Spawn (character)

• 1. Introduction

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  Spawn, the antihero of Image Comics, debuted in Spawn #1 in May 1992, and that first issue sold 1.7 million copies. The hero is Albert Francis Simmons, called Al, who is better known simply as Spawn. Todd McFarlane created him. Simmons begins as a government assassin who dies, goes to Hell for his crimes, and returns in a body he barely recognizes. What bargain sent him back? Who betrayed him, and who keeps hunting him afterward? And why did a monthly comic about a damned soldier end up in court more than once?

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• 2. A Deal With Malebolgia

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  Detroit, Michigan, is where Albert Francis Simmons grew up, the second of three siblings. His father, Bernard, was a traveling salesman, and his mother, Esther, was a devil worshipper. Al rose to become a highly decorated Marine officer, reaching the rank of Lieutenant Colonel with Force Recon. He later joined the Secret Service, and the Central Intelligence Agency recruited him. Finally he joined the U.S. Security Group, an umbrella agency covering the CIA, NSA, and NSC. Its director was Jason Wynn, and under him Al became a formidable assassin.

  A mission in Botswana turned Wynn against his own killer. Wynn had grown tired of Simmons' increasing sense of morality. He secretly hired Bruce Stinson, codename Chapel, who was Al's friend and partner, to kill him. Al was burned to death and sent to Hell. There he struck a bargain with the devil Malebolgia and agreed to become a Hellspawn. In exchange, he could see his wife Wanda one last time. Malebolgia returned him to the living realm with a severely burned body and a demonic guardian called the Violator.

  The deal turned out to be a trick. Five years had passed since his death, and Al could no longer recognize himself or be recognized. He remembered only fragments, including his own name, his marriage to Wanda, and the fact that he had died. Using CIA files, he tracked Wanda down and found her married to his former best friend, Terry. They had a daughter named Cyan. Then another Hellspawn gave Al a warning about the substance that powered him, called Necroplasm, and about what would happen when it ran out.

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• 3. Rat City And The Suit

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  New York City became the proving ground for a Hellspawn who wanted to spend as little power as possible. Spawn fought street gangs and organized crime, and in these early battles he was a dark and sadistic antihero. He became "King of Rat City", a gathering of alleys populated by the city's homeless. There he met Cogliostro, who knew much about Spawn and became his mentor. Police detectives Sam Burke and Twitch Williams took notice of him. A warrior angel named Angela hunted Hellspawns for sport, and a cyborg mob enforcer named Overt-Kill attacked him. Another angelic fighter, Anti-Spawn, also called the Redeemer, turned out to be Jason Wynn.

  After the clash with the Redeemer, Spawn's costume changed. It gained a new cape and chains that could shift shape, and the boots and gloves were replaced with spikes. From then on, the suit fed on souls. The costume is a living symbiote named Leetha of the 7th House of K, also called K7-Leetha. Its shroud, spikes, chains and skulls are one organism bonded to his central nervous system. It protects him even when he is unconscious. The red cape can carry him through the air and work as an extra set of limbs.

  Tony Twist later sent a reprogrammed Overt-Kill after Terry, and Spawn had to reveal his identity to save his friend. A well-placed shot from Twitch Williams brought the cyborg down. Spawn's other abilities include superhuman strength, speed, stamina and durability. He can conjure objects, shapeshift, speak with animals, stop time, teleport and feed off the sins of people. Necroplasm lets him fire energy blasts, though exceeding his limit would send him back to Hell. In life, Al had been a trained martial artist and weapon master. Soon the attacks on Spawn began arriving from two directions at once, Heaven and Hell.

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• 4. War In Heaven And Hell

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  A being called the Heap, an emissary of the Greenworld, pulled Spawn back from the edge of evil. The mounting assaults had been pushing Spawn toward darkness. The Greenworld is a dimension whose power equals both Heaven and Hell. It gave him new powers that seemed to put every element of the world under his control. When the being Urizen attacked, Spawn split the ground and imprisoned him inside the earth. Then he learned that Malebolgia had caused Urizen's release, hoping to start Armageddon and conquer Heaven.

  Spawn and Angela traveled to Hell to stop Malebolgia. During the battle, Angela mortally wounded him, and he killed her in retaliation. Consumed with anger, Spawn took Malebolgia's head. The demon Mammon then offered him Hell's throne, which was rightfully his. After consulting Cogliostro, Spawn decided to turn Hell into a new paradise. Cogliostro then revealed that he was Cain, the first person to go to Hell, after murdering his brother in envy. Cogliostro had always meant to use a Hellspawn to take over Hell. He took the throne but restored Al's human form as a parting gift.

  Back on Earth, a young Wiccan named Nyx helped Spawn regain his suit. Mammon tricked his way into controlling the bond between Spawn and the suit, and every memory of Al was erased. Spawn freed a group of angels called the Forgotten and stayed neutral in the war. Later the Greenworld restored his memories. Rejected by both Heaven and Hell, he lived in an abandoned warehouse while insects crawled inside his body. Then the Disciple tore out his brain and threw his heart into the Greenworld and his body into Hell.

