What went wrong for Spawn? And you can't just say "too edgy", sure these days everything is about rainbows and quirk, but there is always a market for edge
If you were alive in the 90's and early 00s, you remember when Spawn was fucking just about as popular among kids as any other big time hero
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He was too kool
I grew up in the 90's, saw an ad for Spawn at the back of one of my Spider-Mans and thought his cape looked dumb.
I once made a spawn skin for GTA:VC.
Should still be lying around somewhere on a drive or burnt disc.
I'd say that the biggest problem with Spawn is the actual creator himself as well as the issues that the series had pre and post Man of Miracles.
Speaking as an user who wasn't really into comics until 2008 onwards and didn't follow Capeshit characters as a whole, I've only seen Spawn after his fade in popularity.
However, when I read Spawn I think I got it. The biggest problem with Spawn is ultimately that the series repeats too much. See, the original Spawn started off as a typical edgy Image comics that slowly tried to transform itself into an epic. Although it is debatable whether or not it worked from a technical perspective, it seemed to worked from a financial one.
I think that it got to Todd Mcfarlane's head along with the sales of toys. After Man of Miracles and Angela have left, he did a reboot of the franchise. Now, this would have been a good opportunity for the franchise as a whole. Let someone else take over and steer it in a different way.
However, Mcfarlane stayed and seems to be demanded that the story follows the same overall beats, Spawn fights irredeemable villains and his battles eventually turns into an epic story about the clash between Heaven and Hell. I think that is went wrong with Spawn ultimately. Lack of creativity with the series' formula and a control freak at the wheel.
>However, Mcfarlane stayed and seems to be demanded that the story follows the same overall beats
It's an interesting complaint to have thinking about it, since most these days seem to be about different writers ruining legacys and changing up the status quo when it's not wanted
Spawn was a product of his time. He was 90s incarnate.
You can't really bring him back in our time without completely redesigning him and rewriting the storylines. Remember Beavis and Butthead?
Remember season 8? They had to change the subject matter because the world of the original Beavis and Butthead simply wasn't relatable anymore.
For spawn it's the same thing, his character doesn't work outside the 90s.
I see how that makes sense for Beavis and Butthead because a good portion of the show, and the only reason some people watched, was their commentary on music videos of the time which were tied to pop culture especially MTV which is irrelevant these days
I don't see how it applies to Spawn honestly, Venom is still popular....Punisher is still popular...what about Spawn do you think was so "90s" other than the fact that so called badass anti heroes were more in favor back then?
movie was terrible
Like it was ever right in the first place?
Whadya do, watch Nostalgia Critic and decide it's the same as being a kid who saw it?
I never understood what Spawn wanted to be.
He's a black guy, so you'd think maybe he was created for a black audience. But everything else about him seems geared towards white male teenagers of the time, the kind who would listen to Marilyn Manson etc.
Creator owned which meant the character couldn't organically evolve into something with broad appeal.
Imagine if Steve Ditko had final say on the direction of Spider-Man, the character would not have survived past the 70s.
Well, in the 90s black heroes were cool and hip even to white kids, it wasn't like these days with the alt right movement and cuck memes
Ever hear the term "ghetto pass"?
Toward the end it became a mess. Especially when the twins were born. And after a massively unsatisfying ending tried to start all over again with slight variation on the same ideas.
Yes I'm still mad about the big reveal about Al and Wanda before he died. It was the cherry on a shit sundae.
>spawns gimmick is the doomsday clock, McFarlane always stated it was a superhero story with an ending that wouldn't go on and on
>still goes on and on even today
And THAT was what went wrong.
I still love Spawn though
...oh hey.
This.
>Creator owned without an ending
Fixed.
Spawn is cool as fuck and I loved the movie as a kid and just generally thought he looked awesome. I honestly completely forgot about him for a few years but then a friend of mine who's also into comics watched the HBO series and told me how great it was, I did the same and came to the same conclusion that it was, in fact, fucking great. Then I was really really surprised and a little confused to find out that it was still going. I thought it would've ended years ago especially since one of Todd McFarlane's main problems with Marvel/DC is that he didn't like how nothing ever ended. Then I went on YouTube and found out vaguely about some of the storylines that had went down since and they all sounded fucking stupid and uninspired. Plus this shit Also, if it's of any relevance I was born in '98 so I was only alive and able to remember a very brief period when it was still a popular series so I can't really answer you exactly what went wrong, I'm going to say that it never ended. It's not 'edge' because look at how fucking popular Wolverine got with the X Men trilogy and how popular he still remains. And Deadpool. And even Punisher and he hasn't even got a movie that most normies in my age range remember/saw yet they still think he's the shit.
