Broken Frontier

Spawn is re-imagined as a mythical slayer of all gods, and while it’s a thrilling concept with lush art, the execution lacks depth, excitement, and even coherency.

Godslayer takes place in an epic fantasy world, the likes of which have rarely been seen outside of Chinese fantasy comics – it’s a world without heaven or hell, but rather all the gods exist on Earth, as grandee oligarchs, purveying over mortal lives and lands. All is peace and prosperity, until out of the shadows comes a misunderstood demon, a being of such outlandish design that the gods can scarcely conceive of its existence. This demon-shadow is the Godslayer, a Spawn whose only reason for being is the destruction of all those deities that still draw breath. Why does he do this? And whence did he come? These are the primary questions at the heart of the graphic novel, but they are also the primarily ignored resolutions.

Brandishing the art of coveted master Jay Anacleto, Godslayer executes its storyline with a sparse and artificially stylized narrative – the prose is nothing that hasn’t been read in a hundred amateur fantasy books, or perhaps incredibly old-school professional ones. In fact, just as the world in which Godslayer takes place is reminiscent of the settings found within Chinese fantasy comics, so too is the prose highly redolent of that found in such foreign-flavored works, though while Chinese comics are renowned for their ridiculous level of creativity, they’re equally infamous for having some of the most stilted, difficult-to-swallow dialogue, and this very fault is one found throughout the pages of Godslayer. Holguin tries way too hard for a grandiose, mythical ambiance, and coupled with the naturally extravagant art of Anacleto, the final product comes across as egregious overkill.

The two major questions of the book – the motives and the origins of the title character – are scarcely broached; Holguin opts not for anything definite, but rather for purely thematic machinations of character and plot. The Godslayer and the primary goddess he comes to kill in the GN are given backstories, but the specifics – the aforementioned origins and motivations – try to be so perfectly contradictory to established Spawn conventions that they largely don’t make any sense. Holguin makes a decent effort in the ideas department (both the concept and the innumerable spun-on-their-head conventions are notable), but the handling of so many bizarre notions only muddies the waters until they’re near-opaque. To be more explicit:

SPOILERS IN THIS PARAGRAPH ONLY: You can see what Holguin was going for – what with a resurrected knight whose return is not for the love of his woman (as it was in the original Spawn), but rather for an obsessive quest to kill all gods, including the goddess which his old love is connected to, a mission which requires the slaying of said old flame at his own hands. It’s an interesting twist, save for the fact that his ex-lover then doesn’t even enter into it. The fact that she’s connected to the goddess is sheer coincidence, as the resurrected knight never knew that such was his ex-lover’s fate, so when the two come together, the big twist is that the woman doesn’t matter in the least, that fate played only with the gods and the Godslayer, and that the human aspects weren’t even a consideration (the narration is even revealed to be the human man trapped within the apparently autonomous shell of the Godslayer Spawn), which is truly a unique way to approach an otherwise straightforward Spawn retelling. Sadly, only in summation does it evoke any kind of response from the reader – in the execution of the GN, the story is merely muddly, poorly paced, and ends with little impact or fanfare or point. In a weird way, Holguin’s attempt to give an indelibly French, existentialist finale creates a too-pointless and empty fable.

The art by Anacleto is jaw-dropping as always, though even he suffers in places as compared to past work, most notably during the action sequences, in which his penchant for extreme detail blur the specific goings-on and make them horrendously difficult to determine. Anacleto is helped out by Haberlin and Lan Medina, though the switch-offs are not obvious or apparent, so kudos to the team for aping Anacleto’s style and keeping the book at the peak of lavishness throughout.

I was excited about Godslayer, and went in prepared for a possibly middling read, but what I got was a story that needed to undergo some major revisions. The ideas are there, and they’re good ones; the actual storytelling is about as big a misfire as it comes. Some might like this book for what it attempts (and what it attempts is, indeed, its primary worth), but as a final call I have to say – go read Spawn (it’s really, really good nowadays), but pass on Godslayer, at least until they manage a sequel with a better script.