Jan 27, 2025
Spawn is one of my favorite franchises of all time. I have been reading it for 4 years now and I am still only 210 out of the current ~370 issues in. I have probably spent over 100 hours reading the comic, reading the side stories like Gunslinger Spawn, The Scorched, King Spawn, Spawn and Witchblade, watching the 18 episode 1997 HBO masterpiece that was a great introduction to the comic, despite being very different, and the only cartoon I know of that is darker and grimmer in tone than anime Japanese anime I've ever seen - Corpse Party, Elfen Lied, Death Note, Perfect Blue
...
and even Berserk included. When I first heard that there was a manga branching off of the greatest American comic book or "graphic novel" series of all time, I was pleasently shocked and scowered the internet in search of this 3 volume, obscure manga. What I found was so unbelievable subpar to cary the name "Spawn" along with such a cool title, that I wonder how on Mamon's Earthly realm was something like this greenlit? My disappointment is immesurable and my day is ruined.
The main character's backstory has been altered to the point of losing all drama, resembling the intentionally comically basic backstory of Kenji Fujikido in Ninja Slayer. He has a happy family, which is shown for all of a couple of panels and then BOOM! Suddenly they are dead and he's on a quest to avenge them. It's revealed in the opening sequence that he's some sort of 400 year old warewolf now. WTF??? It's like the author wasn't even a fan of the story he was basing a fanfiction off of. What true fan of Spawn would seek to remove all elements of the story that make it so incredibly good? The fact that there is no long time skip in the base universe and timeline of Al Simmons so that he is perpetually trying to reveal himself to his former wife Wanda who's perpetually young and the mother of two toddlers.
Juzo Tokoro-san saw this amazing drama and said "Yeah, but what if it sucked?!". The one thing that remains unchanged is that Spawn dies in a fire, so his skin deterioration is still inline with the premise of becoming hideous from your own demise, but now it's not being betrayed and scorched in Vietnam but instead...is blown up in his own car no reason??? Was the IRA involved in this plot?
Nothing works. This work doesn't work on any level. Non-Spawn fans wouldn't ever read this and would be confused and Spawn fans will be insulted. The story makes no sense. This isn't Spawn. It's some cheesy 80s one-shot action doujinshi/pulp idea rebranded under one of the biggest names in comics so as to sell more - and it clearly failed, as evidenced by the fact that no one has ever heard of this manga.
Everything happens fast. There is no timing to anything. It's almost like Tokoro-san had no passion and wanted the drawing sessions to end as quickly as possible. To top it all off, he gets random ass powers with no explanation, rhyme or reason. Spawn getting a hard, unpiercable armor and fighting with punches and kicks? Has Tokoro-san even read Spawn? Spawn is a story about a man being brought back from the dead after making an accidental deal with the Devil, thinking it was God, not stuck on Earth as a hideous zombie with regeneration abilities and decaying flesh, unable to fulfill his dying wish of reuniting with Wanda, tortured physically and mentally, unable to die. A bitter, horrifying, gutwrenching irony. To the point where the concept for Deadpool was completely ripped off from Spawn, as well as Deathstroke/Slade and others. Besides regeneration, Spawn has a symbiotic suit made of cursed earthworms that chase him anywhere he goes, plasma blasts and teleportation powers in the original series, as well as unbreakable chains he could shoot, tie around enemies necks, or immobilizing them. He's a Hellish entity, hence HellSPAWN. Not a UFC kickboxer. None of his signature stances are present. His iconic long cape is gone in the process of fighting the extremely flat, uninteresting minor villains that pop up every 10 pages or so in just a few pannels. Why would you not just make an original character to carry out your story if you're gonna turn him into a basic street fighter? Why do you have to highjack an intricate, grim, complex and epic franchise like Spawn in order to just make a Saturday morning cartoon? What a waste. A spawn manga sounds so much cooler on paper. The Deadpool manga, although formulaic and certainly no masterpiece, is orders of magnitude more professional that this garbage.
Is this what people who don't like Spawn see when they read Spawn?
If you are someone who enjoys manga but never reads comics, please for the love of God, give Spawn a chance! But not this version! Before even thinking about wasting your time on this, read the original story. Make use of the fact that it has the compendium editions now, so it is a lot more approachable than it used to be, despite its extreme length. It is America's Berserk. I actually prefer it over Berserk, believe it or not. It is more my kind of story and, unlike Berserk, it doesn't take a while to get use to or get into. It's good right away from chapter (issue) 1. Maybe, if you don't wanna read, watch the 1997 series. Anything but this is a better start into the franchise, even the 2000 movies with shit CGI.
The art is super mediocre. Nothing more to say about it. TBH, you can't find any good scans on the internet and the quality of the scans contributes to the illegibility of the manga. It has some cool panels and pretty cool monsters, so that's where the only extra point lies in the abysmal rating that I would give this:
2/10
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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