Spawn

It's been a long time since I even opened a Spawn comic book, much less read one. In fact, I'm pretty sure the last one I opened / read was issue #10, which was written by Dave Sim. It was published in May, 1993. Oh, my. That's . . . um . . . 24 years ago. 

So it's been awhile.

But when I was going through the Comixology website the other day, looking for good deals and investigating things that looked interesting (I'm a big fan of the three page previews), I happened upon the cover of Spawn #279, and it was just astounding. It's a close-up of a black woman's blood-spattered face, and her expression is just arresting. Not to mention her eyes. I had to see who'd committed this act of art. Turns out it was a feller named Jason Shawn Alexander. I'd never heard of him. Although as I looked through his curriculum vitae I saw that he had done the art on a book entitled Frostbite (for Vertigo), and I remembered picking that up from the stand for a look, attracted by the cover art. (I probably didn't buy it because it had the double kiss of death for me: it had a $3.99 per issue cost and it was a six issue limited series. Put those things together and you get a $24 comic book . . . which you can bet will be collected and sold for a hell of a lot less than that. (In fact, I just checked, and Amazon has the collected trade paperback of Frostbite up for $10.17 (and the List Price was only $16.99)  . . . and the Kindle / Comixology version is only $4.99 (which is a sale, admittedly -- it lists for $12.99). 

But this artwork on Spawn was just astonishing. So I looked to see where this Jason Shawn Alexander fellow had started on it, and turned out he had pretty much just started . . . in July 2017 with issue #276. Which only cost $1.99. So I bought it and started reading.

Here's what I found particularly noteworthy:

Page 1, Panel 5: Cyan (who seems to be the main character) looking off-stage with a stunned expression.

Then an asTONishing sequence on pages 2 and 3 wherein the girl / hallucination first rips out her heart, then pulls off her lower jaw. Whaaaaat?

Page 6, Panel 2: A character who seems to be the lead bad guy rears back, his mouth open in a horrifying smile, and there's a motion blur of his teeth across the panel. This panel solidified my impression (which had already started to coalesce) that Mr. Alexander was either a student, acolyte, worshipper, or follower of Bill Sienkiewicz / Dave McKean. With a little David Mack thrown in for good measure. (Of course Bill S. is the guy who blazed the trail.) 

Page 9, Panel 6, an astonishing 3/4 view of a man's head. I think it might be Al Simmons . . . Spawn's secret identity.  But . . . well, y'know . . . it's been 24 years since I read the book, so what do I know? Very cool portrait, though. (And oh . . . Page 10, Panel 1: that was Al. Bazinga.)

Page 11, Panels 7 and 8 . . . that Cthulhu moment? SERiously creepy. 

And the rest of it . . . the Not Particularly Noteworthy parts . . . were at least pretty good. I'm not a fan of the horror genre in any medium, so this book isn't really up my alley at all, but I still found it compelling, and I am pretty sure that I'll be checking out the next issue. And we'll see where it goes from there. 

But that art . . . man. This Jason Shawn Alexander fellow is The Shit.