Spawn Point #4: Misery #1, Rat City #3, Monolith #2

This is Spawn Point my regular-ish posting about all things Spawn and his Universe. Sometimes you plan to write a weekly column looking at the nature of Spawns franchising. Sometimes you get called to strike for a couple weeks, temporarily enjoined, and catch up on 3 weeks of grading. In the spirit of catch up what follows is a look at the latest issues of Monolith and Rat City as well as the debut of Misery. One day I'll expand on my notes and write about Gunslinger Spawn post-Spawn #350 (maybe next week). 

Misery #1
Script/Plot by Todd McFarlane
Art by Szymon Kudranski
Color by FCO Plascencia
Lettering by Andworld Design

 

Misery is the new four issue miniseries focusing on Cyan Fitzgerald. Cyan has been a constant supporting character for Spawn, both Simmons and the series; representing what could’ve been for him and Wanda and an innocent bystander in Hell and Heavens war on Earth. The idea of a Cyan focused miniseries is kind of interesting given this long history within the franchise, what is her perspective on the insanity that is her life? Unfortunately this first issue doesn’t do much to justify ‘why’ readers should care (or buy more issues.) Todd McFarlane and artist Szymon Kudranski are currently working on the relaunched Sam & Twitch and at least in this first issue Misery feels like it would fit as an arc in that series featuring Cyan not on its own. 

 

Readers might be a little surprised when they open the book and think there has been a massive misprint. Misery #1 opens not on Cyan and her father failing to communicate, but a 6 page sequence about Jenny and her abusive piece of shit cop husband. Jenny was delayed due to traffic and with-it dinner. The piece of shit partner did not take this justification in a normal rational or loving manner and proceeds to brutally abuse her. It is the kind of sequence that feels at home in Sam & Twitch. The splash page credit sequence, juxtaposing the scene of an accident with everyday items which become linked to Jenny’s travel drama is fantastic. Colorist FCO Plascencia delivers a moody palette as Jenny arrives home with a rageful red slowly building up and emanating from the piece of shit partner threatening to overtake not just the lone light source but the inky darkness on the page as well. The graphic nature of this opening sequence establishes the physical and visual stakes for the series. 

 

This darkness is contrasted with the lightness and relative failure of Father Daughter communication between Cyan and Terry. While Cyan says this is about Terry not finding justice for her mothers murder, this feeling of resentment is born of a failure of recognition. A moment subtly captured by Cyan entering her translucent form. While I will get on McFarlane’s scripting in a moment, this is a plainly well done sequence by the creative team. It’s a bit weird that Kudranski is just drawing Terry as Keith David, but it’s an homage that works. 

 

After meeting up with an old friend the second big set piece / violence against women occurs. In a sequence that feels like it’s pulled out of the fever dreams of 70s New York a group of young men don’t like being called “ass turds” and told to shoo (read: stop harassing us). It's the kind of unhinged dialog only McFarlane could write. They proceed to threaten physical and sexual violence against Cyan and her friend at the next stop. Like the opening splash page Kudranski juxtaposes larger images with tight close-up panels of a l lecherous tongue and unzipped pants to get across what is really going on here. Cyan fights back and even gets the better of a couple of them. 

 

Cyan’s moment of female rage is visually captured by Kudranski as the devolution of the page itself. Panel lines go from typical solid black or white borders, to scratches, until the whole thing explodes in a double page spread as Cyan gives her assailant what is essentially the Penance Stare as touch. This is the kind of work I like seeing Szymon Kudranski do. The fanning panel layout and shift form ink to pencil like line work mixed with the random geometry (that reads a little trash polka). FCO Plascencia slowly drops the color from the pages as the eye goes from left to right. In the middle the figure of Cyan and her victim/ assailant locked in a moment of two way empathy. McFarlane’s narration says Cyan’s world “shatters into the … insane” and it is an apt description for the splash page. Cyan is flooded with all the horrible stuff this man has done and it is redirected back on him tenfold. A crime scene photo on the next page, another clever panel with in a panel, shows him bleeding through his eyes apparently alive.

