Broken Frontier

Spawn writer David Hine is taking Todd McFarlane's creation in a bold new direction along with incoming artist Brian Haberlin starting with today's Spawn #166. He walks you through the key moments of the issue...

Since I took over writing Spawn with issue #150, artist Phil Tan and I have been systematically tying up most of the loose plot lines and building to the Apocalypse. We wanted to deliver on the promise of Armageddon that had been building since Al Simmons was first brought back from the dead as a Hellspawn.

The intention was to bring the book to a point where we had something like a blank slate and then take the book off in new directions. I wanted to avoid simply hitting a reset button. We ended the Armageddon arc by destroying the Earth and wiping out the human race. Then Spawn, temporarily in possession of the powers of a God, recreated the world and brought back humanity.

Sounds like a reset? Not quite. The world really was destroyed. Everyone really did die. The world you’ll be seeing in Spawn from now on is not our reality and never will be. Although everything looks superficially the same, there is something terribly wrong with it.

Editor Brian Haberlin is also our new regular artist and his style reflects the new Spawn perfectly. This world has a constructed look. It is hyper-real with glossy textured surfaces, but this is the reality of nightmare. The surfaces crack and decay and there is a sense of something very bad lurking beneath the surface.

PAGE 1

This issue centers on Detective Twitch Williams finding Spawn and trying to persuade him that he is still needed to fight evil in the world. There’s a framing story that opens and closes the issue, the story of the ordinary people who live in New Vista Apartments and how that evil is creeping into their minds. I’m going to concentrate on that framing story here.

There are a number of ways to open a scene, the most common being the establishing shot. I wanted to do the opposite here, to start with a detail, an extreme close-up that summed up what this new Spawn series is about. Celia has this habit of picking her fingers. It’s something I do myself when I’m stressed and I guess I’ve always wondered how far you could go with that kind of habit. For our purposes this is a very useful metaphor. Celia is literally peeling away the perfect shiny airbrushed surface to reveal the raw substance beneath.

I always do thumbnails for my books, which I normally don’t send to the artist but in this case Brian was fine with me sending layouts for the first two pages. I had a very precise idea of how I wanted this opening scene to work. Brian and I had agreed that the colors on the book were also going to be very distinctive. Brian approached this like a cinematographer using lighting and color to isolate and focus on significant elements. So we have a very limited color palette that reflects the mood and emotions of the characters.

There’s a wonderfully grotesque contrast between the perfect painted nails and the shredded flesh of Celia’s fingers.

PAGE 2

Panel 1 puts the reader right inside Celia’s head, looking down those long, long arms. I actually asked for a black background on this panel but Brian was right to put in the details of the kitchen setting. By tilting the point of view he has created a really disorientating effect, as if Celia’s world is sliding away from her, beyond her grasp.

As she looks at the knives, those heavy black handles are more ominous than the steel blades, buried in the block. Brian captured the atmosphere of this scene perfectly. You can almost hear the voice murmuring in Celia’s head as she looks at her reflection in the knife’s blade.

PAGE 3

Whenever I talk to Brian about the new Spawn, we always end up talking in cinematic terms. Brian has a film school background so when he works, in his head he is shooting a movie, which is pretty much how I approach my scripts. There are a lot of silent panels in this book, but if an artist is doing his job right, the reader will be picking up clues that will create background sounds.

I’m a big fan of David Lynch films and when I look at this page I can hear the weird industrial soundtrack of Eraserhead, the electric buzz of those flickering lights and the movement that makes Joey turn his head in panel 3.

Red clearly has a lot of significance in this story. Lipstick, nail polish, flowers, the button on the roach spray. That old lady will turn up again next issue.

PAGE 4

Panel 1 is deliberately cropped to put all the focus on the glove. I think we have a pretty good idea why Celia is wearing the gloves. That knowledge gives an ambiguity to Celia’s sexiness here, especially in panel five where she poses coquettishly, apparently teasing and rejecting her lover. I love the way Brian has drawn Celia’s face here. Helpless, appealing, seductive and just a little bit crazy.

