Spawn: Blood Feud #1

[history79]

10 pages of 30

Comments

[tcampbell1000]

It's tempting to wonder what Alan would have made out of Spawn if he'd simply taken it over for a while instead of doing a couple miniseries and fill-in issues. He's a lot more chameleonic here than he normally is: while the writing is more sophisticated than Todd McFarlane on his best day, it still feels McFarlane-ish. In some ways, that's disappointing (the mystery posed here, like the mystery near the start of Spawn/WildC.A.T.s, will not be very difficult to figure out by issue 2).

But it speaks to a sort of gentlemanly restraint. Moore mostly avoids breaking the toys that he's only borrowing. Compared to the "slash and burn" revisionism he applied to WildC.A.T.s, Supreme, Swamp Thing and Miracleman, this approach is quite a departure.

Thing is, he might have felt there was nothing broken to fix. Give McFarlane credit where it's due: Spawn really did have some jaw-dropping concepts right out of the gate. Yeah, sure, the title character looked like Spider-Batman and his suit's abilities were "What if Venom were a goth," but in basic outline form, the series reads like something brilliant. The notions of Heaven and Hell were fascinating, the moral ambiguities were compelling, the racial casting was twenty years ahead of its time, the power odometer was unique and dramatically effective, and no series before or since has been more interested in rendering vagrants as people.

So well put together were its basic concepts, and the art of McFarlane and Capullo, that even for a while after the "edgy 90s" fad started to fade, Spawn stuck. Despite really terrible dialogue and the increasing awareness that Todd had no idea how to take his story forward past a certain point, it could command attention.

And then it couldn't. These days, it's better remembered as "that weird thing we were all into for a few years in the 90s," like Pogs. But I think it could've been different. If McFarlane had found it in him to hand the writing reins completely to Moore or Gaiman or Morrison, all of whom he flirted with for a while, the results could've been amazeballs.

(Not Dave Sim, though.)

[deh_tommy]

I thought the HBO anime was really good for the most part.