 

 It’s pages like this that make up for some of the more stilted figure work Kudranski produces. I often wonder if it’s a matter of how coolers follow his line work that leads to that color banded realism (see Sam & Twitch also done by FCO Plascencia). Mikel Janin’s line work as a similarly referenced and stilted posing but at least with June Chung it works. The color and page design the art team produce in Misery is why this wouldn’t neatly fit as a case in the paes of Sam & Twitch, it’s too weird and supernatural influenced. But this aesthetic difference doesn’t change how marginal Cyan feels in her own book. She is on a journey of self-discovery and after a run in with Jen at the police station (and dodging Twitch) winds up at Granny’s house. Maybe the next issue will start to interrogate what it is Cyan wants as she reacts to her new Rogue like power set. 

Rat City #3
Script/Plot/Lettering by Erica Schultz
Art by Ze Carlos
Color by Jay David Ramos

 

Rat City #3 Pages 3 (top) 4 (bottom)

Three issues in and the creative team seem to have come into their own as a unit. Erica Schultz plotting and scripting does a good job of both structuring the issue and telling the story and giving Ze’ Carlos room to visually tell it, in particular a shattering splash page. The standout for me in this issue, however, is the work of Jay David Ramos’ palette. Their vibrant use of color is giving the early 90s experimentation with digital color (when it was still new and mixing with existing printing processes)* and it adds to both the readability of Carlos macro page design choices. In particular Ramos keeps the figures of Peter Carin, now know as the Deviant by PTS, bold and with a lot of soft rendering of details in contrast to the environment. Rat City's environmental palette is technically applied in a similar way, but the spectrum of colors and their value makes everything darker. The grime of the city as Peter rushes out the door with Rhys is the mixture of browns and greens on top of dirty silver with blue back lighting. In contrast to this complexity Carin’s Deviant form, is composed of defined segments of Red, Black, and White roughly following the 60-30-10 rule.  The lack of refraction when the Deviant’s mask hits the neon lights of (Nu) New York City helps to sell the supernatural qualities of the suit as this unholy fusion of technology and demonic energy. 

 

Picking up from the suit reveal in the last issue, Rat City is in near constant motion as Carin fleas with Rhys and the forces of PTS. With no real downtime except for the final scene the creative team do the right thing and just show readers the hints of the Deviant’s powerset. This might surpise you but, it’s a lot of the same powers most Hellspawn have! Of note is Carin using and controlling the shadow teleportation technique, first unknowingly activating it and winding up at St. Raymonds Cemetery the final resting place of the rest of his battle brothers and now Rhys. Carlos uses the teleportation and Carin’s growing familiarity with it as the transition point into a heart shattering splash page. The final teleport of the issue also acts as the page transition to another scene Dr. Boze facing the anonymous Chairman of PTS, so not only is Carin getting more sophisticated with their use but the creative team as well. How the creative team manages to show and not tell the powerset in this issue was heartening considering how much “telling” is baked into the formal logic of Spawn IP. 

 

Peter doesn’t have many answers to what he’s gotten himself into, but readers are beginning to get a better sense of things under the neon glow. For starters, the narrator of this series is Rhys’ informant-comms support, Quinlain Wali. Dr. Boze refers to Wali with the gender neutral honorific title of Mx. so until otherwise I’m assuming Wali goes by they/them pronouns. (update: and the writer confirms this) It might be a little hard to figure that out though as they throw themselves off the top of an old New York bridge after meeting Carin and saying they're the source of the mysterious black out in issue #1. It is an effective enough cliffhanger. While I’m doubtful Wali will perish in the next issue, it raises the prospect of an Augustus Hill (see Oz) style narrator which could be interesting. 

 

It is a rare thing though to see the omniscient narrator and with it raises questions of their perspective. It forces up a meta read about the nature of storytelling itself how will this perspective influence or create decoherent meaning with the artwork, comics are semiotically premised on words and pictures synergizing with one another. (For an example of how this unity is perhaps a bit more an assumption and imposition by the reader and a position that perhaps subordinates the artist too the writer see KirbyWithoutWords.) It’s something to think about going forward with the genre mix of this book maybe the narration is where more classical storytelling forms will come through the most. 

