1990s Gothic Superheroes - Spawn

Or Give Me the Same Thing But Different

A few years ago Red Letter Media was roasting a schlock masterpiece called Faust: Love of the Damned, (something I will NEVER RE:View).  They concluded, somewhat prematurely, that this movie was a ripoff of Spawn.  It wasn’t but the film undoubtedly got the minimal financing it did because of Spawn

This is kind of funny to me because when I first saw the animated version of Spawn during a Typhoon Party on Okinawa, my immediate reaction was that it was a ripoff of Faust.

First, let me be clear, a Typhoon Party is not some bizarre Marine Corps initiation ritual involving Brobdingnagian amounts of farting.  It just means you're locked up in the barracks for a couple of days during a literal typhoon, so everybody gets drunk and stays that way until the storm leaves for the more fashionable parts of the Far East. Consequently, binge-watching stuff is pretty common and Riggs had the first season of Spawn on tape.

Second, Spawn isn’t exactly a rip-off of Faust but it’s too close to be coincidence either.

While I seem to recall Todd McFarlane saying something about him never having heard of the Faust comic, frankly a deconstructed superhero story about a killer who is brought back to Earth with demonic powers due to a Faustian bargain and who is pining after a lost love is a little too close for random coincidence.  Besides, everyone in the comics world knew about Faust: Love of the Damned, it was simply too infamous for McFarlane to not have been aware of it.

Nonetheless, McFarlane was able to produce sketches from when he was in high school “proving” that at least the costume design was unique. In fairness, while Spawn was known for its violence, it was not notable for hardcore pornography like Faust was.

It is rather curious to me why Spawn became such a hot property in late 1990s Hollywood. Usually, there is something going on behind the scenes but the only thing I have been able to uncover in a week of research is Tinsel Town groupthink. 

In 1989, Tim Burton’s Batman blew the box office doors off in a very big way. Adjusted for inflation it made over a billion dollars in Today Dollars.  Money interests Hollywood the same way blood in the water interests a shark. 

Although they weren’t quite sure what to do with this new trend.  The Superman franchise was viewed as a failure although most of that was due to the Salkinds’ poor judgement. The problem was that Hollywood producers didn’t think the Salkinds had done anything wrong.  “Superhero movies are supposed to be camp,” was the thinking at the time.  And while Batman was kind of campy, Batman Returns was much less so.  They didn’t know what to do with this dark superhero thing that these new weird kids, (who had taken as their sigil a single letter X), were so into.  Was it just Tim Burton maybe?

Then came The Crow. Not as big a hit as Batman Returns but big enough.  Clearly, the prior success was no accident.   The ancient battle cry of Hollywood was taken up, “Give me the same thing, but different.”

Anime was becoming popular with this new generation that had turned things as harmless as skateboarding and bicycling into gladiatorial death sports. “Of course, they love blood-drenched cartoons.”  The problem was by the time American studios had started to look seriously into the matter it was already the mid-90s and the anime studios had worked out they owned the goldmine so why not mine the gold themselves?

Clearly, Hollywood was going to have to make their own adult cartoons.  AOL Time Warner put HBO to work on it.  They immediately hired Catherine Winder who had started at the one half of the old Top Craft anime studio that had become Walt Disney Studios Japan (the other half became Studio Ghibli). Her first American animation credit was the utterly bizarre Aeon Flux for MTV. Sexy (I suppose), violent, and very, very out to lunch, she was clearly the perfect choice to head up the project. She hired Ralph Bakshi to make something called Spicy City that no one including me remembers. And Todd McFarlane to create an animated version of his comic book Spawn.

As I said, I saw the animated version first, because I was drunk and had nothing better to do until we would be stood down from TC1 Emergency. I had been aware of Spawn for some time and I had no interest in it because it was by Todd McFarlane.  

In college, I had heard everyone raving about this hot new artist who had just been handed a new Spider-Man comic.  I bought three issues before I decided that everyone except me was being conned. 

The stories had all the usual problems of a comic book being written by an artist. The plotting was bad, the dialog was clunky and the pacing wasn’t there at all. Frankly, I didn’t like the artwork that much either.  McFarlane drenched each page in ludicrous amounts of detail work.

The eyes were too buglike and too big, the strands of web were so jagged it looked like barbed wire. There was no sense of proportion and less of restraint.  I remember at the time thinking, “This is a self-taught artist who doesn’t know how to tell a story in pictures.  He just fakes it but there is so much random, chaotic stuff going on people buy it but he is faking it.” 

Consequently, I was not interested in a comic book titled Todd McFarlane’s Spawn. I figured it was going to be a bunch of Boomer cliches wrapped up in incomprehensible artwork.

Official Al Simmons Spawn toy

Good call.  Pretty much every Baby Boomer Vietnam-era political obsession was in evidence.  McFarlane was a white liberal writing about black people who were closer to a TV sitcom family than any of the black people I ever got to know in the Marine Corps. And of course, everyone in the military was a bunch of baby-burning war criminals.  Being a liberal Canadian McFarlane poured gasoline on this burning pile of cliches.

McFarlane himself was astonishingly white, coming from Calgary. He married the only girl he ever dated in his life (still married to her 40 years later). He had and still has a rabid obsession with baseball but claims that he couldn’t go pro because of an ankle injury.  The injury is real enough but I can’t speak to his level of athletic talent prior to that.   Regardless, he appears to be an authentic alpha male who took an interest in a nerd hobby and when being a career athlete didn’t pan out, pursued that instead.

Given his driven personality, and the Big Two’s obsession with competing with the Indies during the 1980s, turning himself into an overpaid pet rockstar artist scans. The personality mix strongly favored him, since then as now comic book production has been dominated by Gamma males, who themselves are easily dominated.  I can’t tell when he first hired publicists but it’s reasonable to assume he did so as soon as he could afford them. 

Spawn was at the top of the comics sales charts and it didn’t get there by accident, but it didn’t get there on the strength of McFarlane’s writing talent either  In fairness to him, he recognized his own weakness and started hiring A-List writing talents, like Mike Grell, Alan Moore, and Neil Gaiman.  The last naturally proved to be a long-term headache that resulted in mutual lawsuits.

McFarlane had a great deal of control over the animated series but seems to have had quite a bit less with the live-action movie.  He insisted the animated show had to be raw and shocking, which is honestly what HBO wanted from him in the first place so that wasn’t exactly a hard sell.  The live-action film on the other hand was PG-13. After all both of the Burton Batman movies had been PG-13 and they had made plenty of money for the studio. However, given the significant underperformance of Batman and Robin, Spawn was allowed to be edgy as it could get away with… So long as it kept its PG-13 rating.

But this was the height of Spawn’s influence.  When the new century rolled around, sales numbers dwindled as they had for the rest of the comics industry. During Gaiman’s lawsuit, it was revealed that Spawn’s initial sales were in the 1.7 million issue range but had fallen to 300,000 monthly when he was brought on board.  Gaiman claimed that his name value boosted sales back up to around a million. Today an average issue of Spawn is allegedly moving around 20,000 units.  Good for an independent comic book but it’s nowhere near what it was. Although, the Spawn Compendium numbers are much higher.

At the end of the day, my biggest problem with Spawn is the same problem I have with Sandman.  It’s the standard atheist’s view of the Christian supernatural. There is no God, but there is a Satan who is very real. There are angels but they are no different from demons, just more hypocritical. It all leads to an afterlife that is even more dreary than what the ancient Greeks envisioned. They are all alike.

It’s the same thing every time.

The same thing but different.

Discuss in the comments below