity that deviates sharply from that of the "real" Marvel Universe. 

Here, for example, we're told Fin Fang Foom, Tony Stark and Rick Jones are all dead...that last of whom, it is implied, might have involved some uncharacteristic foul play from Bruce Banner. Also, Doctor Demonicus, a character that Doug Moench and Tom Sutton introduced in the short-lived Marvel Godzilla series of the 1970s, plays a major role, suggesting that the events of that series might be honored in this one-shot.

The plot involves General Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross's kaiju-hunting team of super-scientists laying a trap for Godzilla. 

The bait is Mothra, who the mind-controlled giant spider Kumonga is webbing to the desert floor in Texas. 

"The cries of Mothra will be too much for Godzilla to resist," Demonicus tells Banner. "They have showed some camaraderie in the past."

Mothra was introduced in the 1961 film Mothra, and, with 1964's Mothra vs. Godzilla, she and her lore were subsumed into Toho's growing Godzilla "universe." Though they were enemies in that film, and Godzilla tried to start some shit with her during her brief appearance in 1966's Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, the two monsters were allies in Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster and 1968's Destroy All Monsters (which was actually set in the far-flung future of the 1990s, but never mind that). 

Kumonga debuted in 1967's Son of Godzilla (and later briefly appeared in Destroy All Monsters and the Millennium Era's 1994 finale, Godzilla: Final Wars).

When Godzilla does arrive, Ross and Banner attack the monster, each of them piloting a Mechagodzilla. Mechagodzilla, a robot duplicate of the monster built by aliens, first appeared in 1974's Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, and reappeared the following year in Terror of Mechagodzilla. Later versions of the character (in 1993's Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II, 2002's Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla and 2003's Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S., Mechagodzilla) would be the creation of the Japanese military, intended as a weapon to use against Godzilla, as Ross' versions are here.

Finally, Demonicus reveals his ultimate weapon, created from the genetic material of each and every monster the Thunderbolts had previously defeated: Hedorah. This monster first appeared in 1971's Godzilla vs. Hedorah, one of the franchise's more divisive films (Personally, it's one of my favorites...despite that weird...thing Godzilla does near the climax).

Godzilla vs. Spider-Man by Joe Kelly and Nick Bradshaw Apparently set somewhere around 1985, given that Spider-Man is wearing the black costume he picked up during the course of Secret Wars, this issue is somewhat unique in that it doesn't feature any other monsters from other Toho films. It's also the only one that refers to another, previous one of the one-shots, with Spidey narrating, "The last thing I remember hearing of Godzilla was when it tangled with the Hulk!", a little red spider-symbol standing in for an asterisk, leading to an editorial box pointing readers to Godzilla vs. Hulk. 

Kelly refers to Godzilla as "an eighty-thousand ton surgeon" who "wakens only to excise the earth of the cancers that plague it."

Bradshaw seems to be drawing his version of the Godzilla from 1984's The Return of Godzilla (which came to the U.S. the following year as Godzilla 1985); note the prominent fangs throughout.

I'm not sure to what extent Kelly's portrayal of the monster as a guardian of Earth's natural order fits at that particular point in the monster's history, although certainly Godzilla spent the later films of the Showa cycle fighting alien monsters and would go on to do so off and on in the films of the Heisei era. 

This particular year would be an awkward time for the monster, though.

Godzilla vs. X-Men by Fabian Nicieza and Emilio Laiso This 1990s-set story features Charles Xavier and his X-Men taking an interest in Godzilla's predations, which seem focused on the Japanese Tsugunai Robotics company, which is later revealed to be working with Trask Industries (That is, of course, the company that makes the mutant-hunting giant robots, The Sentinels).  

What's with Godzilla's interest? Well, after the X-Men battle the King of the Monsters in a rather unusual way, we find out, when a three-headed giant robot enters the fray. This, we are told, is Tri-Sentinelmechakaiju, "containing the form and power" of a trio of Godzilla advesaries from the Heisei era: Biollante (from 1989's Godzilla vs. Biollante), Battra (from 1992's Godzilla vs. Mothra) and Fire Rodan (never actually referred to as such in the film, at least not in the English sub-titles, this is a form taken by Rodan in 1993's Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II).

