Chronic Review: Spawn # 201!

Spawn # 201

Image Comics

Script:       Will Carlton

Pencils:      Szymon Kudranski

21 pages for $2.99

I really have no business reading this book, but I just couldn't help but peek in on the debut of Will Carlton.  The guy was shagging coffee and signing for FedEx packages a few months ago, and now he gets the keys to the franchise?  Sorry, but that's way more compelling than anything that's happened between the covers of a Spawn book in well, ever.  It's like watching a real life "Devil Wears Prada", except Will Carlton is presumably less attractive than Anne Hathaway, and Todd McFarlane is certainly sexier than Meryl Streep.  But I digest.

The good news is that Spawn # 201 represents competent, professional writing.  Issues?  Sure, and I'll nitpick some of them a bit later.  This is a Spawn book, not a Grapes of Wrath sequel, so the bar here is reachable, and it is reached.  If you were waiting for a train wreck, you're going to have to find another track.

Jim Downing: 21st century Jesus

After the blockbuster smashing and epic reveals of Dragonball Spawn # 200, things have quieted down a bit as we begin the new era.  In what turns out to be the most enjoyable element of the book so far, Jim Downing sits down in front of some television cameras to tell the story of his coma, his miraculous healings, and to seek answers about his identity from a national audience.

Jim has an agent now, for crying out loud.  This was a pleasant surprise for me.  The Al Simmons Spawn was always committed to brooding in the shadows and planting a righteous reckoning on some deserving skull or another.  The idea of a TV show or a public relations department would have been unthinkable.  Jim Downing needs this kind of work, by the way.  We're two years into the character, and he's still a confused wet noodle with omnipotent powers.  He's just not a character that has you tearing open the LCS doors on a Wednesday to get the next installment.

And sure enough, just as we're starting to get some semblance of character development from Wet Noodle Downing, we get the obligatory conspiratorial rumblings in the background.  Oooh, the fix is in and somebody's going to call and reveal Jim's true identity, and there's going to be a surprise "big finish" to close the program.

Yes, Spawn we're all sick of this secret bullshit!

Cut to three hours before the Karlene Phillips show began taping, and Downing is picked up by a mysterious cop who is 39 times more interested in Jim than he should be.  He knows too much, and he wants to know too much.  After an incredibly wordy and awkward exchange, the officer stops at Frankie Holtzman's house as a favor to Jim for setting fire to that hospital a few issues ago.

And there's where the comic threatens to lose me.  Because once inside, we've got a magic brief case containing all the "answers" to Downing's identity, but he can't know them yet, because he's "not ready" for it.  He's not powerful enough.  Yawn.

The new players are vampires, and I guess there's nothing wrong with that, but when the lead suck head is named "Bludd", well, I have to wonder about the maturity level.  I know, I know, it's a Spawn comic.  I don't require this to read like a Jane Austen novel.  But are we seriously going with the vampire named Bludd?  Wow.  And then this idiot vampire stooge practically demands that Spawn tear his head off and grab a note from within his body like some undead fortune cookie.  It's just too bizarre to make you believe in it.

That's not the deal breaker, though.  No, the potential deal breaker is that somehow in this bold new direction we keep coming back to this same hackneyed "big secret" formula.  Telling the audience they don't know certain facts is not enough to call yourself a narrative.  Waiting a month, or twelve months, or twelve years for a piece of information does not make what comes before interesting.

Nobody would tell somebody this.  Ever

It has to be interesting to be interesting.  That would seem obvious to most, but the concept is apparently lost on Spawn, which seems entirely devoted to future "huge reveals", and always at the cost of it's present.  This is the exact same issue I had with the book when McFarlane came back to it with Endgame.  It was all promise and no payoff.  Every month Spawn comes to you and says "I bet you don't know THIS!"  And every month a reasonable adult reader is forced to look at the comic and say "I bet you I can't be bothered to give a SHIT!"

The difference now, if there is one, is that Carlton appears to have instilled a little hope in the form of some style and a fresher take.  The vampire with the case, in the midst of spouting the usual nebulous bullshit, seems to have a real motivation.  He like Spawn, has become a monster.  Just a little dash of something real in the larger soup of nonsense.  The fame angle could be fun, and there's some chance that we might actually see a real character inside of Jim Downing the "modern messiah" down the road.