 

A good example of this synergy in action is the double page spread after Carin leaves the cemetery and finds himself in a kitchen. Ze Carlos design work, transforming the panels into shattered glass after Carin punches out his reflection is just good skeuomorphic design work. It creates a tangible visual metaphor for both Carin’s emotional state, one of broken exhaustion of not just losing Rhys but it feels like the last 11 years in general, as well as his bifurcating identity of Peter Carin/Deviant. That is a lot to respond to and “adapt” to after a lifetime of adaptation but “Peter didn’t want to adapt anymore. He wanted to die.” And he tries to seppuku with a shard of glass (because what would cyberpunk be without the cultural appropriation of Asian cultures). The suit won’t let him. Schultz lettering decision to break up the 5 sentence narration and use it to guide reader along this emotional and narrative journey in the splash page is an effective decision.

 Of the currently released New Universe titles, this is my favorite so far. It has the most effective genre and franchising mix with fundamental storytelling choices that just make it easy to read and onboard people. 

 

*I’d have to go run the numbers a bit more, but roughly I’m imagining the color work up to ~30 ish, there’s what I assume is a shift in printing tech by roughly the 60s that allows for a wider gamut of coloring to occur that really helps to give Brian Haberlin and Dan Kemp the space to make some of those plainly hard images of late 90s early 00s Spawn. 

Script/plot by Sean Lewis
Todd McFarlane, additional script
Art by Valerio Giangiordana
Color by Ulises Arreola
Letters by Andworld Design

The second issue of Monolith scratches some aesthetic itches with artist Valerio Giangiordano and Ulises Arreola leaning more into the 40k-esque sci-fi of it all and the absurdity that entails. Narratively there is still a bit of friction, but Sean Lewis’ scripting and Giangiordano’s page design make for some effective micro narratives within the issue. 

 

Monolith’s journey against and towards Omega Spawn continues, now on the run after escaping from space prison in the previous issue. Space is a dangerous place and Monolith soon finds himself doing gig work on a transport train that barters supplies for safe passage. It is surprising instances of the working-class milieu of the franchise*, as Monolith trades his labor power for passage on the train. It grounds Monolith and begins a trend of the creative team in this issue of showing Monolith in action, training like he’s Space Conan, instead of telling us about it. Monolith’s internal perspective is still the subject of Lewis’ narration, functioning as the transitional hinge the flashbacks rely upon, but there is something more engrossing about seeing a young Monolith smashing rocks and bursting through Planet Eaters. 

These flashbacks do raise some narrative questions, however. In the previous issue we are given a Gaia powered flashback showed Monolith as a young human child on Earth. Except, we are never shown him as a child on Earth in these new flashbacks. Monolith grew up on a planet that saw planets consumed by Gaia and the Planet Eaters. He imagines Earth, linking it as part of his history but he does not appear to be born there. Curiouser we also see him already in costume. It is this bit of friction and the overall emphasis of Monolith in action that helps to refine his character. Monolith appears to be in a state of arrested development, he is a BoyMan. Not unlike the Space Marines from Warhammer 40k, a group who are taken from their families at a young age and turned into transhuman killing machines and turned into the 90s idea of what 13-year-old white boy would think is rawesome. Monolith in the wake of the Planet Eaters presence begins to train and become awesome. Ethics and morality become flattened there is only good and bad, a child’s view of the world. This connection is reinforced when Monolith is pulled back to the present by a young child’s question about if he is a “good or bad.” As they leave the young child calls Monolith in the opposite direction because they are “good guys.”

 

There is ‘bad’ and then there is Evil, and Omega is the latter. Omega’s arrives in the kind of callously destructive fashion you would expect, the “good’ kid and their mother we were introduced to pages earlier lie obliterated on the side of the page. Lewis’ scripting of Omega in this sequence is the first time Omega comes off as having a bit of character to him, or at least the dialog paints this figure as the nihilistic space tyrant the paratexts have told us he is. Giangiordano visually captures this by melting space and time and showing Omega on a throne at the end of the universe as he talks about the rebirth of an enthralled Monolith. Is it Darkseid homage? Yes, and it is effective. It gives the character a level of thematic gravitas he was lacking in previous appearances.