I picked up these in Japan a week ago, came with the original vhs tapes of the series. They had a couple more out there too.
And no marketing to push it as a big comic.
>I don't see how it applies to Spawn honestly, Venom is still popular....Punisher is still popular...what about Spawn do you think was so "90s" other than the fact that so called badass anti heroes were more in favor back then?
Or for that matter the dozens of superheroes created in the 1960s and earlier that are still popular and raking in millions of dollars in movie ticket and toy sales.
MacFarlane flaking out on the comics. Sporadic issue releases instead of consistent.
The cartoon series was great.
He fell into the same trap that the original TMNT comics did: they killed off their best and most popular villain in the first few issues. No-one was ever going to top the Violator, Overtkill, the Redeemer, Angela, Wynn, Malebolgia, none of them were decent replacements. Sure they brought him back, but he wasn't really one of Al's big rogues anymore that he has a massive rivalry with. Without that Moriarty style rival, his books just weren't as interesting.
Clown/Violator deserves to be in a better book
I stopped caring for Spawn after Malebolgia died
beyond that was an endless cycle of Spawn getting dunked on, losing his powers, getting them back again
repeat over and over
It didn't have a story/arc that made it big. Most of Spawn is average as hell. Once you get past the good art there's nothing else there.
So edgy and dark it went straight to stupid. Plus the character was too unrelatable.
>stop reading at issue 196
>read about current spawn
>Al Simmons is around
>Hell has access to Earth
>Satan is the antagonist
So Armageddon was a completely pointless arc, huh?
Us black kids didn't give a fuck about Spawn. It was pretty much what we called "white-boy shit".
>Spawn getting dunked on
Fucking this. The narrative always explains how vast his powers are, but I don't think there's a hero that jobs harder than Spawn. He gets steamrolled by EVERYONE.
I can't wait for Kevin Smith's Sam & Twtich tv series. Wanna bet which one will be female and which one will be black?
Spawn wasn't too edgy
It was too 90s
When does the Spawn comic get good?
Fucking THIS. If you have an end goal for the character, you don't just stumble on after you get to that goal.
And it had a lot of people from BTAS - not surprising, given that Andrea Romano was the casting director
Neither Venom nor Punisher are popular anymore. They have their niche, with an obnoxious, vocal minority of fans (Punisher especially), but calling them "popular" is grossly overestimating their relevance.
Sam and Twitch are best cartoon cops
>"Y'know why they call him Twitch?"
>Twitch fires several shots into a bullseye without flinching
>"Because he doesn't. Ever."
I never read the comic until about seven years ago, while the cartoon was balls-out amazing the comic (in trade form at least) was a jumbled up mess.
Punisher is due to Netflix. It'll only grow in popularity when he gets his own series this year.
Venom needs a movie or TV series because he's been repeatedly BTFO by Carnage this last decade.
Punisher's popular among gun enthusiasts.
Chris Kyle kinda started it when he and his fellow troops started spray painting Punisher skulls in the middle east
>Venom is not popular anymore.
>Marvel asked retailers to buy ONE THOUSAND copies of Venom #1 each to get a special variant.
>They did it because customers were fighting so furiously to get the variant that it more than made up for the cost of the copies.
Nigga, Venom is hella popular. He's still stronger in the public consciousness than most of Marvel's characters, even some of the Avengers.
Writer suddenly started running out of ideas.
Having Al completely embrace his Bad Self and ultimately replace Malbogia as the big bad was a bit of a cop-out.
Well you will soon be able to play as him in Injustass.
Not sure why, maybe Todd gave Ed Boon a handy or something.
And oh yeah, he was half demon even when he was alive.
And oh yeah Cog was the hidden antagonist all along.
He stands alone in a world were only crossovers and multiverses succeed.
Spawns popularity has risen and fallen in directly opposite ways since the movie came out.
The live action movie made the concept too ridiculous.
that's a a lie, as a black guy I'll tell you if you read comics in the 90's you read Spawn, because everyone read Spawn. But you didn't read Spawn because he was black like you would Cage or Black Panther, you read it because it was awesome.
Punisher isn't popular among gun enthusiasts, American Sniper is
this. there's just no topping the Violator
t. white guy pretending to be black on the internet
?
Punisher MAX is popular amongst gun enthusiasts because it's the most accurate to life one.
Isn't Venom's new comic one of the best selling Marvel titles...
In any case there is a reason you won't likely see a set of Marvel merch to this day without a Venom piece
No one has a problem with original black characters except stormfront. It's when they take other characters and replace them only for the sake of diversity is what pisses people off.
I always found the different news anchors pretty amusing... until I realised that Todd was just ripping off The Dark Night Returns (which made Miller's Batman/Spawn crossover quite amusing).
