Spawn 300: End of the Beginning

I remember seeing Todd McFarlane at the Chicago Comicon in the late 1980s. SPAWN was still a new thing, and Todd was talking up how the symbol would one day be as ubiquitously recognized as a black bat in a yellow oval.

I gave it a year, two at the max.

Thirty-plus years later, here we are, with the milestone issue of SPAWN, one issue away from setting the record as the longest-running creator-owned comic, with a wide array of supporting characters, good and evil, and a twisted morality play that treats Heaven and Hell as competing corporations.

I will say that one of the things that made SPAWN intriguing to me was that he had been giving a finite amount of infinite power. Starting wtih 9:9:9:9, every expenditure of eldritch energy caused the Spawn-o-Meter to decrement. Which meant that, at some point in the character's run, he was going to bottom out, and things would be over.

When we last see Al Simmons in SPAWN 300, we get our last look at the meter: 0:0:0:1.

And if you think it's about to be over, you're dead wrong. Because Al Simmons has been concocting a plan, and everyone -- every demon, every angel, every agent of Heaven and Hell -- has underestimated his true capabilities. But they're about to see them -- as well as some new allies he's made along the way, introduced in this issue. (Trust me, everyone's going to be excited about Jessica Priest's transformation!)

McFarlane is joined by Greg Capullo, J. Scott Campbell, Jason Shawn Alexander, and Jerome Opena to produce this magnum opus, with its plethora of alternate covers.

One thing that hasn't changed since the first issue is that each issue seems to have been written in a rush. There's a plan and a plot. That's easy to see. But a little bit of proofreading would go a long (LONG) way to improving the storytelling. But SPAWN fans are unlikely to notice, as they get caught up in the visual spectacle of the greatest battle of Al Simmons' afterlife.