El: LWiA 4.2: Morrison Spawn (Patreon)

Started with the opening of the chapter, to do some scene setting as I reintroduce Morrison. More anon.

----

Morrison, for their part, spent considerably less time working for Image. Indeed, prior to doing the creator-owned Happy! with Image in 2012—by which point Image was a very different company—Morrison’s only Image work was a three issue run of Spawn beginning in December 1993. This came about largely by accident—Dez Skinn’s Comics International misreported that Morrison would be included in the initial wave of guest writers alongside Moore, Gaiman, Sim, and Miller. Bemused, Morrison got in touch with McFarlane and, as they tell it, “he liked the fact that I had the same surname as Jim Morrison and suggested I write three issues.” It’s a funny story, and surely one Morrison is telling in the same spirit as Alan Moore’s “SPORN!” anecdote, but it highlights a blunt reality of Morrison’s career at the end of 1993: they simply weren’t one of the top stars in the industry. 

This surely rankled. Morrison’s relationship to Moore’s work was one thing. That was a shadow they’d always been in, and while they plainly had feelings about that fact it was not news.But Gaiman was their peer, recruited at the same meetings they’d been. But it can’t have been a surprise either. Gaiman was riding the crest of Sandman and everything he touched was turning to gold. Morrison, meanwhile, had produced some critically beloved titles, but their only unequivocal hit was Arkham Asylum, and they knew full well those sales were because of the Tim Burton film and Dave McKean’s art, not because of anything they did.

Nothing about their eventual Spawn gig dispelled the notion that they were a “best of the rest” sort of writer—precisely good enough to be the one that missed out on the initial run of guest writers. Where Moore, Gaiman, Sim, and Miller’s issues were all drawn by McFarlane, Morrison’s first issue, Spawn #16, was notable for being the first issue of the title that McFarlane was uninvolved in, with art instead coming from Greg Capullo. And this was always the plan for Morrison’s run—initially they were supposed to fill in so that McFarlane could draw Moore’s Violator series, but ultimately they ended up providing cover for McFarlane to do Spawn/Batman with Frank Miller. This was one of two crossovers published with the characters, the other, titled Batman/Spawn, being put out by DC and featuring Doug Moench, Chuck Dixon, and Alan Grant all writing with Klaus Janson on art—a respectable creative team to be sure, but nothing compared to Miller/McFarlane, a disparity that says much about the clout and, more to the point, money that Image had in 1994.

And like Moore, Morrison needed the money. Arkham Asylum was by then several years in the rear view mirror, and their big paycheck had by then been frittered away “on champagne, drugs, and spur-of-the-moment expeditions around the world,” as they put it. With McFarlane paying as much per issue as Morrison had made off Arkham Asylum, a quick run of Spawn comics was an obvious choice. But where Morrison and Gaiman had both approached the gig with an eye towards crafting quality stories within the Image aesthetic, Morrison was altogether more cynical about it. Asked in an interview if they were going to offer “a radical interpretation” of Spawn, Morrison scoffed, “You’ve got to be joking. I’ve written this for Spawn fans,” explaining that “I met a lot of the kids who read Spawn and basically they just want to see lots of fighting and bright lights and monsters and violence. That’s the kind of story I’ve written.”  Reflecting on it years later, they described it as “some of the easiest work I’ve ever done,” readily conceding that they just “found a tone that seemed faithful to McFarlane’s voice and followed it through to the end.”

And the lack of effort frankly shows in the comics, which are a faintly incoherent mess. The main plot is a charming bit of directness: the forces of Heaven create Anti-Spawn, a Crusader-themed rework of McFarlane’s design that used crucifixes instead of skulls. Spawn and Anti-Spawn brawl for two issues, with Anti-Spawn largely beating the stuffing out of Spawn for the first one and Spawn turning the tables with an assist from his homeless friends in the second. It’s big dumb fun of exactly the sort Morrison promised—Spawn ultimately finishes the fight by punching straight through Anti-Spawn’s head. 

But the issues have a subplot concerning a town called Simmonsville in the middle of the Nevada desert. In fact, it’s built on the spot where an underground nuclear test accidentally blew open a gateway to Hell. There the US military, using a supply of psychoplasm (the substance Hell is made of, which apparently “changes in response to mental states. Whatever you’re thinking of, whatever  you desire or fear, psychoplasm becomes that thing”), has constructed a town built entirely out of the fragmented memory of Spawn’s mortal life as Al Simmons. “Houses that he lived in, the schools he went to, playgrounds he played in, factories and churches and parks—all recreated here in the desert, above the doorway to hell,” as one of the military suits in charge of the project explains. It’s a neat idea, and Morrison spends the first third of their opening issue establishing it before having Spawn discover it at the start of the second issue (or, rather, he’s simply dumped there by a demon), only to have this plot abruptly interrupted by Anti-Spawn’s attack. After Anti-Spawn is defeated, Morrison devotes the final couple of pages to Spawn destroying Simmonsville. But at no point do these two strands of plot intersect in anything other than a wholly incidental way. It results in an arc that’s lacking in basic dramatic unity, giving the sense that it hasn’t been thought through. It doesn’t look easy—it looks lazy.

This is no great sin. It is, after all, just three fill-in issues of Spawn written purely for the money. And Grant Morrison on their worst day is still a vastly more nuanced and interesting writer than Todd McFarlane. But there’s a strange self-fulfilling petulance to it. Having failed to make the a-list roster of Spawn writers Morrison wrote a Spawn arc that largely confirmed that they didn’t belong there. Morrison spoke in interviews at the time about how they’re “always on the side of Satan, because he’s the one who introduced us to the concept of knowledge. When I was a kid I kind of figured out this whole thing where the serpent is the symbol of life and rebirth and DNA, so I decided since then that if I was on anyone’s side I’d be on Satan’s side,” explaining that they “see Satan and Christ as the same thing which is the creative principle and the principle towards evolution.” This is, obviously, cribbed straight from Blake, but it speaks to Morrison’s instinctive desire to be the petulant upstart. But on Spawn, Morrison demonstrates what Blake soon learned: anything—even rebellion—can be a prison if you stay inside it.

Morrison made noises about wanting to continue working with Image, talking about ideas for “a 12-issue super-hero story which will be released as three interlinking series—Pantheon, The High Five, and Mister Ink” that he wanted to publish there, but this series never materialized, and Morrison would do no further Image work. That is not to say, however, that they did no further disposable work for hire comics in the period. It’s just that, unlike Moore, these projects were mostly not about collecting massive paychecks. Instead they took a series of low-selling gigs on Marvel and DC books, all focused on one basic goal: helping Mark Millar establish his career.