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.
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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