As for the enmity that Tsugunai Robotics has for Godzilla? Well, it is eventually revealed that one of their number is a man named Kaneto, and that his father was part of the newly established Japanese Self-Defense Force in 1955. He died "in the mayhem" that resulted when Godzilla fought "a monster named Anguirus". (These words appear in thought clouds at the top of a panel showing the silhouettes of Anguirus and Godzilla facing off in a burning city; the city and the monster shapes look so film-accurate, I think the image might actually be a manipulated still from the movie, which is, of course, 1955's Godzilla Raids Again). 

Godzilla vs. Avengers by David F. Walker, Georges Jeanty and Karl Story This one is set in the 2000s, as seen by the New Avengers line-up (and the Brian Michael Bendis parodying script, courtesy of Bendis friend and occasional collaborator Walker), but the Godzilla content, perhaps oddly, refers back not to the Millennium era, but that of the Showa era...sort of.

The story is set-up as a particularly talky, quip-filled debrief of the Avengers team's attempt to break up a fight between Fin Fang Foom and Godzilla, the Marvel monster in the shorts wanting to prove that he is King of the Monsters, rather than the licensed guest-star in the Marvel Universe. Also entering the fray? Jet Jaguar, who Iron Man explains is "a robot designed and built by Goro Ibuki to handle situations involving kaiju, just like this!"

Jet Jaguar appeared in the not-very-good 1973 Godzilla vs. Megalon (How not very good? Well, it was one of the two Godzilla films to have an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 built around it). He hasn't appeared on film since but has appeared in some of the IDW comics. Goro Ibuki was one of the film's human characters and was played by Katsuhiko Sasaki.

Though this version of Jet Jaguar looks exactly like that from the film, he is here built by Bonnie Ibuki, the niece of Goro Ibuki, and her friends.

Godzilla vs. Thor by Jason Aaron and Aaron Kuder This final story, which seems to be set in either the 2010's or, perhaps, today, is the one that is most dependent on the familiarity with a particular film: 2001's Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: All-Out Monster Attack, which is one of the better Godzilla films (Up there with the original, Shin Godzilla and Godzilla Minus One). 

Aaron makes multiple references to the film. Narration refers to Godzilla as "a monster fueled by the restless souls of those lost in war," which is specific to GMK, wherein Godzilla's metaphor for World War II is made literal, a mysterious old man telling one of the human characters that Godzilla was attacking Japan because they have forgotten the dead of the war.

Like the Godzilla of the film, this one has cloudy white, pupil-less eyes, giving him a particularly sinister appearance.

A high priestess of the Hand, who has here resurrected Godzilla, watches ecstatically as Thor and Godzilla fight, exclaiming:

Yes...Godzilla is even stronger than before!

Stronger than when it slew Mothra and King Ghidorah, the last of the Guardian Monsters!

This too refers to the plot of GMK, as in that particular film, Godzilla is quite unequivocally the bad guy, and a trio of ancient guardian monsters of Japanese myth rise up to oppose him. These are, as the priestess says, Mothra and King Ghidorah (in his only film appearance as a "good guy" monster), as well as Baragon from the very weird 1965 Frankenstein Conquers the World, also known as Frankenstein vs. Baragon. The poor, goofy-looking monster is neither namechecked by the Hand priestess nor included in the title of GMK...

In the film, Godzilla is ultimately destroyed by a human opponent, when an admiral in the Japanese Self-Defense Forces played by Ryudo Uzaki pilots a submarine into Godzilla's open mouth, fires a powerful missile into a wound in the monster's throat which, when Godzilla attempts to use his atomic breath, ends up blowing him up and incinerating his body.

But since Toho never actually seems to let the viewers think Godzilla is ever really dead, not even in standalone films like GMK, the film ends with an image of Godzilla's disembodied heart on the ocean floor...a heart that then resumes beating before the credits roll.

When this comic opens, the Hand has apparently recovered that heart and the priestess has it bathed in a shower of blood from the world's worst killers, which apparently jump-starts it and resurrects Godzilla off-panel. 

While I think a comics reader can make it through this volume without much familiarity with various Godzilla films okay, and probably even stumble through the Thor issue, these specific references will probably stick out as confusing if one hasn't seen GMK. And you should see it because, as I said, it's one of the better Godzilla movies. 

