Broken Frontier

The first 10 issues of Hellspawn are amassed into one single, inch-thick tome showcasing the young talents of Bendis, Niles, and the ever-incomparable Ashley Wood.

Following the centennial climax of the central Spawn title (wherein Al Simmons at last disposed of his dreaded arch-nemesis – the king of Hell, Malebolgia – and assumed the consequently-vacant throne of the underworld), Hellspawn was a title conceived to study the effect such a shifting of the cosmic scheme of things would have on the small picture: on small-scale humanity, on individuals, on day-to-day life upon the planet Earth. The concept called for an artist that could portray base reality on a nearly metaphysical scale, an illustrator that could illustrate what wasn’t there, as well as what was. Now that Spawn was both a bogeyman and a celestial power, the unraveling of Al Simmons’ epic required a sister-title that would depict how the world responded to a storyline that should apparently change the very foundation of all things. Enter: Ashley Wood.

Wood was a virtual unknown in the comics field before Hellspawn’s launch, and ever since he has hardly been far from any true connoisseur’s lips. Though as much of an auteur as the artist has since become, delving into various styles of immeasurably changeable dynamic, his early work on McFarlane’s pride and joy still strikes this reviewer as being some of his most earnest, and painstakingly considered pages he’s crafted to date. Think about it: this was it – this was Wood’s big, big break if only fandom responded positively to what he and inaugural series writer Brian Michael Bendis inevitably put to paper (and what a whack-o pairing that was: the talking-heads, slow-drama king teamed with the most representational artist to ever grace a comic-book panel). One can almost see Ashley pacing his room/studio/what-have-you, struggling over how to portray every individual scene given him in a way that would both reflect his strengths as a distinctive artist, and connect to a readership that expected a fight scene to actually present them with a blow-by-blow fight.

The initial story-arc, titled "The Clown," followed the Violator-Clown antagonist as he – freed from the old hierarchy of the Malebolgia – wanders the Earth and spreads suicidal depression in his wake. Al Simmons tries to stop this plague of dark despair, but should he? He is the king of Hell, after all. Bendis masterfully chose a perfect plot vehicle for Wood’s introduction into mainstream comicdom; the characters and threats are real, but only vaguely physical, primarily archetypical opposites rather than fisticuff-inducing foes. While Spawn and the Violator had been utilized with a more generic hero/villain relationship in the flagship title, in Hellspawn, the two are seen as what they truly are: forces of the universe that take physical form only by choice and by necessity, neither of which would logically come about any too often. Wood dives gleefully in to illustrate a world of wraithlike existence, where humanity is a curiosity, an animal whose conditioning and setting are as interchangeable as a modern man’s choice of clothes. His pages are atmospheric to the extreme, yet wholly discernable in content, and Bendis performs a commendable service by filling Ashley’s blank spaces with just the right style and variety of dialogue to gel uniformly with the smaze-ridden visuals. In fact, the duo work so unearthly well (pun intended), that the six-issue run between the two reads like a pop-art advertisement collection, with the wording displayed alongside the highly inventive imagery forming a singular, instantaneous affect upon the viewer.

The story then maneuvers through a series of grandiose, original concepts after "The Clown" comes to a close, including a Spawn-as-Ghost-Rider-like-arbiter-of-punishment, a brewing backstory with angels entering the earthly plane through the spiritual window of suicide, a shadowy black-ops agency whom hold Simmons’ old boss Jason Wynn (who’s suspected to be the reincarnation of Genghis Kahn), and the return of the cyborg-ape, Cy-Gor. Bendis bowed out after issue #6 and now-celebrity Steve Niles clambered aboard to twist the reigns in an emphatically different direction. Where Bendis tried for an obscure, removed narration, Niles brings in caption-box prose and direct, confrontational dialogue to weave a tale of intrigue and steadily mounting tension – a thriller with a hefty dose of the supernatural at its core, as if Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton had tried their hand at a horror comic. The switch-over allowed Wood a chance to show his more sequential chops, and he succeeded as captivatingly here as he did with the more ephemerally-themed first story-arc.

Sadly, as intriguing as Niles’ take on the story is in overall scope, the collection ends without a single one of his profferings having come full circle, and even with a redrawn final few pages by Wood (the pages are signed 2006), and regardless of the word "FIN" stamped at the bottom of the very last splash in bold, thick letters, the reader is left with a sense that – while the ride was wild, without regret, and utterly winsome on all number of aspects – the final stab is gut-wrenchingly sudden and unerringly trite, an absolute cliffhanger that tries to passionately pass itself off as a coherent conclusion, which is the most aggravating way possible to wrap-up any epic, especially one the reader has committed 200+ pages and 20+ dollars to. Still, this is the "Ashley Wood Collection," and as issues #11-13 feature the work of Ben Templesmith, it’s logical to finish where it does, and equally in the book’s favor: the proceeding issues aren’t difficult to purchase individually (though be warned: the series hardly finishes in the remaining few issues published, and it has yet to achieve a return to the racks after the long-running Miracle Man legal fiasco).

Still, for anyone willing to forgo a clean finish, the body of the work is as strong and flavorful as it comes, with decidedly low acidity. A cavalcade of otherwise lost characters and subplots from the main Spawn comic are handled deftly by the two writers and interwoven to suit the aesthetic of Wood and of the Simmons-as-more-than-human-and-shown-that-way premise. The book is large, it’s beautiful, and it’s immensely satisfying (oddly, once I walked away from the ending, I realized I still loved every single page of the journey there, and the execution was surreal enough that the dangling plot scarcely affected my final satisfaction). While the core title has only recently achieved a similar level of craftsman admiration, the older collections of the spin-offs (Sam and Twitch, Hellspawn) hold up marvelously in the here and now, their age barely noticeable. It’s worth the high cover price and more; now I’m just waiting for the series to start back up so we can get a second collection this thick and bountiful!