Spawn

fade

fade

Staff member
I've never read this before. I saw the HBO series back in the day, and of course the terrible theatrical movie. I'm not sure what to make of it. I've read a lot of it. Up through 170 or so. I kind of lost a little interest after God and Satan were finally revealed. Little disappointing in that it stripped away a lot of the mythological mystery on which the beginning of the story relies, reducing God and Satan to
literally petulant children, and figurative petulant children when they get their bodies back
In fact, reading back through the early ones again after you find this out makes the stories feel silly. Then shortly after that, they retcon Al to be a
wife-beater (that was shown earlier, I know, but not to this degree) and a child killer
. The early series feels like better story telling, but it's hampered by Macfarlane's stiff unnatural dialogue, and the art is hampered because he apparently had never seen an actual black person before. The later pencilers are better, but the story always kind of feels, I don't know, like it's starting rather than moving.

Discuss?
 
Frank

Frank

Your taste in pop culture sucks
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I'm kidding, as I dug the HBO show when I was younger and the comics when I was younger still. I haven't read them since issue 50 (which was the last one I bought). I was exactly the right age for the Image "revolution" to "wow" me at the time before I knew better.

The series never did seem to actually go anywhere for years at a time.
 
Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

I liked Spawn back in the day, but going back and trying to read it reveals that it suffers very heavily from 90's syndrome.
 
drawn_inward

drawn_inward

I haven't read that far. I bought them back in the day b/c I thought I was going to retire off my comic book collection. :facepalm:

I've read up to about 25. I liked the HBO series. Like everyone else has said, it doesn't really hold up well. Although, how many of those early Image books hold up? Wildcats, Gen 13, Wetworks, Youngblood, etc. They all seem kind of lame now, but so does a lot of stuff that I liked as a kid.

Don't worry @fade I think you have good taste in media. ;)
 
fade

fade

Staff member
I appreciate what image tried to do but honestly I think they proved that editorial direction mattered. A lot. Plus Macfarlane kind of reduced it all to hypocrisy when he became a money grubbing dick, refusing to pay Gaiman and appropriating other people's creations.
 
SpecialKO

SpecialKO

drawn_inward said:
Wildcats, Gen 13, Wetworks, Youngblood, etc. They all seem kind of lame now, but so does a lot of stuff that I liked as a kid.
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The first two managed to evolve in really interesting ways (Wildcats more than Gen 13), but Wetworks kinda floundered even when Image was all utility belts and mullets, and Youngblood barely got out the door.
 
Yoshimickster

Yoshimickster

I used to love Spawn...'s toys which made sense as Macfarlane put more attention into merchandising than story telling. The comics I could never really get into, they didn't seem that different from any other super hero story I read or saw. The guy was nothing more than a Venom suited Ghost Rider to me. Also, Overt-kill is the worst super villain name EVER! It just feels awkward to read and say.
 
Hailey Knight

Hailey Knight

I had a crate full of Spawn toys. They were fantastic; the limbs had more joints than most action figures and they were all cool monsters and weird stuff. They were some of my favorites. I used to play with them, my Aliens toys, and Jurassic Park.

What glorious days in the basement.
 
Frank

Frank

Yoshimickster said:
I used to love Spawn...'s toys which made sense as Macfarlane put more attention into merchandising than story telling. The comics I could never really get into, they didn't seem that different from any other super hero story I read or saw. The guy was nothing more than a Venom suited Ghost Rider to me. Also, Overt-kill is the worst super villain name EVER! It just feels awkward to read and say.
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His original name was Overkill, but Toddy Mac ran into some issues with the fact that Marvel already had a character by that name. Namely this Guardians of the Galaxy character:

Whoa, it's a big image. Needs spoilering.
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Quotemander Prime said:
I had a crate full of Spawn toys. They were fantastic; the limbs had more joints than most action figures and they were all cool monsters and weird stuff. They were some of my favorites. I used to play with them, my Aliens toys, and Jurassic Park.

What glorious days in the basement.
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That wonderful time between Toddtoys and their shitty action figures and before they became shitty statues. There were some fucking awesome toys then.
 
Yoshimickster

Yoshimickster

I hate how when toy companies call figurines as action figures, the point of calling an action figure an action figure is that they are capable of action! Figurines are not fucking capable of action, therefore calling one an action figure is a lie and said lying company should be made bankrupt and fucking DIE! Or, just make freaking figures that are capable of actual action(s).
 
fade

fade

Staff member
The thing that sort of bugged me about Spawn was that it all just became so meaningless when the truth was revealed. I suppose that feeling was probably totally intentional, but I still don't like it. It effectively rendered all of the early stories kind of pointless. Especially when it was revealed that
your arrival in Heaven or Hell in the afterlife was random, and not based on morality
 
SpecialKO

SpecialKO

fade said:
The thing that sort of bugged me about Spawn was that it all just became so meaningless when the truth was revealed. I suppose that feeling was probably totally intentional, but I still don't like it. It effectively rendered all of the early stories kind of pointless. Especially when it was revealed that
your arrival in Heaven or Hell in the afterlife was random, and not based on morality
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Holy crap, I never read that far. That really does make the earlier stories pointless!
 
