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 31st 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.
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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
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