 

The page design in this issue overall helps to carry this issue to new heights with Giangiordano hiding frames within frames or just turning pages into tapestry-like constructions. On the first page Giangiordano uses the triangular design of Monolith ship to naturalize the triad of panels that make up the first third of the page. This architecture provides easy guide for the readers eyes but also helps to mesh together in this atemporal morass that complements Lewis’ narration about being on the run in space. Monolith’s flashback page similarly evaporates time-space unity, but ironically guides the reader through a succession of gazes that are linked in the temporal-spatial unity of the page.

 

There is an artistry to these pages that isn’t found in the back half of the issue as Monolith and Omega brawl out. Giangiodano just goes full kaiju mode with this brawl, blurring the background into a spectrum of colors and speedlines. It’s a good Hulk vs Hulk fight that reminded me of this old Godzilla game for the SNEs. 

 

The real drama of this fight wasn’t found in the choreography between Monolith and Omega, but the story around it. The creative team do a good job of leaning into the 40k of it all, by which I mean both the absurdity of these hulking alien demons (the collision of sci fi and fantasy). Lewis’ narration slips between referencing their struggle as natural phenomena, a “chain reaction”, and as unnatural “monsters.” As they brawl the perspective shifts away from our protagonist to the victims around them. They are ripping through this protected space without a care in the world. The human citizens of the colony, though, they care. And so we have interspersed throughout the brawl these cutaways and commentary on the human response to these monstrous deities rampaging through the city. They have reacted with a hail marry weapon, an artillery piece with a single shot that can split atoms, time, and space. Not that Omega or Monolith notice. 

 

Much like how the depreciation of space-time unity helped to give certain pages a sense of gravitas, these cutaways give this back half some legitimate drama and tension. It creates Hitchcockian suspense, readers are shown the metaphorical bomb under the table with the ticking clock, and then the bomb goes boom! And Monolith becomes an isekai! The two combatants find themselves in a strange land, past Earth. It’s an effective cliffhanger that sets up Monolith’s first appearance in Spawn #313. 

 

 

* The majority of characters in this franchise cannot be considered ‘working class’ they perform highly specialized labor, but the way the comics consistently frame their labor is from this perspective.)

Spawn Point #3: Rat City #1-2

This is Spawn Point my regular-ish posting about all things Spawn and his Universe. Regular-ish is doing a lot of work, originally this was supposed to be up on May 31^st but alas my union at UCLA was called to stand up and strike! Which needless to say has shifted my priorities a bit. I am continuing to catch up on the new crop of titles launching out of #350, this week we look at the first two issues of Rat City. 

Rat City #1 

Script/Plot by Erica Schultz

Art by Ze Carlos

Color by Jay David Ramos (1-20), FCO Plascencia (21-24), Marcello Iozolli (25-32)

Lettering by Erica Schultz

 

Rat City #2

Script/Plot by Erica Schultz

Art by Ze Carlos

Color by Jay David Ramos

Lettering by Erica Schultz

Rat City jumps to a whole different Spawn’s future, with lead character Peter Cairn. It’s 2111 and after losing his legs in a blown operation, special forces member Peter Cairn is subjected to experimental cybernetic enhancements that return to him mobility and then some. As Al Simmon’s necroplasmic bomb from Spawn #300 ripples across time-space and reaches his universe, Peter becomes part of a shadow war he isn’t fully aware of.

 

Rat City was the title releasing after Spawn #350 that I was most looking forward to. Rat City features head editor Thomas Healy and the creative team taking a Hellspawn and cybernetically smashing it into another genre, cyberpunk. But will this chrome job be a smooth integration of flesh and circuit, or will it be a crude horrifying mix of man and machine? Rat City’s logo captures some of these anxieties of blending genre and aesthetics, as well as the stratified class structure of cyberpunk, the ‘Rat’ is all clean and techno but the ‘City’ is crumbling beneath it. This process forces up some interesting questions from aesthetic (how does supernatural organics mix with the neon and chrome?) to thematic (what role do metaphors – or literalness – of demons and angels have to play in the techno future?). These are questions that the series’ first two issue begin to deal with in ways the subject of last week’s column, Monolith, did not. 