It's hard to say which pieces of the stew are actually Will's, and which are Todd's.  My guess is that the "Big Secret" formula and obsession with "Power" are McFarlane

A few words about the art.  Kudranski seems like a fine penciller to me, and appropriate for the book.  The colors, though.  Where are they?  Yeah, I know they're going for a more noir feel, a grittier and darker atmosphere.  Fine.  This thing is so washed out, I'm wondering why not just go black and white?  It looks more ugly than moody to me, as is.  But I'm not particularly qualified to speak on these subjects.

Bottom line is that Spawn is now a competently constructed book with some promise, but weighted down by it's insistence upon a very tired "Big Secret" formula.  It will succeed in as much as it can grow out of its past and let Carlton do something clever on his own.  There's some evidence that he has it in him.

- Ryan

Tale Of Two Cities: Spawn # 200/Savage Dragon # 168!

I don't know if any of you noticed, or if this was planned, but both Spawn and Savage Dragon celebrated seminal events yesterday.  I think both represent significant achievements, but they could not have been handled more differently.

If you were at your local comic shop yesterday, I doubt you could have missed Spawn # 200.  It featured the very neat and tidy even century numbering, the #200 was emblazoned prominently on the McFarlane pencilled cover.  It was extra-sized, it was extra-priced, and everything about that comic screams marketing.

Meanwhile, Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon sat quietly next to it with a regular sized issue at it's regular price, and a not-very-auspicious # 168 issue number.  It paid no heed to Comics Hype Economics 101.  What it did was blow the doors off Spawn # 200 in the most convincing and satisfying way possible.  Let's start with Spawn, though....

Ah, wait.  Before I get to the meat of things, I must warn you that I don't know how to talk about either of these comics without handing out massive 60 megaton spoilers.  Like, especially in the case of Savage Dragon, we're talking about "potentially ruining 17 years of culminating stories" type spoilers.  You've been warned.  Now back to Spawn...

Spawn # 200

Image Comics

Script:  Todd McFarlane/Robert Kirkman

Pencils:  McFarlane/Kirkman/Michael Golden

53 pages for $3.99

First things first - reaching 200 issues is a legitimate, significant achievement, and I congratulate Spawn on reaching it.  McFarlane touts his book now as the second longest running independent book ever, (Cerebus being # 1 of course) and I see no way to challenge that.  I thought Usagi Yojimbo might have him inched, but I looked, and even if you count the Fantagraphics/Mirage stuff, Todd's got him on issues.

It hasn't always been pretty, and it certainly hasn't always been on time.  There have been epochs where the brand was frankly watered down with spin-offs and crossovers.  There have been epochs where the brand was frankly listless and dull.  But in 2011, there is one and one only Spawn book, and it has more attention from McFarlane than it has in a long time, and that's a good thing.

Once upon a time I could hardly turn on a television without bumping into a monstrosity that called itself Dragonball Z.  This was anime on steroids, with "stories" that revolved around an endless stream of paper mache characters, if you could call them that, fighting each other for reasons unknown.

Before the fighting, there was usually some bravado, although you could trade dialogue with anybody else in the series and not notice.  It was all the same testosterone enhanced nonsense.  You had some inappropriately long staredowns, and an occasional epic "reveal" where the guy who was about to kick another guy's ass turned out to be a different guy than you originally thought.

Super Saiyan

The whole crux of the hook was "power", which in Dragonball meant the ability to physically destroy other people and nothing else. The only thing that mattered in that show was your ability to beat down whoever might be standing or inexplicably hovering in the air near you.

There were powerful cats called Saiyans, and every now and again somebody would hit the next level and become a Super Saiyan, at which point the audience was expected to crap their pants in awe.  And if you were watching this at age 12, perhaps you did soil yourself in the sublime manliness of it all.  If you were me, you'd yawn and then find something good to watch.