*If you're not terribly familiar with Godzilla films, I will here note that the 71-year-old, 35-feature film franchise is divided into cycles or eras, some of which are named for the Japanese emperor at the time of their release. The Showa cycle spanned 15 films between 1954's Gojira and 1975's Terror of Mechagodzilla and, a few glitches aside, can basically be viewed as a single, continuing, multi-film saga. It received a reboot in 1984 with The Return of Godzilla, which kicked off the Heisei cycle, which constituted seven films, and has a rather tight film-to-film continuity. It ended with 1995's Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, which killed off the Heisei Godzilla, making room on the world stage for the new, American Godzilla (Which ended up not needing the stage for long, as that Godzilla only starred in a single, 1998 film). The franchise was rebooted again in 1999 with Godzilla Millennium: 2000, the first film of the six-film Millennium cycle, each film of which was meant to be standalone, with a single exception, and ended with 2004's Godzilla: Final Wars. We're currently evolving Reiwa Era, which so far consists only of 2016's Shin Godzilla and 2023's Godzilla Minus One (Unless you count the trio of made-for-Netflix animated films, which I don't). And, of course, the Legendary/Warner Bros "Monsterverse" franchise that kicked off with 2014's Godzilla is still going strong, with Godzilla starring or co-starring in five of its six films, another of which is slated for 2027 release. 

When Batman Met Spawn Pt. 2: On 1994's Spawn/Batman #1

While I have no idea what the sales figures for books from 31 years ago might have looked like, I have to assume that Image Comics' half of the Batman and Spawn crossover event, Spawn/Batman #1, was more popular than DC's, Batman/Spawn: War Devil #1. It was certainly the more exciting of the two, and the one I had preferred when I read them both as a teenager.

A large part of that is, of course, that Spawn/Batman was drawn by Todd McFarlane, and his art was, of course, the main selling point for the comic featuring the character he had created. 

Perhaps an even larger part, though, was that it was written by Frank Miller.

Miller had previously written Spawn in 1993's Spawn #11 (part of a four-issue run in which McFarlane had a series of surprising guest writers, including Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Dave Sim), but the character he is most associated with is Batman. And here Miller would be returning to Batman for the first time since his 1986 Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. These days, after Miller has returned to the world of the Dark Knight Returns repeatedly, and written Batman in a couple of other projects as well, it probably doesn't seem like such a big deal, but I have to imagine it was in 1994.

And the Batman that Miller was writing in Spawn/Batman was, indeed, his DKR version of the character, albeit a younger version, as this story would have been set well before the events of that seminal near-future set series. McFarlane hints at that fact on his cover, an homage to the famous Miller-drawn silhouette of Batman leaping before a bolt of lightning cover from Dark Knight Returns, and there's a note on the 2022 Batman/Spawn: The Classic Collection hardcover's credit page for Spawn/Batman making it explicit.

"Spawn/Batman is a companion piece to DC Comics' Batman: The Dark Knight Returns," it reads. "It does not represent current DC continuity."

I'm not sure of the exact wording that might have run in the original one-shot, but it must have been similar, as I remember knowing at the time that this was meant to be a story of the Dark Knight from DKR and not the "real" Batman (Say, if this is the Batman from Dark Knight Returns, only from an earlier point in his career, does that mean that 1994's Spawn/Batman is technically the first appearance of Frank Miller's All-Star Batman, from the pages of All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder...?)

So, what's the difference between this Batman and the one then-current DC continuity...?

Well, not much, actually. The main thing seems to be that Miller writes Batman here as an extremely stubborn, unrepentant asshole...arrogant to a fault, and unable to admit he's wrong or change course when that fact that he might be becomes apparent. That, and he's more violent. 

On page three, there's a panel showing him stalking away from eight men sprawled on the floor, saying "Punks.. ...you're lucky I went so easy on you...", while the blue narration boxes read "Tonight's foes are left behind him, broken things."

Later, when he catches Spawn setting two men on fire, "a wanton act of murder," Batman drops thirty feet and drives his heel into his kidney ("Shouldn't cause too much damage," the narration reads, "Six months in the hospital and he'll be ready to face the judge.")

