This is what happens when Techland goes to the comic book store: we end up discussing what we picked up. This week, Graeme McMillan and Douglas Wolk talk about Spawn #200 and the first issue of Casanova: Gula.
DOUGLAS: So I read SPAWN #200, and my mind is still kind of reeling from it. I’m afraid I’m going to have to cope with it via bullet points:
*A 53-page story is a pretty good deal for $3.99.
*I expected that there might be some interesting guest artists here (and hey, wasn’t Rob Liefeld supposed to draw a sequence in this issue?); I was not expecting the first four pages to be written and pencilled by Robert Kirkman.
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*And I definitely didn’t expect the bulk of the story to be pencilled by Michael freaking Golden, of all people. Or for McFarlane to render Golden’s style totally unrecognizable in everything except the flashback scenes (which seem to have been inked by someone else: Danny Miki and Jonathan Glapion are both credited with “additional art”). Michael Golden on Spawn. It’s like buying an battered Bad Company LP and discovering that the bassist is Jaco Pastorius.
*Spawn may be the most girlproof series of all time. I’ve maybe only ever read seven issues of it in their entirety (and a lot of those were the “guest writer” issues early on) (note, by the way, that in Todd McFarlane’s end-note, he claims that “the first 150 issues were either written by Brian Holguin or myself”–uh…), but perhaps somebody who’s read the whole corpus can enlighten me as to whether there’s ever been an issue of it that passes the Bechdel Test.
*The most unintentionally hilarious sentence from McFarlane’s end-note, by the way, has to be “Although we’re up to issue 200, I’ve tried to use a relatively small amount of talent on my title.”
*The note at the end from the managing editor includes the phrases “touting about,” “photo realistic,” “Todd expressed he wanted,” and “takes the artistic reigns.” With editors like this, etc.
*Here’s the dialogue from a single panel: “He can’t speak because he’s not the Omega, he’s just a replica in the Omega class. As much as Clown spouts off about his knowledge of the Omega, he still hasn’t realized he’s only face to face with a second-rate copy! But he was correct about one thing–my need to control your costume again. The transformation, from Al Simmons to you tore the suit apart for one brief moment, giving the symbiote a chance to reconstruct itself without any guiding hand to temper it. Meaning, dear Spawn, that in a very short time, your costume is staged to become the most powerful force in the ENTIRE UNIVERSE!” It’s probably worth mentioning that that’s spoken by an off-panel character–just off-panel, the word balloon has an arrow pointing off to the right side of the page–who is not visible anywhere on that double-page spread (or the previous one).
*Also, there’s the page on which dialogue in the second panel is followed by dialogue in a word balloon whose tail points back to the first panel. I’m just going to have to think of that as advanced.
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*Really, this has to be the most singlemindedly obsessive comic book this side of Steve Ditko’s current comics, or possibly Cryptic Wit. It probably makes perfect sense within the mind of its creator, and it pushes a very strong aesthetic as far as it can possibly go, but it offers no key to let anyone else in.
GRAEME: It’s rare that I feel as if a comic is actively telling me to go fuck myself, but Spawn #200 is one of those cases. This is a weirdly repellent read – storywise, terribly overwritten and impenetrably plotted, and with ugly art – that seems designed to celebrate itself and its fanbase, but just confuse and exclude anyone else. Even things like the “Previously in Spawn” recap on the inside front cover don’t help, with no context given and bland, meaningless names being thrown out (“The Clown,” “The Freak” – charitably, I guess, you could say that McFarlane is trying to go for some kind of archetypal thing with his names, but it really feels as if half the characters got stuck with generic placeholders that were never meant to be permanent). It really is as if this is a comic that requires a secret password to even understand it.
Unlike you, I felt that I could tell the Golden pages; there’s a change in the page design and the character-work that McFarlane doesn’t manage to completely demolish with his inks; there’s more space, and a more traditional, clearer sense of panel-to-panel continuity. It’s the most attractive stuff in the book, but still wasted on the material, which seems to consist of men, monsters and/or men who turn into monsters talking to each other in monologue and occasionally fighting for no immediately apparent reason. Something about Hell? More than anything, reading this reminded me of my one experience trying to watch Pokemon and just getting exhausted by the sheer amounts of energy it spent trying to spin its wheels and keep up the illusion of things happening. Spawn is Goth Pokemon. There, I said it.