PAGE 6

The last time we saw Spawn, at the end of the Armageddon arc, he finally remembered the terrible thing he did to Wanda when he was still Al Simmons. He recalled the suppressed memories of his  abuse of his wife, Wanda. Shortly before he died he hit her and caused her to miscarry. Although this had been mentioned a couple of times in past issues, I decided we had to shine the spotlight on that event because for me it was the key to what made Spawn the creature he is. The recollection of this horrific event sent Spawn into despair and although he has saved the world, he feels that there is no place in it for the monster he has become.

Twitch has had an ambivalent relationship with Spawn but in the final days leading up to the Apocalypse a bond of mutual respect grew between them.

Again, I had a very distinct idea of the colors I wanted for this scene:  a warm golden glow for the exterior, contrasting with cold greys inside the warehouse. Note the name on the door: CHIKATILO IMPORTS named after the notorious Russian serial killer.

Twitch is a brave man, but in panel three we can see the dread in his eyes. I asked for that close-up of the feet in panel 4 with bugs running around, but it was only when I saw the art that I realised Twitch was walking on the bugs. So I added the sound effects.

Most of this scene is laid out as wide screen panels, suggestive of the format of the cinema screen. It’s very useful when you want to slow the pace and encourage the reader to contemplate each panel as an extended moment.

PAGE 9

When Al Simmons came back as a Hellspawn, his re-animated corpse was symbiotically linked with a living necroplasmic costume that reacts to the commands and also to the moods of the wearer. Spawn’s appearance changes regularly. He has been everything from glossy superhero to rotting undead. When Twitch comes face to face with Spawn he finds the most dehumanised version we have yet seen.

Look at that first panel. There is no humanity left there and it has spooked Twitch. Discussing the relaunch with Todd McFarlane, he has said that in this series Spawn should be a creature of darkness, often almost invisible, sensed as a presence rather than clearly seen. As he speaks to Twitch, the costume slides across his face, hiding the naked skull. In the dialogue, Twitch is recalling the last conversation he had with Spawn before Armageddon.

Twitch, along with the rest of the human race, has an imprecise memory of Armageddon. The one common element is the blinding White Light that occurred before the rebirth. Everyone is interpreting that in their own way. Twitch suspects that he died but he wants to hear it from Spawn.

Those chains in the background are a part of Spawn’s living costume. The entire warehouse reflects his state of mind.

PAGE 14

Here’s where we get down to it. This scene actually continues from a short epilogue to Armageddon back in issue #164. Spawn’s recreated world is all sweetness and light until a crack quite literally appears in the sidewalk and snakes up the side of the New Vista apartment building and we know something is about to go badly wrong. Inside the building one of the tenants picks up a metal statuette of Stan Laurel and clubs his flatmate to death.

The final panel of issue #164 showed the statue of the grinning Stan Laurel covered in blood and brain matter. I was searching for a transgressive image that would sum up the horror of what was happening and that really did it for me. I grew up with Laurel and Hardy and they always represented a lost innocence and the irrepressible optimism of ordinary humanity. As Twitch says here, “I can’t tell you how many ways that is so wrong.”

Seeing the finished page, it also looks like we’re suggesting that smoking dope is harmful to your health!

PAGE 21

Here we return to the story of Celia and Joey. Joey has returned to Celia’s apartment, determined to declare his undying love for her. He finds the apartment in darkness, all the lights smashed. But Celia forgot the light on the kitchen stove. As Joey switches it on and turns around, his eyes flick from object to object. Again this is a cinematic effect of rapidly cutting from close-up to close-up.

Panel 2 is one of my favourites of this issue. The pure white milk with the blood sinking into it. One thumbprint and a lip print on the glass. Is that lipstick or is it blood? It’s a beautifully rendered image. The glass is so real you could reach out and pick it up. But you really wouldn’t want to. Panel 3 is tilted at a 90-degree angle creating a visual jolt. That’s all Brian. My panel description simply read: “Close-up of the blood-smeared knife.”

And then the arms. There’s something horribly beautiful about this kind of gore. There’s the same kind of fascination that lies behind Professor Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds exhibitions of flayed human bodies. I guess we all really do want to know what lies beneath.

Spawn #166 by David Hine and Brian Haberlin is in stores now.