 

Taking Spawn and blending it with a wholly different genre isn’t new, the franchise has been doing that since the early years. Most successfully in titles like Spawn: The Dark Ages* or the high fantasy title Spawn: Godkiller – a series I hope to get to in the next couple of months. Those titles are to varying degrees fantasy titles, an aesthetic and narrative sensibility that the mothership is itself well versed in. Cyberpunk with its neon, chrome, penchant for raining, and anti-capitalist storytelling is at the opposite end of that spectrum. There is a supernatural quality to cyberpunk in how it stretches the natural (defined as our present and past) with futurism, technology, techno optimism and pessimism, twisting them together into a nightmarish future. Aesthetically it can be understood as the eradication of our conception of the “natural” and with-it essentialist thinking through a postmodern, self-conscious, reinvention of that surface. Janet Bergstrom argues this in “Androids and Androgyny” (Camera Obscura Vol. 5 #3) by examining how the futuristic aesthetics of science fiction and early cyberpunk films short circuit audiences essentialist views resulting in the often (ironically) hyper gendered figure of the android and cyborg. This process can be found in the work of artists such as Masamune Shirow (Ghost in the Shell), Hajime Sorayama, and Lorenzo Nuti and comics like Cyberforce. 

 

From this point of view the symbiotic suit of a Hellspawn and their often-hyper gendered presentation could be integrated into the cyberpunk aesthetic quite easily. We only get our first glimpse of the suit drawn by Ze Carlos as the final image of the second issue. It sheds inky blackness with for steel and circuitry. Carlos’ bifurcating helmet design evokes devil horns. It’s interesting that, at least in this image, the cybernetic legs are still that gunmetal steel and disconnected from the torso’s design work creating further separation and breaking up the costume. As a highlight color that necroplasmic green runs throughout and adds a lot of depth to the suit. Ze Carlos does a good job of evoking the geometry of Al Simmons Spawn suit without just recreating it in a futuristic mode, some of his design work can be seen in the supplemental material for issue #1 and on their Instagram. It also doesn’t magically turn Peter into a an over exaggerated hard body, like his former squadmate Rhys. 

 

It is also worth noting that despite losing his legs a little bit above the knee, Peter does not appear to be emasculated in the biological sense. This is a plus considering characters like Cyborg, Victor Stone, at DC and mainstream American art’s history of fears around Black male sexuality. It is that history that David Walker was writing against in his run on Cyborg. One of the things I’m most curious about with Rat City is how the creative team treat race and gender in this cyberpunk Spawn title. 

 

For all these aesthetic questions of integration and adaptation, Schultz and Carlos produce in the first issue both a single page that feels quintessentially “Spawn” and a portrayal of Carin that is spiritually aligned with the mothership franchise. The page in question is the Vitruvian Man of sorts from the first issue, the page where Carin’s new nanite powered legs are implanted into his body. It is that high and low convergence. Carlos evokes one of Leonardo da Vinci’s most well-known images and juxtaposes it with shit! Ok, not, actual shit, but it’s some brown goopy business that is leaking out of orifices. That is the kind of spirit and low brow humor the first 30 or so issues of Spawn had. 

 

After Peter is dismissed by Pharmatech and his Government’s program for not meeting their standards, Peter survives working construction and odd jobs. Peter is at work, stuck in a hole, when the ripple effects of Al Simmons necroplasmic bomb spreads throughout the city. Like an EMP it momentarily shuts everything down and causes chaos in the city. Eventually, Peter makes his way back to his apartment in Rat City. This is another little moment where Schultz and Carlos are taking the idea of something from the mothership and giving it a new spin. Rat City is the name of Spawn’s alley with the unhoused encampment. In this eponymous comic Rat City is the name for a series of slum housing units where the “have-nots” or 99% of the citizenry live in the shadow of the oligarchs in their towers. Schultz narration shines in this moment, which is itself a spin on a core formal element of Spawn: omniscient narration. In the case of Rat City the narration that accompanies the comic is more retrospective as seen on my much loved Vitruvian Shit man page “Shit … I should’ve tried harder to stop all of it.” This is a subtle difference, but it gives a sense of tragedy to Rat City. It forces up the question of who is talking, is it Peter or some techno Cogliostro  Sinn? These elements make the whole thing more interesting than the vague descriptiveness of Monolith.