After reading Spawn # 200, I'm forced to conclude that in Todd McFarlane's hands the book has devolved into Dragonball Spawn.  Only instead of Super Saiyans, we have Omega Spawns, Spawns so cool and so powerful they chop the heads off of other Spawns!  Oh my stars and pre-pubescent garters!

Marvel at....Omega Spawn!

In case you hadn't caught it the first three times, Clown informs the Jim Downing version of Spawn that there is definitely something going on with Freak that just doesn't jibe.  Freak slaps his arm back on and reveals that he is actually.....Malebolgia, the only guy in the universe more powerful than an Omega Spawn!  OH, the magnitude of it!

Violator switches forms to gain more power of course, I mean, what else could possibly matter.  It's such an important deal that he has to knock out Jim in order to do it.  And before it's all done, wait for it, the Spawn costume becomes the most powerful thing in the whole wide universe.  Yes, I said it.  Are you tingling yet?

Al gives advice

Needless to say, I was not.  There was one scene in Spawn # 200 that had potential for real drama, in which Al Simmons takes a pocket universe time-out with Jim and quizzes him about whether he's actually the guy for the suit and all that it entails.  I think in the hands of a Brian K Vaughan or someone of that ilk, we could have been left with a lasting memory and a psychological place to hang our hearts on the character.  As constructed, it's a wordy mess that serves mainly to introduce another "mystery" to solve.

Spawn # 200 is certainly worthy in terms of scope, pomp, and circumstance.  The core concept could actually be quite appealing - we're talking about conflicts between Heaven and Hell, stuff of literally Biblical proportions.  And the secrets revealed here may actually pay off for somebody who has been reading the book for awhile, and maybe has some investment in Malebolgia, or wondering if Spawn was going to continue with Jim or Al Simmons.  If you haven't been reading the book for awhile, I think it would read as a confusing mess of machismo.

So unfortunately, while the explosions might be appropriately large, I'm not sure why anybody would bother to care about any of it.  There are no human ramifications evident in these conflicts, the book as it is seems to be more interested in who can kick who's ass.  In that scheme, making the Spawn costume the most powerful weapon in the known universe is a pretty big deal.

To me, it utterly destroys one of the book's best early hooks.  Once upon a time Spawn was relatively unique in that his power set was not only limited, but you could watch it dissipate on the page.  Spawn had the ability to put on a fireworks display, but it drained the battery, and once it was gone...the threat was that it was gone.  Spawn, and really most characters for that matter are more compelling when they are competent but vulnerable.  This Super Saiyan nonsense works directly against that. 

Next month we begin the Will Carlton/Szymon Kudranski era of Spawn.  If the epilogue is any indication, I think the art chores are in exceptionally good hands.  And nobody has a clue about what to expect from Will Carlton, who has no prior writing credits.  But it should be different, and different from this almost has to be an improvement.

PS:  Near as I can tell, Robert Kirkman pencilled the first four pages of this comic, and they look incredible .

Savage Dragon # 168

Image Comics

Script:     Erik Larsen

Pencils:   Erik Larsen

20 pages for $3.50

Savage Dragon # 168 is the grand finale of a 19 year piece of storytelling, and it is a remarkable thing to behold.  We sometimes Marvel at what Brubaker has been allowed to get away with on Captain America, or what Bendis has achieved on Ultimate Spider-Man, but Savage Dragon has those crushed.  What started with The Dragon way back when culminates here.

It's not perfect.  There's possibly too great a leaning on the "Boom!", the "Frakk!", and the "Skrow!" in this issue.  It opens with Marcus pounding on his father and repeating endlessly "Hello!  My name is Malcolm Montoya...you killed my sister Angel...prepare to die!"  It's 20 pages, many of which are splash pages.

The difference between this extravaganza and Spawn # 200 is that this story gets far more accomplished in 20 pages than Spawn did in more than 50.  Way more.  And while it does have some of the more traditional comics slug fest aspects to it, and is also built on incredible reveals, there is a far more palpable sense of drama in Dragon, and the human cost is far more apparent on every level.

What I mean by that...is that Savage Dragon has killed his son and daughter, and the entire human race has been destroyed to pave the way for a race of alien dragons.  That kind of human cost.