Otherwise, there's nothing here that really signals this as an entirely different Batman; it's more a matter of the character's attitude and voice than any specific facts. And, given how often other writers have tried to emulate Miller's Batman writing over the years, this take on Batman doesn't sound too off.

Somewhat remarkably given that War Devil had three writers so used to working within the constraints of Big Two corporate super-comics, Miller, who by that time had already become something of an auteur, does a far better job of presenting a real team-up comic, one which does a pretty decent job of introducing Spawn to new readers...of which I think it is safe to assume the character had gotten quite a few of with this comic, as Batman fans and Frank Miller-on-Batman fans likely picked this book up and were meeting McFarlane's hero for the first time.

When Spawn appears for the first time, a splash on page 12, the narration tells us that "He is a dead man brought to a wretched life--a slave of Hell who seeks redemption." As Batman investigates the unhoused people in New York ("the dregs of humanity"), the narration tells us that "now and then he hears legends of one of their own named "Al"--a bum possessed with magic powers."

That there is more than War Devil told us about Spawn, really. The story reflected that, of course, but didn't make any of it explicit. We also learn that Spawn is super-strong and nearly invulnerable, that his magic comes from Hell, and that while he seems to be able to do almost anything with it—including, in this comic, bringing a dead Batman back to life, teleporting the pair of them and manage some sort of psychic mind meld with Batman—he seems to have a limited supply of it, so that he prefers not to use it unless he has to.

As I said, the fist 10 pages or so belong to Batman. The very first page is a 12-panel grid, the panels hosting terse, tough-guy narration that, at this point, I find hard to tell if Miller is writing in earnest or in parody. The first panel features the light of the moon and the words "A cold night," and the "camera" slowly pans from the full moon to Gotham City; it is the first of three, four-panel sequences pulling from a white space to reveal some information about the scene.

So yes, the page opens with the words, "A cold night. A dark night." And it ends with, "A cold night. A dark knight:"

Get it? (Oh, and that's not a typo; there's a colon in the last narration box of the first page; a turn of the page reveals a splash page of an angry looking, wounded Batman standing amid a bunch of intricate pipework, his logo and name atop the page, apparently connected to that colon.)

After having beat up the previously mentioned foes, Batman discovers crates of weapons, "sold by agents of a fallen dictatorship to Gotham street gangs":

Weapons--Built for a war that never happened.

Guns. Grenades. Rocket launchers--

--And strange, high-tech devices that hint at the smaller horrors that would have followed the nuclear nightmare.

Batman is investigating these ("A pair of battle gloves, humming with the promise of power"), when he's attacked by a robot that looks silly, almost sarcastic in design; a round-ish body topped with triangles of armor, two big three-fingered fists atop spindly arms and a periscope-like protrusion from its underside, all perched atop a trio of spindly, too-small legs. 

Batman defeats it, using the gloves (although the one he dons is actually different looking then the ones McFarlane originally introduces two pages previous), gloves that seem to give him a degree of super-strength (This will, of course, come in handy later, when he finds himself duking it out with the super-powered Spawn). 

In the process, though, he discovers there's actually a still-living, severed human head wired up into the robot innards; the robot is actually a cyborg, then, using an unwitting victim's head to provide it with computing power. 

Examining the recovered (and now deceased) head back at the Batcave, Batman discovers that it belonged to a presumed dead "vagrant" and "acute alcoholic" last seen in Manhattan.  

"What's the brain of a New York bum doing inside of a Soviet cyborg?" he asks aloud. The Batcave sequence also features Alfred, and Miller handles their typical rapport nicely ("I don't get nightmares," Batman tells Alfred, "I give them."  "No need for punchlines, Sir," Alfred replies, "You're among friends.")

So, Batman goes to New York to investigate, while Miller uses TV talking heads and news broadcasts to advance the plot, as he did so extensively in DKR (Spawn readers may recognize them, as McFarlane had drawn them in his own book before and since). Also investigating the rash of missing homeless men is, of course, Spawn. The narration boxes tell us he has some friends missing. He encounters a pair of men dousing sleeping homeless man with gasoline and attempting to set him on fire, but, using his magic, Spawn redirects the fire towards the would-be murderers.