 

Maybe it is the context in which Spawn first came into the world, but I’ve always read a fairly consistent labor metaphor throughout the series. All Al Simmons wants to do is to be left alone and to do his job (whatever that is). He is middle management for a series of terrible bosses. First, it is Jason Wynn, which got him killed. After that there was Hell, all they wanted was to control his soul and make them lead their armies against the forces of Heaven. Heaven also is not much of an improvement over Hell it turns out. And now that Al is trying to “lead” other Hellspawn on Earth, he is demonstrating that he, himself, is not exactly a good boss either. The exploitation and hacking of labor is central to cyberpunk. In the first issue as Peter is viewed by his bosses not as a person, but as a tool that is meant to kill, run, or dig holes. In the aftermath of the explosion one of his first thoughts after blacking out isn’t his health, but the need to get back to work and get at least a partial shift in. When Peter and his former squadmate Rhys show up to Pharmatech for a “checkup,” Dr. Boze speaks of Peter and others as experiments and property. It is in the face of this constant dehumanization and alienation that Peter’s first transformation into the Spawn of Rat City occurs. It will be interesting to see how these elements are developed going forward. 

 

Other than the TTRPG and video game world of Shadworun, I can’t think of any other popular Cyberpunk x Fantasy narratives or story worlds. The Devils of cyberpunk aren’t some metaphysical force but the multinational corporations that control the world. Now the main Spawn book hasn’t shied away since #250 or so (lets call it the Jason Shawn Alexander run to be safe) from showing a union between the demonic and capital. For now at least Erica Schultz is taking things in a more metaphorical level, with the only talk of angels and demons coming from a Pharmatech patient who claims to have seen the “demon” coming for them as karmic retribution and that there are no “angels” beyond the exam room doors. Peter rights these warnings off as the ramblings of a guy who is going through it, but he is in fact figured as the karmic demon in the final pages of issue #2. 

 

This last bit of my thoughts has been slightly repetitive. All these observations are deferred to a future issue. Rat City does an excellent job of raising questions in terms of narrative as well as leaning into the conventions of cyberpunk and franchise that make me want to read more! But without more text I can’t come to any justifiable read or conclusion. That is the fun and pain of covering something issue to issue. 

 

There isn’t a good place to put it but Jay David Ramos’ color palette in these first two issues has been great. In particular Ramos’ use of orange and reds for the explosive splash page when Peter’s vehicle is overturned. Ze Carlos and Ramos evoke the energy and style of 90s Image without falling into the trap of producing pages that are overwrought, energetic but almost unreadable. Everything on that splash page makes perfect sense. When we get into the actual city scape of the comic, Ramos does a good job of keeping a feeling of artifical luminance without it also overtaking everything into just being an exercise in neon color palette play.  

 

* Dark Ages is getting a reboot from Lliam Sharp later this year, going back even further into the “Dark Ages” with the fall of the Western Roman Empire. 

 

 

Next Week: A look at Gunslinger Spawn in the aftermath of Spawn #350 with Gunslinger #29-32

Spawn Point #2: News Round Up: McFarlane x Marvel & Phoenix Fan Fusion (05/24/24)

This is Spawn Point my regular-ish posting about all things Spawn and his Universe and McFarlane Productions. In this post we have a recap of Todd McFarlane's panel from Phoenix Fan Fusion (May 24, 2024). 

So after some thinking, Spawn Point is going to be a weekly post on Fridays (most likely), separated between some sort of critical engagement/review of that week’s comics or older material and applicable news. Consider this the “news” portion of the week. 