The story is not without its confusions if you're just jumping in at the end, of course.  There are a lot of players on the board, we're dealing with time travel and multiple realities, and nineteen years of stories carry some weight.  I don't know what Wildstar's vision was, or how it impacts how a long term reader's interpretation of the final arc.  I don't know Vanguard's history, but events in this book leave him with no role to fill, and if you know the guy, that probably provokes a more meaningful emotional response than it did for me.

Please understand that I'm not complaining about the accessibility of this comic.  In fact, I think it's extraordinary how concisely Larson is able to encapsulate this enormous opus into readily understandable bites.  All of that complexity boils down to this:

 Savage Dragon is an alien sent to earth to prepare it for his species.  A couple of scientists couldn't bear the thought of simply destroying the human race so the dragons could move in, so they blasted his brains out and substituted with 5 days of television programming, making him effectively an amnesiac.  The last 19 years of storytelling have led us to the point where the invasion was ultimately successful with Dragon's help after all.  He decides he can't live with losing everything he's learned to love, and dooms himself and his own race to endless wandering by undoing it all.

The best stories always have a simple hook.  That's almost 20 years of comics distilled into a concise paragraph, and it all came home in Savage Dragon # 168.

It's the little things that count for me.  The element of this that struck home the hardest was a conversation between Savage Dragon and the apparently omnipotent Darklord:

I'm sure that idea isn't unique in science fiction, but it certainly is interesting to me.  From Dragon's perspective, he can't deal emotionally with the loss of his loved ones and wants to go back and undo that.  From Darklord's rational, more objective perspective, there's no point.  Going back won't save the people he's trying to save, it will branch off a different reality of people that will look and act similarly, but won't be those people.  In an infinite number of realities, those people survive quite nicely in other worlds in that manner.  Why not just love them, and save everyone the trouble of your guilt?  It's mind-bending stuff.

Savage Dragon feels a little more vital than your average comic book because it's obviously Erik Larsen's passion, and there is a sense that anything can really happen in this book.  As this issue ends, Savage Dragon is dead.  Darklord makes a deal with Dragon to go back in time and fix it so that the human race survives:

 Darklord takes him up on that offer, decides he's too much of a pain in the ass to keep around and vaporizes him as payment for the human race's salvation.  One gets the sense that Darklord has a unique code and only did that because Dragon uttered the word "anything", making his death fair game.  Things like that are more satisfying than your usual comic book fare, and more sophisticated than I would have guessed Savage Dragon was capable of before I started sampling it.

Powerful things happen in this book, and they seem to happen in something approximating real time.  We've had almost twenty years of Savage Dragon comics, and about twenty years have elapsed in the book.  Dragon has evolved, his kids have grown up, the human race has been destroyed and saved.  Things happen.  And Dragon's great heroic act essentially sentences an entire race of people to a lifetime of suffering.  Does that happen in your average superhero comic? 

Now, the means for bringing Dragon back are certainly there.  Darklord could probably undo it with the snap of his fingers.  I don't think that's Larsen's intentions, though.  This is not a stunt to sell a few extra copies.  He didn't rush his arcs to get this monumental stuff in by # 150, and he didn't string it out to fit it into a magical # 200 issue.

It seems like what Erik Larsen is doing is telling the best stories he knows how, and letting the chips fall where they may.  The first great era of the Dragon is done now, and who knows where it picks up next month? (The "Next" blurb on the letters page reads:  so....now what?)  One would assume that his son Malcolm is now the Dragon, and we begin again with his adventures.  I don't know!  And that's a good thing.

I think Larsen ended his first era on a very high note:

It is a crazy world his characters live in, and it does beat quite a few alternatives - our world, and most fictional ones.  You know, there was a time, back before I was just a consumer, when comics told stories that mattered, and Phoenix might destroy an entire alien civilization and then sacrifice herself, and it would happen at Uncanny X-Men # 137 because it was time to do it. And yeah, it didn't stick forever...but this was before the ubiquitous 12 minute death, and it felt important.  Savage Dragon is a return to that mode of storytelling, and the things that happen in any issue of this comic "mean" more than any five Fear Itself type Marvel shenanigans.  And for that I say bravo, Mr. Larsen!

- Ryan