  Mammon tortured Spawn for his secrets. When Spawn's heart fell into the Greenworld, a soul was freed. Chris, along with Sam Burke and Twitch Williams, traveled to Hell to rescue him. Spawn escaped and discovered that the signs of Armageddon came from Wanda's twin children. Zera revealed that Jake was God and Katie was Satan. Their hatred of each other had led the Mother to strip their powers and positions and send them to Earth.

  The Mother told Spawn he could not stop Armageddon, but he could preserve humanity if he ate a piece of Forbidden Fruit from the Garden of Eden. Demons cannot enter that garden, so his power was weakened there. With guidance from Cyan, he defeated all twelve Disciples except Judas, whom Cyan told him to spare. Judas stabbed him in the heart, and the Mother resurrected him with the fruit. Spawn gained an angelic form and greater power.

  Spawn returned to an Earth destroyed by the Four Horsemen, where angels and demons waited for their last battle. He destroyed the forces of Heaven, Hell and humanity, and then God and Satan killed him. They fought alone on Earth. Spawn came back, resurrected everyone with their memories intact, and closed the doors to Heaven, Hell and Earth. He asked the Mother to make him human. Then he remembered that before his first death he had beaten Wanda and caused her to miscarry their child. He decided he had always been a monster and asked to remain a Hellspawn. That lost child would soon return in the hands of Mammon.

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• 5. Morana And The Return

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  Mammon, disguised as Mr. Malefick, had been shaping the Simmons family for years. Al's brother Richard could not remember their parents because of a spell Mammon had placed. Spawn found the family home under that spell and learned that his mother had planned with Mammon to create the strongest Hellspawn. His father's journal described an ancestor who once met a Hellspawn known as the Gunslinger Spawn.

  A castle became the stage for Mammon's real plan. He wanted the Rapture to occur so that Satan, God and Malebolgia would all be gone. His perfect Hellspawn was Morana, the child Wanda had miscarried. After bathing in virgin's blood, Morana bonded with the uniform and prepared to consume her parents' souls. Cyan used her own power to travel to the future, where an old woman gave her a message for Al. Morana beat the last twelve members of the Legion, whom Spawn had summoned. Then Cyan taught Nyx a spell that sealed both Mammon and Morana away.

  Al then jumped into another dimension to be reborn as a weapon against both Heaven and Hell. In the Endgame storyline, an amnesiac man named Jim Downing woke in a hospital, seemed to know Spawn, and transformed into him during a fire. A nurse named Sara helped him, and Wanda Blake recognized him as the form Al took when he first returned to Earth. The Clown, a deceiving enemy, told Jim that his suit was a living being.

  In the Resurrection storyline, God, appearing in the form of a dog, told Al that Wanda had died and was trapped in Hell. Spawn fought Satan and saved his wife. Wanda went to Heaven, and Spawn stayed on Earth to protect people in her memory from the forces of both realms.

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• 6. Courtroom Battles

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  In 1993, McFarlane contracted Neil Gaiman to write Spawn #9. Gaiman introduced Cogliostro, Angela and Medieval Spawn in that issue. McFarlane designed and co-created all three, and he agreed Gaiman was a co-creator. He paid Gaiman royalties for reprints, graphic novels and action figures. After a few years, McFarlane stopped paying. He told Gaiman that he owned all the rights, citing the copyright notice in the issue and calling Gaiman's work a work-for-hire.

  Gaiman sued in 2002, and McFarlane counter-sued. Gaiman had formed a company with Marvel Comics called Marvels and Miracles, LLC, which paid for the suit. Its main goal was settling who owned Miracleman, a character in which Gaiman felt he had a stake. McFarlane was believed to hold a sizable share of Miracleman after buying the assets of Eclipse Comics. The court threw that issue out. Instead, it ruled on breach of contract, ownership, and whether the characters from Spawn #9 could be copyrighted. It rejected every argument McFarlane made, which led to a sizable judgment against him and Image Comics.

  A 2004 appeal decision upheld that judgment. The court held that Gaiman wrote the story while McFarlane illustrated the characters, so each contributed half. Each therefore held a 50% stake in Cogliostro, Angela and Medieval Spawn. Reprint collections after the lawsuit left out Spawn #9 and Dave Sim's #10, which featured the copyrighted character Cerebus. Both issues returned in the hardcover and deluxe editions of the Spawn Origins Collection. In 2012, the two men settled, and Gaiman received full ownership of Angela. He sold all rights to the character to Marvel Comics.

  The Marvel dispute left a mark on the story itself. McFarlane lost the right to use the Man of Miracles character because of a copyright dispute with Marvel. As a result, the character was retconned out of existence, and God and Satan stopped being twins. Their story was then based on the Abrahamic story of Creation.