The big news consumer news this week was the announcement of McFarlane Productions working with Marvel and gaining license to produce, 1:10^th and 1:6^th scale “posed figures” aka statues. In both his statements at the Phoenix Fan Fusion panel and in an interview with comicbook.com (embedded below), McFarlane highlights the highly specific verbiage used as to not violate either Diamond Selects 7in figure deal or Hasbro’s Marvel Legends deal, which allow for the production of articulated action figures. Oh, licensing you can always find new way to cut a piece of pie if there’s money to be made. I’m not much of a statue’s person. This move into statues, however could be seen as an attempt by McFarlane and Marvel to gain new purchase within fandom communities.* One of the things that stands out to me the most when I go to anime conventions is that posed figures by BanPresto and others make up the majority of what is sold and they’re in that rough 1:6 – 10 scale. Manufactures like McFarlane (with My Hero Academia and now Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War) and S.H.Figuarts (with well everything else) produce action figures based on anime properties, but that isn’t what I see, anecdotally, in my roommates collection. With the general convergence of western comics and pop culture with anime at fan events and in retail, these like $35-ish figures could be an attempt to gain purchase with audiences in a from factor they are already familiar with. 

The other bit of commentary comes from reactions to both McFarlane’s panel presentation and to a lesser degree the interview with comicbook.com. I do not have the wherewithal to fully theorize this at the moment, but I want to note the use of populist rhetoric in McFarlane’s sales pitch as it relates to not wanting to overly exploit his customers. During this presentation he vaguely recounted past opportunities to nickel and dime them. This isn’t a new rhetoric for him, the archive of his statements demonstrates a critical and capitalist-skeptic sentiment, couched in folksy “common sense.” These statements should not be read as being anti-consumerist, he is very much about consumption. That salesmanship mindset helps to explain the recent semiotic based critique of audiences critical of his NFT business (McFarlane Digital, and a lesser degree OddKey) and why he is able to fits within the Web3 space rhetorically as well as more mainstream capital. Which is why I’ll be at listening to McFarlane’s appearance on the Gen C Podcast from Consensus 2024 (it’s some crypto bro event.)

Next Week: Rat City #1-2 thoughts and News

Spawn Point #1: Monolith #1

 

This is Spawn Point my regular-ish (is something regular if it is the only one?) posting about all things Spawn and his Universe. For now, I intend to mostly just catch up on the comics and the fallout from issue #350, as my school schedule opens up. To start things off below are my thoughts on the first issue of Monolith. 

Monolith #1 (of 3)

Script/Plot by Sean Lewis

Art by Valerio Giangiordano

Color by Ulises Arreola

Lettered by Andworld Design

 

As someone who is fascinated by Spawn and McFarlane Productions the announcement of a three-issue miniseries centered on Monolith made “sense” in the classical toyetic franchising logic that can be used to understand Spawn as a property. Monolith is the bruising hellspawn introduced in Spawn #313 as a heavy for Omega Spawn. Monolith quickly appeared as a megafig in the revitalized Spawn toy line, a situation not to dissimilar Tremor’s appearance in Spawn #25 and their appearance on toy shelves. This debut on toy shelves has at least followed with several appearances in The Scorched, also written by Sean Lewis. Even though Monolith looks like a late era Hordak henchmen, the supporting roles did give him more intertextual connectivity than the development and narrativizing at the core of Masters of the Universe. All this connectivity, however, failed to make anything stand out for his character. He added yet another stubborn, opinionated, and traumatized servant of hell to annoy and bicker with Jessica Priest. 

 

For all the franchising obviousness of this move, Monolith has a lot of work to do. Sean Lewis and Valerio Giangiordano must give this hunk of red the soul and dimensionality that justifies leading character status. To their credit the creative team appears to be on the right track with, surprisingly. This being a Spawn book, the art is also good reason to check it out with Valerio Giangiordano channeling a more graphic iteration of their work in Savage Avengers. I was at first cautious when I saw that Giangiordano line work wasn’t being colored by one of his more frequent collaborators, but Ulises Arreola proves to be quite complementary though let down a bit by the abundance of grey mandated by the space prison setting. Monolith #1 isn’t a groundbreaking narrative or pushes new formal ground, but it hits the basic expectations of good drama well enough. It has many of the quintessential elements of Spawn’s Universe, which may be one of the factors that proves to be unkind to new readers. 

