Friday, March 4, 2011

SPAWN #65 - September 1997

The Past

Credits: Todd McFarlane (story), Greg Capullo (pencils), Todd McFarlane & Chance Wolf (inks), Tom Orzechowski (copy editor & letters), Brian Haberlin & Dan Kemp (colors)

Summary: Cogliostro gives Sam and Twitch a tour of the alleys, explaining the past of Al Simmons and detailing his life as Spawn. The detectives learn that a subconscious suggestion led Spawn to choose their office to unload Billy Kincaid’s body. Cogliostro informs them that they have been chosen as Spawn’s knights in the quest for his lost soul.

I Love the’ 90s: On the real-life Terry Fitzgerald’s hype page, he announces that HBO will release the Spawn series on DVD, for “all of you techies (like myself).”

Review: So, two months after the movie is in theatres, we get the big recap issue. I’m sure McFarlane wanted this to be on the stands in time to coincide with the film’s release, but the book always seemed to be two months or so off-schedule. Given the nature of the story, this could’ve been an inventory issue that could be placed anywhere, but perhaps McFarlane thought it would be unfair to the regular readers to interrupt the story arc from #62-#64. The story’s told through a combination of prose and static splash page images, as Cogliostro tries to justify Spawn’s petulant behavior, and pretend that there’s been more than five issues worth of plot over the past three years. Finally, Sam and Twitch learn that they’ve been selected to be Spawn’s “knights,” which I’m sure just thrills them. Despite the abundance of filler this issue, this revelation actually does advance one of the series’ longest running subplots. It’s such an oldie, in fact, that the original solicitation for issue #24 had Spawn and the detectives teaming up as the alleys’ newest heroes. You’d almost think McFarlane’s been wasting everyone’s time for the past forty issues…

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