It is 901 AD. The Dark Ages. The darkest of times. Centuries after the Romans retreated and faded, yet many centuries before reason and order would take hold. The Dark Ages were times marked by sweat and blood and lives cut short by famine and disease. Desperate days. These were the times the lands known today as Great Britain were fought over like raw meat in a dog’s teeth. The world was up for grabs. New religions were sweeping the continent like a plague of hope in a hopeless time. These are the days that a Hellspawn named Covenant walked the earth in search of the truth, understanding and solution to the curse that bound him. These are his Dark Ages. These are his adventures…
Written by Steve Niles
Penciled by Nat Jones
Inked by Kevin Conrad and Richard Bonk(27-28)
Colored by Todd Broecker
Lettered by Richard Starkings
When we last left off, Lord Covenant had fully committed himself to his new identity as Spawn – despite no longer technically being a Hellspawn powered by Necroplasm. The forces of “good” had done what they tend to do and stolen an artifact of Hell, a boy went off on an adventure with the Northmen that murdered his village, and everything appeared read to come smashing together in a spectacular explosion of hellfire. Nat Jones, inkers Kevin Conrad, with additional ink by Richard Bonk, and colorist Todd Broecker come together to deliver a spectacle filled finale that leans into the publisher and properties roots. As a byproduct to this stylistic choice the creative team also pick up some of the bad habits from that publisher and property that were not as effective.
After “Spawn” passed issue #300 there have been consistent questions about where to begin with “Spawn”? Ironically the thing that enabled it to claim a Guinness World Record, something that was supposed to make reading it straightforward, hard to manage. And while you could easily start at issue #1 either or single issue or read through the Origin collections it is kind of missing the point of “Spawn.” My go to recommendation for “Spawn” is either start skip monthly single issues all together and read the collections starting in one of two spots. The first would be the ‘Spawn: Resurrection’ which puts you at #250 and is the basis for the narrative up until 300+ and the space where the last major retcon has occurred and follow the collections from there. The other would be to start at ‘Spawn: Dark Horror,’ which puts you at #276 and the start of Jason Shawn Alexander – the artist that got me interesting in “Spawn” to start with – which is where all the stuff leading up to #300 really begins. The main “Spawn” title is like any long running fight manga, not to dissimilar to Akira Toriyama’s time on “Dragon Ball” “Z” and “Super,” artists come in and out and the book takes various generic and stylistic choices and revisions. While both properties are unified by a continuity of storytelling (for the most part) there is enough variety that it would be easy and useful in thinking of them as specific storytelling units or saga not a unified whole.
Having worked through “Spawn: The Dark Ages” I would probably now recommend it if someone was interested in getting into Spawn. It exists in a single volume and comes to a largely satisfying conclusion. More importantly to it as an exemplar of Spawn as a generic text through the course of 28 issues the two main creative teams works through most of the ticks of what the main “Spawn” book did in the first 150 or so issues. The fact we have two major creative teams reinforces the Spawness of it all. Lord Covenant and Al Simmons are not the same person but the environment they existed in and the structures of power that manipulate are highly similar. The presence of Cagliostro and the cyclical nature of thinigs from Covenant’s violence, the structures around him, turn “Dark Ages” into something like a remixed myth. A consistently told story that changes over time but has several key features who are known by the presence of lack of presence in the context of the larger metastory of “Spawn.” At the core of both books is a quest for redemption from a protagonist who was led astray and the recognition of their own ethical-moral failings, mixed with creation of an anarchist-humanist spirit, is what makes Spawn “Spawn” as much as the noodling overwrought art. Having something like that to show someone who wants to read this wild and crazy superhero book is a lot easier than going read the first 100 issues but skip the next 150 or so. That’s a lot of work to get new audiences members and transform them into consumers of your product – which is one of the main reasons why Marvel and DC spent most of the last decade rebooting or numbering things – and Spawn is not even two decades old.
“The Dark Ages” encapsulates the essence of “Spawn” in these 28 issues and these final four issues especially. That isn’t an entirely good thing as the creative team lean into the excessive Image as the book barrels through its final quartet of issues. “Dark Ages” isn’t a slice of lfie book it about action and the agents of Hell and Heaven wreaking havoc on the realms of men. It isn’t pretty but it can be spectacular. That sense of energy and spectacle is something the Image founders pioneered when they were at Marvel. Spectacle for them is often linked to the size of the image the bigger it is the more important it must be and so on. That is why you have vertical double page spreads in “Spawn” #1 and in the early issues of this series. The art team go back to that well in these final issues multiple times and it is to the detriment of the narrative being told. Not because you cannot tell a good story in large images, for its faults ‘Child’s Crusade’ largely works on single image pages, but it eats into the page budget that could be used to smooth out the moments in between the bloodshed. The one major shortcoming for these final issues is that the creative team did two big fights instead of one. Now the second fight with the Phlebiac Brothers is more of a slaughter than slugfest, but the use of a double page spread in it treats it like it was one. The bigness becomes somewhat tiresome after a while even as Covenant has this profound moment of pacificism that in the end leads to his redemption. Which is a big moment, but it did not feel big in the end just the same as the preceding pages. It can be hard to make an image feel important and spectacular if every image is big.
That final page is Spawn storytelling in a nutshell as spectacular imager, the redemption of the human soul, set in a readable page design with just enough prose around it to tie the word and image together and give it the feeling of something more. That somewhat ironic fusion of theatricality, spectacle, stylistic excess, with often serious minded narrative prose and their synergistic ability to creat the feeling of something more is at the heart of Spawn as a properties success and the finale to “The Dark Ages” is a good example of it for anyone who wants to find out what this Spawn business is all about.
