Given how many issues of Spawn are on the docket, I’m a bit overdue to get back into the mopey gothic bugger. So this calls for a doubling up to cover the two issue story involving that most 90s of things: an oversized, overmuscled killer cyborg.
Listen to Episode 24: Spawn #6&7.
You can subscribe to the Council of Geeks Podcast, home of 90s Comics Retrial on iTunes or on Stitcher.
Does anybody feel like Spawn is on the ground going “I can’t… he’s too EXTREME!”
Guns that just sort of leak fire when you hold the barrel seem impractical to me but then again I might not be EXTREME enough to get it.
Finally, a reminder that the podcast theme song is by Erica Driesbach,and you can find more of her work at her website right here.
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I wasn’t a big fan or collector of SPAWN but I had both of these issues. I remember liking the design o Overt-Kill when I saw him–in fact, I’m quite sure I bought issue #6 because of the cover. He looks like McFarlane drawing the Rhino’s body with a bit of a Liefeldian flourish (something on his eye).
Then I read the story and discovered he was called OVERT-Kill. Wait, was that a typo? I’m sure that’s gotta be a typo. Overkill is a thing, not Overt-Kill. But I realized no, he was called Overt-Kill and my heart sank. I think at that point I realized I enjoyed looking at the pictures in SPAWN but not reading the book, and I don’t think I looked at another issue after getting #8.
Good episode. Nice split verdicts.
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Clarification: I’m not deaf to self-deprecating humor, but for the record, solo shows tend to stay sharply on point where multi-host shows are going to be more conversational and therefore more personality driven.
In the early ’90s, Stan Lee hosted a line of how-to tapes for Stabur Home Video that spotlighted individual artists. I think it was called something like The Comic Book Legends. Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld were on an episode about creating characters, and with a minuscule amount of help from Stan that he jokingly tried to expand credit for, created Overkill. In the time behind the video’s release and Trobb using Overtkill in comics and toys, Marvel UK trademarked their own Overkill as a sidekick to Motormouth, necessitating the added “t.”
I bought Spawn for the first year, but after this two-parter, I could tell that it was about time to wrap it up following the guest writer series. As I recall, McFarlane only expected Image to go so far, and intended to treat Spawn as a sort of maxi-series (take note of how quickly the Spawnometer initially ran down before it slowed and disappeared altogether.) Following the two million sales of Spawn #1 and the sustained success of Image, McFarlane altered his plans, and I suspect he knew he needed to stall sometime around the lame issues covered on this episode. Also, look at how much of what became Spawn’s lore came out of the writers’ series, possibly less out of a need to flesh out his mythos than as a way to expand the series length until he wrapped his initial story (which I don’t think he ever did.) Who expected Spawn to last over 250 issues and counting a quarter century later?
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I have these! Somehow they didn’t keep me from getting to issue 25. Probably because issue 8 was written by Alan Moore (followed by Gaiman, Sim and Miller).
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