"When you meet Satan-- Say hello for me," Spawn frowns at them, and this is where Batman comes in with his kick to Spawn's kidney, saying "You must be Al" on the splash page in which he makes contact, sending Spawn reeling and his chains jangling around crazily.

The pair fight for four-and-a-half pages, and it is a much less one-sided fight than the one in War Devil. Batman is shocked at how strong Spawn is ("It's like punching a brick wall"), while Spawn, who here seems to know exactly who Batman is and to address him by name, fights back effectively hand-to-hand, foregoing magic, except for using it to make himself strong enough near the end "to beat the crap out of Batman."

Their exchanges are silly. "I 'm not in the mood-- And I don't have the time," Spawn says, catching a batarang in one hand and using a chain to block two more. Batman flying kicks him, saying "Got time for this, punk?"

Eventually the fight devolves into just mostly dark panels, narration and sound effects (SMEK SMEK, KOOGH, WHUK! and so on), Batman deciding he's over-powered and that, if dead, he's no use to anyone. He ultimately retreats. 

But, having realized that Spawn still needs to breathe (which reminded me of Batman's first fight with The Hulk, where he made a similar observation about that super-powered foe), Batman had dosed him with "nerve gas-- --enough to make a mob take a nap." While Spawn kept fighting through it, as soon as Batman slinks away, he relaxes the magic he was using to make himself strong and starts vomiting from the gas.

Soon Spawn encounters one of the cyborgs, and, using a makeshift Bat-signal, the book's villain, a humanitarian named Margaret Love, sics Batman on Spawn, telling the Dark Knight that Spawn has been attacking her operation and plans to attack her fundraiser aboard her boat that the president himself plans to attend. 

Of course, by this point, we have already learned that Margaet Love is really Nadia Vladova, and, using the cover of helping the homeless, she has been disappearing some of them and installing their heads in her cyborg killing machines.

Her ultimate goal? To fire a nuclear missile at New York City from her boat, setting off World War III and using all the weapons and cyborgs she commands to rule the aftermath.

Before our heroes can stop her, there's another six-page fist fight. This time Batman is armed with the power gloves we saw earlier, and the heroes are essentially now evenly matched. They beat the hell out of one another, desperately trash-talking the whole time. At the end of it, they are both sprawled on the ground and panting for air, unconvincingly continuing to threaten one another.

"I'll rip you to pieces," a bleeding Batman says, "Undisciplined slob." He follows that up by gasping "KHAGG".

"Catch my breath," Spawn replies. "Just catch my breath and I'll break you in half." Adding "Kheff".

Then Love/Vladova's cyborgs attack, inflicting a mortal wound on Batman, who was by then on the ropes and pretty much helpless. Spawn uses his magic to destroy the cyborgs, heal Batman and, in the process, spending about two and a half pages inside Batman's head. In the process, in which they come to know one another's origins and gain a new understanding with one another, Spawn shares the truth about Love/Vladova with Batman.

While Batman isn't exactly grateful for the save ("If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a dead punk that won't shut up," he tells Spawn), they finally team up, share a double-page splash (an image that artist Greg Capullo seems to have recreated for his contribution to the two-image gallery at the back of the Batman/Spawn: The Classic Collection), attack Vladova's boat full of brain-washed elites, a high-tech arsenal and a primed-to-launch, nuclear-tipped missile aimed at the city. 

While the villainess dies during the battle—in maybe the messiest bit of storytelling of the whole comic, the precise circumstances of her death aren't clear—she launches the missile, and it's up to Spawn with his magic powers and Batman with his clear mind, deft hands and all-around know-how to stop it.

The two heroes bicker on the penultimate page, and, when Spawn points out how they just saved the whole city, maybe the whole world together and asks, "What do you say we just bury the hatchet?", Batman replies with, "Bury this."

The last page, an otherwise silent splash page, reveals that the "this" was a batarang, and it has indeed been buried...right in the middle of Spawn's face, his sickly green blood covering the black, metal weapon and gushing from the wound.

The readers, and Batman, know that Spawn will, of course, live, but man, what a dick this version of Batman is, huh? 

