Batman Spawn: The Comic Crossover Years In The Making

The reality of batman appears is not that simple, but its goals are certainly that simple. “We are celebrating the 30th anniversary of the two Spawn and Image Comics this year,” says McFarlane. “If you are 30 or under, [Image’s history is] folklore.” This folklore includes the original Spawn/Batman 1994 crossovers – one written by Frank Miller with art by McFarlane and one written by a team of classic Batman writers (Doug Moench, Chuck Dixon and Alan Grant) with art by Klaus Janson. These stories represented the first time an Image founder’s character was crossed over with a DC character, a massive event in the history of the new company created explicitly as an alternative to the corporate comics that had deeply mistreated McFarlane and the rest of its Image founder. peers (and countless others before them). These two Spawn/Batman the issues have never been reprinted until now: they will be collected for the first time in November.

“In any form of entertainment, people always want to be part of big events to say, ‘Yeah, I was there,'” McFarlane says. “It’s time for us to say, ‘Hey, for all of you who missed the opportunity and weren’t around a few decades ago, here we go again. We’re going to have fun. And for those of you who were, we will hopefully make a bigger, badder, and better version of what we did last time.

Capullo is ready to expand, and his re-teaming with McFarlane gives him confidence that they will succeed. “Todd is an artist; he has that visual mind and knows what’s going to make a great comic and what’s going to look good on a page,” Capullo tells us. “It feels like we haven’t really missed a beat, and we’ve been doing that from the start.”

You’d think that with everything McFarlane does outside of the comics, the years since that scrapped 2006 crossover would have altered his approach somewhat. Oddly enough, though, it looks like Capullo, the guy who’s been almost completely into comics since then (he’s done art for several metal bands in addition to his comic book work), is the one who suffered the most changes in the ensuing decade and a half.

“I have a good handle on Batman, but doing it in the context of working with Todd again and having Spawn in it just gives me a slightly different vibe,” Capullo says. “He still looks exactly like my Batman, but maybe the cape can be a little a little longer… he wants a cape. Al Simmons, the CIA agent who makes a deal with the devil to come back to life and returns with superpowers, a shapeshifting cape and prehensile chains to fight in the ultimate battle between heaven and hell, will do it to a guy.

McFarlane, for his part, does not cross narrative currents. He was, at various times, a comic book writer, cartoonist, screenwriter, Emmy Award-winning television producer, music video host, licensing mogul, hockey team owner and a renowned toy manufacturer. But he works hard to keep those threads separate.