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...!