 

If you wanted me to tell you the character motivation for Monolith, it would be a struggle. I could point to their supporting work protecting the planet in The Scorched in the late teens early twenties when the Greenworld was sending in interdimensional bugs to wipe out the planet and spread tale of his want to defend the living. There is his servile relationship to Omega Spawn in the Omega Island arc. Neither of these appearances, however, give me a sense of their character outside of the archtypical Heavy role they play. For some, and the rule-of-cool logic that animates Spawn aesthetically, it is enough. Once I found out that Valerio Giangiordano – one of the better Instagram follows – was the one doing art I at least knew this book would look cool. Monolith smashing fellow inmates into pieces with that oh so Spawn narration promising plans-within-plans to justify this spectacular violence are some of the best pages in this issue. With three double page splashes (or just over ¼ of this 20 page narrative) they better be spectacular. Arreola’s color palette shines in these moments of excess, he renders the environment in a more realist manner than you would expect. When Giangiordano art is colored it tends to go for a flatter more hue-oriented palette that doesn’t try to get in the way of Giangiordano’s inking. Arreola picks strong colors and then renders with just a enough value to give the appearance of dimensionality, that Monolith or Omega’s symbiotic skin reads as textured in ways the art teams on Spawn or Gunslinger Spawn do not. 

 

None of this, however, tells me anything new about the heart of Monolith. The comic tells me what he wants, redemption for vaguely defined past failures, but it doesn’t show me. That is, until the page when Lewis and Giangiordano show me something I had never considered before: that Monolith was once human and by extension a child. A deeply buried memory is suddenly excavated from Monolith’s psyche. He is transported to the green meadows of Earth. Arreola rightly plays with an almost super natural pallet in comparison to all the grey that makes up the prison environment. He sees himself as a child, before his nightmare of existence began. Monolith proceeds to rend that child figures head from body and throwing the skull and spine at his foes feet. In that brief sequence, about 1.5 pages overall, I learned more about the heart of Monolith from the art teams expressive rendering than anything prior. He is at his core a scared little boy transformed into a toxic man who only knows how to physically pummel his problems into submission. A reading that is quickly made textual by the appearance of Gaia who chastise Monolith for seeking vengeance against Omega and charges him to prove his humanity and emotional maturity. 

 

All this visual and emotional storytelling is great. The readability of the narrative in these moments highlight a major point of friction in this first issue: I have no clue when this story takes place! The first page and panel give me date (3030 AD) and location (Deep Recesses of Space). However, this temporality becomes muddled on the sixth and seventh pages, which shows how Monolith became a resident of the Omega’s space prison. The sixth page begins by reflexively asking a question “How did Monolith get here?” before promising to do that we must go back to the “recent past.” Giangiordano than draws Monolith in his space craft coming upon not a moon but the space prison which quickly tractor beams him in and “dragging Monolith into … NOW. Our current time.” I assume this means 3030 AD, but this also reads as “current” for the comics which is not 3030 AD. Ever since #300 and the necroplasmic detonation across time-space things have been a little funky, but this bit of friction highlights the potential pitfalls of using omniscient narration in this way. That last line could’ve been stricken, and the sequence would read cleaner. That is the moment where I think this comic becomes new reader un-friendly. As a whole I think the creative team do a good job in this issue of condensing Monolith down for new readers, or to be frank giving him dimensional characterization for the first time ever. But the above is a real moment of friction that to the uninitiated used to the peculiarities and vibes of Spawn, could and arguably should be thrown off with how this narrative is being produced.

 

McFarlane (and to a lesser degree Brian Holguin) employ omniscient narration to imbue the art work with greater narrative depth and clarity than a single image might have due to how he writes the series which is closer to Marvel method than full script. With the Spawn line expanding it has been interesting to see other writers and artists play in the sandbox, but they all seem to be using the same formal tools. It’d be nice to see the line expand what is allowable in a Spawn book. 

 

 Next: Rat City #1-2