At the shop today, as we’re doing some restocking of back issues, pal Dorian sez to me, he sez “so why do people think Spawn is any good?” I think my response was something along the lines of “well, you know, at the heart of it, it really isn’t a bad idea….” In fact, I thought it was a great idea, especially back when it was called The Grim Ghost.
Anyway, that reminded me of when it was first announced, waaaaay back in the early ’90s, that Marvel’s most popular artists were going to split off and form their own company, Image Comics. For a brief moment, I thought about what a great opportunity this would be. Hugely popular artists, at a time when comics sales were skyrocketing, going off do to their own thing, without the constraints of a big company making them work on superhero properties. Why, this would be a great way to expose all those superhero readers to new genres! McFarlane fans would have followed him to, say, a Western comic (which I think McFarlane’s art would have been well-suited for, actually), or Jim Lee to a sci-fi pulp adventure book, or Valentino to a detective comic, and so on.
Ah, if only I were that young and foolish optimistic again.
