4 out of 5

“Come to Image,” they said.  “You’ll get a little Wildc.a.t.s, a little Spawn… it’ll be fun!”  And so Alan Moore did, and it sorta mostly was.

But he didn’t go in with a head of steam to revamp the universe; he seemed to assess the trends – the gregarious tone, the art-over-content approach – and work on something that made sense in that mold.  Which certainly resulted in some very un-Moore-Y, dumb stuff, but also gave us some over-the-top relative (to Image) quality, in which Moore wasn’t exactly smirking at the Spawn fanboys, but acknowledging the worship and maybe nudging them to loosen up a little.

McFarlane, farming out his famed character’s book to various creators for select issues – Morrison, Gaiman, and more – seemed especially game for this.  Alan’s initial Spawn foray foregoes any kind of excessive dramaturgy or focus on the eponymous character to play around in Hell, and to give Todd the chance to dross up some pretty cool imagery.

We join child-killer Billy Kincaid, waking up in an organic nightmare version of The Matrix – Hell – ducking out of dreams of the be-caped, chain-wielding monster who sent him there.  He and other Hellbound spuls begin to explore, learning about Hell’s various levels (not sure how much of this structure was pre-established) while Billy contemplates killing a little girl in their group.  Moore takes some light potshots at faith and commercialism, then unleashes a fairly obvious twist that, nonetheless, gives us the amusing payoff of the overweight Kincaid stuffed into a spawn suit and recruited for Malebolgia’s army.  And that’s it!  Todd does his thing all over the pages (which is what it is; I’ve never been a fan but he does his style well), and Moore just sort of a has a good time playing in the muck.

Of course, he would get to pick up some of this stuff in other Image titles, but here its all standalone, and pretty enjoyable as a result.