I was they only black guy in the hood who read comics. My friends would read when they came over, though. X-men and Batman ruled their taste. My white friends at school were all over Spawn, and gave me a couple extra issues. None of my friends from the hood liked it. Maybe if I lived in an integrated neighborhood instead of a black neighborhood, I could say "I had black friends who liked Spawn, but it wasn't my thing". Hell, even the black guys who were into comics at achool didn't care about Spawn, except one kid who was always getting picked on, so I'm chalking THAT up to him wishing he was Spawn so he could take revenge.
I only ever watched the hbo series (still got the dvds). After multiple rewatches....
It's fucking nothing!!! Nothing ever happens. Ever.
The writing is coldsteel the hedgeheg tier. Al is this badass cringelord who won't accept help from cogliostro because he can make the plot advance faster just by brooding in a dark alley. Violator just stopped appearing mid s2 (ok he had like, one fucking scene in the finale). Gwyn only worked on s1, and i still don't care what he does to al's family, or why is hell interested on him.
Burke & Twitch had the only satisfactory arc.
This whole post just reads hilariously but...
>so I'm chalking THAT up to him wishing he was Spawn so he could take revenge.
Is the best
Man I remember reading Spawn when I was younger, and I remember a SPECIFIC joke written in I think issue 25.
It has a drawing of McFarlane caricaturing himself and how he had his issues all out of order because he couldn't count and Spawn behind him "GET IT RIGHT BUFFOON"
And I just... I'm still mad about that.
Was he trying to do some Pulp Fiction shit? Was there a reason he was doing shit all over the place? Was it an effort to be 2deep4me?
>the clown
The movie wasn't great but come on man, name one good comic book movie before the 2000's.
>Batman and Robin
>Batman Forever
>that fucking Nick Fury movie
>Fantastic Four
>Blade
>STEEL
He WAS kinda sad. He was Urkel without the smarts or weird clothes. People just liked to kick him around. We assume he did some shit that wasn't cool outside of school, got himself ostracized by the local kids, and was just catching shit for it.
>name one good comic book movie before the 2000's.
Batman 89
Batman Returns
The first two Donner Superman movies
The Crow
And yes, Blade
Also there was nothing wrong with X-Men for the time it came out in
>naming 80's movies when the original complaint was referring the product of the 90's thing.
I thought I clicked that other post to link it in, that's on me though.
Blade was fucking trash
Blade was good, it was stereotypically 90s in a lot of ways but that doesn't make it bad, but it will be another generation or so before people can enjoy 90s things without ridicule
>that's a a lie, as a black guy I'll tell you if you read comics in the 90's you read Spawn
This. We were the only black family in my neighborhood but my 30 year old father read Spawn and all of my male cousins read it, too. I definitely like the show and the move a lot better, though.
Pretty much this, and especially in the comic.
Most of the comic is characters monologuing, recapping, or thinking while staring at nothing.
Bad writers try to tell things out of order to mask how simple their narrative is.
Did you ever eat hot cheetos with ranch? Black kids turned me onto this, and it's still the greatest treat
>I was born in '98
Please leave
These characters could reinvent themselves with times to keep being relevant while staying true to core themes. Spawn didn't, he's still stuck where he was in the 90s.
Spawn failed for many reasons:
1. The Angela/Tiffany debacle. Neil Gaiman created Angela, who is arguably the break-out supporting cast member of Spawn. But McFarlane doesn't want to work out a payment plan with Gaiman, meaning we got stuck with Angela's god-awful rip-off Tiffany instead who fans HATED, shoved down fans throats.
2. McFarlane created a TON of cool villains, but they only existed in the toy line. Only one or two ever appeared in the comic.
3. The short sighted bullshit that was making a Rob Liefeld character from Youngblood Al Simmon's killer. This backfired big time when Liefeld was briefly excommicated from Image and movie/TV rights for Spawn were bought. We got a crappy ass replacement killer introduced, which pissed fans off
4. The Gaiman feud, especially once Todd McFarlane started his pathetic long con towards using Miracleman as a hostage against Neil. Using Miracleman, a rarely seen but incredibly influential comic, as leverage and then turning out that he knew he never had any ownership of it, pissed off a LOT of fans.
5. The lack of advancement of the story. Things stalled in Spawn storyline-wise a lot and people stopped giving a shit after a while.
6. Curse of Spawn/Sam and Twitch; basically diluted the franchise especialy Curse of Spawn, which reeked of Todd's rejected pitch to turn Al Simmons white when he first pitched the Spawn movie, to create his own version of "Ultimate Spawn" ala Ultimate Spider-Man