Spawn Kills Every Spawn! #1 // Review
Periodically, any comic book universe gets a little big and unwieldy. Just to blow-off a little steam, artists have a little fun killing off a whole bunch of characters in jest. Back in 1985, Boris the Bear did it to irradiated martial arts animals for Dark Horse. A couple of years later, Fred Hembeck destroyed the Marvel Universe for the sake of a comic book called...Fred Hembeck Destroys the Marvel Universe. Periodically since then there has been the opportunity to wipe-out a universe for fun. Image Comics does it again this month in Spawn Kills Every Spawn! #1. A cartoony kid Spawn is going to go on a rampage killing every variant he can in a four-issue mini series written by John Layman with artist Rob Duenas and colorist Robert Nugent.
Spawny is kind of upset. He’s been dealing with the fact that he’s not the only Hellspawn. He’s upset. He turns to the reader and lets them know that this isn’t even the worst part...as it turns out, he’s not even cannon. So he doesn’t really exist. Surely there must be people who appreciate him, though. He’s going to go and find out just how beloved he is...at a Spawn convention…
Layman really seems to want to be funny. The good news is that there isn’t really any kind of desperation in his scripting of the first issue that would suggest a deep NEED to be funny. As a result, the issue doesn’t feel nearly as cringey and awkward as it might have otherwise come across. There’s a nonchalance about the awful comedy that feels genuinely charming in its own way. That goes a long way towards almost making the first issue of the new mini-series kind of enjoyable in its own way.
The cuddly nature of Duenas’ visuals feel just weird enough next to the day glow coloring job of Nugent. There’s a lot of detail crammed into every panel, but it’s not too terribly accomplished. There isn’t that wonderfully bizarre sense of inspired exaggeration that marks the best artists to wield similar styles. Basil Wolverton could have done amazing things with a parody like this. Harvey Kurtzman would have been brilliant with it as well. What Duenas DOES do quite well is spoof the whole visual language of a Spawn comic book. The mindless, issue-length demonic slugfests in the mainstream Spawn universe are pretty solid spoofs of themselves to begin with, but Duenas takes it to the next level in fun, well executed visuals that are, nevertheless...pretty uninspired.
It’s just...weird...to think that they’re going to try to stretch this thing out into five issues. They’ve pretty much got the overall feel nailed more or less perfectly in the first issue. No reason to go on about it. Maybe a second issue could wrap-up everything, but even THAT seems pretty indulgent given the amorphous attempt at humor that the first issue has turned out to be.