  A different suit came from a mob enforcer McFarlane named Antonio "Tony Twist" Twistelli, after the hockey player Tony Twist. In 2004, a jury found that Todd McFarlane Productions had profited from the player's likeness. It awarded him a $15 million verdict. Two appeals upheld the verdict in June 2006. The two sides later settled out of court for $5 million.

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• 7. Sales Peaks And Valleys

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  At 16, Todd McFarlane created Spawn, after a hobby of drawing that began at an early age. He spent "countless hours" perfecting each component of the character's visual design. The comic arrived in the early 1990s, when collecting was growing exponentially and a speculator boom was hunting for the next hot book. McFarlane already had superstar status from Spider-Man, where his name appeared prominently as both writer and artist. His break with Marvel Comics and the formation of Image Comics struck many as a sea-change event. In May 2008, Wizard rated "The Launch of Image Comics" number one among events that rocked the industry from 1991 to 2008.

  During Spawn's second year, Wizard called it the best-selling comic published on a consistent basis. It had reached that spot without fancy covers, poly bagged issues or card inserts. Sales slumped around Spawn #25 but were again consistently strong by Spawn #45. The 1997 feature film brought a peak. Its pre-release publicity made Spawn the top-selling comic for May 1997, and Curse of the Spawn #9 came in fifth. Yet the film was only a mild commercial success and never started a film franchise.

  The decline was gradual. Spawn #174, from 2008, ranked 99th for the month with retail orders of 22,667. In October 2008, issue #185 marked a new creative direction and McFarlane's return to the book. It sold out at the distribution level and received a second printing. By issue #191 in May 2009, estimated sales of 19,803 copies had dropped Spawn below the top 100 titles reported by Diamond Comic Distributors. As of September 2010 it ranked 115th in the top 300.

  Issue #200 sold out on the day of its release in 2011, and a second printing followed the next month. It featured work by Greg Capullo, David Finch, Michael Golden, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Marc Silvestri, Danny Miki and Ashley Wood. IGN gave it a negative review. Sales kept falling despite a series of homage covers meant to renew interest, and Spawn #243 hit a low of under 12,000 retail orders. A resurgence began as the title approached its 300th issue. That milestone made Spawn the longest-running independent comic book series of all time. McFarlane has said he wants Spawn to outlive him the way Spider-Man, Batman, Superman and even Disney outlived their creators.

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• 8. Universe And Screens

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  In 2021, McFarlane built a wider Spawn Universe, starting with a one-shot called Spawn Universe No. 1 that sold 211,000 copies. King Spawn followed in August 2021, with pre-order sales of 497,000 and total sales of 520,000. Gunslinger Spawn arrived in October 2021 and sold 385,000 copies. That made it the biggest launch for a new ongoing superhero title in 25 years. The Scorched, released in January 2022, sold more than 270,000 copies.

  Earlier spin-offs had drawn famous writers. Alan Moore wrote a three-issue Violator miniseries, and Neil Gaiman wrote the three-issue Angela series with art by Greg Capullo. Frank Miller wrote Spawn/Batman, with art by McFarlane himself. Curse of the Spawn, the first long-term monthly spin-off, ran 29 issues and aimed at an older audience with a darker tone. Spawn: The Dark Ages followed Lord Covenant, a 12th-century knight killed in a holy crusade who returned as a Hellspawn. Rat City, a 2024 series set a hundred years in the future, followed Peter Cairn, a cybernetic Spawn transformed by Al Simmons in Spawn #350.

  The character reached screens in 1997, when Michael Jai White played Spawn in a feature film. White became the first African American to portray a major comic book superhero in a major motion picture. The film received generally negative reviews. HBO also aired an animated series, Todd McFarlane's Spawn, with Keith David as the voice. It won two Emmys, one in 1998 and one in 1999, and two Golden Reel Awards. Spawn also fought Kratos in a 2011 Death Battle! episode and appeared as an avatar in the 2018 film Ready Player One.

  Video games include Todd McFarlane's Spawn: The Video Game for the SNES in 1995 and Spawn: Armageddon in 2003. He also joined Soulcalibur II in 2003 and Mortal Kombat 11 in 2019, with Keith David returning for the latter. In 2023, Spawn headlined the battle pass of Season 6 in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. McFarlane Toys released its first Spawn toy line in 1994, and the band Iced Earth based a concept album, The Dark Saga, on the story. Wizard ranked Spawn 60th among comic book characters of all time, Empire placed him 50th, and IGN placed him 36th in 2011.

  The long-running plans for a new film restarted in 2019 after the success of the R-rated Joker. Jason Blum's Blumhouse was named as producer, and McFarlane planned to direct. Jamie Foxx was reported in May 2018 to be playing Spawn. On the 22nd of July 2024, McFarlane announced that the script was complete and that the film would be retitled King Spawn.

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