Espy

Espy

I say this not being the biggest Spawn fan or having a really in-depth knowledge of the character, just a limited one: Seems to me that Spawn may have been a better series if it had a solid start and end point with a good, cohesive story and didn't need to fall into the typical comic book "revolving door" of story in order to be able to keep going.
 
Frank

Frank

fade said:
I appreciate what image tried to do but honestly I think they proved that editorial direction mattered. A lot. Plus Macfarlane kind of reduced it all to hypocrisy when he became a money grubbing dick, refusing to pay Gaiman and appropriating other people's creations.
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Yeah, it took him about a year to become exactly what he was rebelling against.
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

Y'know, I'd (and still haven't) seen or read anything about the character, other than the movie.
I assume it craps all over canon and whatever, but, all other things aside - why is it that movie gets such a b ad rap? It's almost constantly pointed to as the worst of the worst of action hero movies. Sure it's very '90s, and the special effects were decent but not great in its own time - I'm not saying it's a great movie, far from it - but as a teenager and seeing it as a nontie-in action romp, I quite enjoyed it.
 
Frank

Frank

It was terrible (and most of the special effects looked terrible even then), that's why it gets bagged on.

It came out the same year as Fifth Element, Men in Black, Starship Troopers and Jurassic Park: Lost World. There were plenty of better looking and plain better action movies that year.
 
Bowielee

Bowielee

I liked the costume and John Leguizamo's portrayal of the Clown. That's about it.

When one of the high points of your movie is John Leguizamo's performance, there's something deeply wrong with your movie (unless it's a movie about drag queens stranded in a small town in the middle of nowhere).

As far as the cannon of the movie goes, it actually tries too hard to stick to the comic arc. That's why there's a whole bunch of stuff that makes absolutely no sense.
 
fade

fade

Staff member
The movie had weird timing. By the time it had to have been produced, Macfarlane's glacial story had barely advanced. Let's see, Cog had only just revealed he was also a hellspawn, but literally nothing more than that about himself. Al and the Violator had had a showdown resulting in the Violator's decapitation, but we knew very little about Malbolgia, except that he was one of many devils, and not Satan himself. They retconned the comic in concert with the movie to change Al's killer from Chapel to Priest, who didn't even exist until Al suddenly had a revelation that Chapel didn't pull the trigger after all. Plus making Terry white was weird. I read that was to keep from exclusively targeting a black audience.
 
checkeredhat

checkeredhat

The Spawn movie is a perfect example of the studio executives getting themselves involved and ruining a project.

A friend of my family quit his Special Effects job at ILM to start up a production company with his buddy. This is the guy who convinced Spielberg CG was the way to go on Jurassic Park. He hated his job adding motion blur to the stop motion dinosaur footage and tried to talk his supervisor into just doing CGI dinosaurs. When he was told that couldn't be done he modelled a T-Rex skeleton and had it playing on a looping walk cycle the next time Spielberg was around. He also animated the T-1000 in T2, and the water alien the Abyss, and a bunch of other stuff. The last thing he did with ILM was the Star Wars special editions.
Anyway, I bring this up because: the project his buddy had in mind? A gritty, R-rated, true to the source material version of a little comic called "Spawn". Change after change after change was forced upon them by the studio, and that awful movie was the result. It basically boiled down to:

"Take out all this character development. Teenagers want boobs and explosions. Add in more explosions!"

"Okay, can we at least get more funding for the SFX department to do that?"

"HAHAHAHAHA... Oh, you're serious. No."
Steve knows even the special effects weren't that great, which I think bugs him, but he takes solace in the Violator, because that was all him. He wouldn't let anyone else touch it.

He directs commercials now (Actually I haven't spoken to him in a few years; I think he may be teaching now). His last foray into film was directing "The Wild" for Disney, which he only did because they agreed to fund a MASSIVE upgrade and expansion of a Canadian animation studio if he would do it.

Edit: Holy crap I just found an hour long documentary on him. I've linked it now.
 
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fade

fade

Staff member
I still think they jumped the gun a lot. Now would be a good time to make a Spawn movie. The PG-13 world has been broached, so I think it's okay to go ahead with a solid R Spawn that condenses the story from origin up to
Spawn's rebirth as a god and Armageddon
. Maybe as two. Unlike most superhero stories, the origin is rather simplistic, and doesn't even really have to be done at the beginning.
 
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