I can't help but wonder if this image, and the wordplay leading up to it, wasn't something that Miller conceived of very early in the project and then worked backwards from to tell a story that might get to it. 

So that's Miller's story, a sort of simple team-up one, in which the character's are introduced separately, put into circumstances causing them to fight one another...put into circumstances to fight one another again, and then ultimately must unite to take on a common foe that they could only defeat by working together. Miller's only real innovation of the classic formula, which I feel was introduced and perfected by Marvel (but maybe not), is to add a second round of fighting, and, despite the initial misunderstanding, keeping the heroes at one another's throats throughout the proceedings. 

As for McFarlane's art, he had, of course, drawn Batman before, rather famously in "Batman: Year Two"...at least the early parts of that story, which was, of course, positioned as a direct sequel to the Miller-written "Batman: Year One". Therefore, he had a decent amount of experience with both characters...though he was obviously much more experienced with Spawn, the character he created. 

His Batman reminded me quite a bit of Norm Breyfogle's, especially in the way in which he would often draw the character mostly as a partial silhouette, an angry, jagged black shape with sharply pointed ears, the white of his triangle eyes and bared teeth and the yellow of the bat-symbol sometimes being the only details visible (In fact, McFarlane so often draws Batman's head in shadow, it's genuinely unusual to see the lower half of his face, the flesh-colored chin that juts out from beneath his cowl, at all in this book).

In addition to Breyfogle, McFarlane's Batman reminded me a bit of that of Joe Quesada, who drew the Dark Knight in 1992 mini-series Batman: Sword of Azrael and, most memorably to me, the cover of the 1992 Batman Gallery. And, of course, I think there's more than a bit of Miller's own DKR Batman in there, particularly in the short, more broad triangle-shaped ears (in the mid-90's, Batman's ears tended towards the long) and the big bat-symbol.

McFarlane seems to have contributed a distinctly huge cape, one that flares up like titanic bat-wings in perhaps the most dramatic image of Batman McFarlane draws, and pools around the character when he's standing still. This was, remember, back before Kelley Jones had started as the regular artist on Batman, too; at this point, Jones was only drawing covers for Bat-comics (McFarlane had previously, somewhat famously, drawn a huge bat-cape with a life of its own on a 1988 Batman cover).

There seems to be, in at least one panel, a bit of Spider-Man to McFarlane's Batman too, in the way he gathers his bat-rope in his hands, the slack forming a crazy pattern that trails off at great length. 

Beyond the drawings of the two heroes, I found the art serviceable but not particularly remarkable. Like I said, the cyborgs seemed a little too stylized, bordering on the cartoonish, and the handful of civilian characters, including the villain and Alfred, aren't particularly distinct nor notable.

Oh, one thing I noticed about the art was that McFarlane has Spawn's mask seemingly coming and going at random throughout the story, although given what we know about his costume being something of a living creature, I couldn't tell if this was due to the occasional art mistake in the book's continuity, or if it was intentional, as that's how Spawn's mask actually works (In War Devil, he's shown removing it, as if it was a piece of cloth he wore).

Tom Orzechowski, who seems to have been the original and regular Spawn letterer, handles the letters here as well, and thus the character's signature dialogue balloons look much more at home in this comic than they did in War Devil, where they stuck out as somewhat foreign or alien and, as I had said, seemed to suggest that Spawn was talking really, really, inappropriately loud all the time. 

Overall, I think Spawn/Batman still reads as the superior of the two 1994 one-shots pairing the two characters. On a technical level, Klaus Janson's War Devil might be better drawn, but McFarlane's issue is more expressive, more highly stylized and thus a bit more visually interesting.

In terms of writing, it's hard to judge the two against one another. Miller's script is, like McFarlane's art, more stylized and, I think it's safe to say, more over-the-top. It's also a bit more unique, reading so unlike so many other superhero team-ups and crossovers. It's definitely a better Spawn story, if not a very good Batman story...which, of course, might be why DC took some pains to differentiate it as a story of Miller's Dark Knight Returns Batman, and not, you know, the real Batman.

As for Batman and Spawn's 2022 team-up, I'm not rereading that and trying to write about it again. I covered it here, though, if you would like to read what I thought of it when it came out.