Spawn ’77 #1 Review: McFarlane and Spears Rebuild the Legend

Okay, NOW this is how you screw around with an icon without making me want to throw the book across the room. Spawn ’77 #1 takes Todd McFarlane’s earliest concept for the character, hands that raw DNA to Mark Spears, and basically asks, “What if Spawn had crawled out of the grime, paranoia, exploitation cinema and supernatural weirdness of 1977 instead of becoming the monster we met in 1992?” That could have been a cute anniversary gimmick. A couple retro references, funky clothes, maybe Spawn standing next to a muscle car and everybody goes home. Spears and McFarlane instead commit to the damn bit so completely that this feels less like alternate Spawn merchandise and more like somebody discovered a cursed comic book underneath a stack of old VHS tapes.

The first thing that smacks you is Mark Spears’ artwork. Dios mío, this book LOOKS like something. Spears is not simply drawing modern Spawn and throwing an Instagram ’70s filter over him. The faces, clothes, interiors, architecture, cars, shadows and even the visual rhythm feel pulled from another era. There are oranges, sick greens, dirty browns, electric purples and deep reds everywhere, and instead of fighting each other they create this sweaty supernatural atmosphere where you can practically smell cigarette smoke trapped in the carpet. When Spawn finally dominates a page, those glowing eyes against all that period texture make him look less like a superhero and more like the thing your grandmother warned you not to stare at after midnight.

What I really dig is how patient the book is before unleashing him. Spears and McFarlane spend real estate on ordinary people talking, arguing, lying and generally proving that human beings were perfectly capable of being terrible before Hell sent backup. There is domestic tension, sleaze, crime, ego and desperation simmering underneath everything. At first I wondered whether they were holding Spawn back TOO long because, fam, his name is on the cover and I came here to see this freak. But that restraint becomes the point. Every mundane scene makes his eventual presence feel more invasive. He is not walking into a superhero universe. He is invading somebody else’s ugly little 1977 nightmare.

And Spears can tell a story. That needs saying because gorgeous painted comic art sometimes gives me the same problem as somebody showing off a $4,000 action-figure display while forgetting you still need room to WALK through the house. Pretty is not sequencing. Spears understands the difference. The quieter conversational pages use expressions and body language to carry tension, while the supernatural material begins breaking the visual rules. Panels get hotter, shadows get meaner, compositions become less comfortable and suddenly Spawn feels like he is infecting the book itself. There are pages around the middle where the reds and purples practically take over, and the transition from mundane crime drama into demonic insanity is smooth enough that you don’t immediately notice how far the book has dragged you into Hell.

Tom Orzechowski lettering Spawn again is one of those little things that immediately gives the book legitimacy. He knows when to stay invisible and when a sound effect needs to become part of the violence. The balloons never suffocate Spears’ detailed compositions, and the louder moments have that old-school comic-book physicality without feeling like parody. More importantly, dialogue-heavy scenes remain easy to navigate. That’s essential because this is not 74 pages of Spawn beating somebody into hamburger. The book talks. A LOT. Readers expecting nonstop cape-and-chain insanity may initially wonder where the fireworks are, but the lettering keeps those conversations moving while Spears uses faces to supply the menace underneath them.

Now, I do think the pacing is going to divide people. This is a chunky first issue, and it is deliberately more interested in establishing its world and its people than speed-running Spawn mythology. Some sequences could lose a panel or two without sacrificing anything, and there were stretches where I was ready for the supernatural side to kick the damn door down already. But once the book begins connecting its human ugliness to the horror underneath it, the slower build makes sense. This isn’t trying to replace Al Simmons, retell Spawn #1, or scream “LOOK, IT’S THE ’70s!” every four panels. It is constructing its own version of the mythology from the ground up, and I would much rather see creators take that swing than give me another continuity remix wearing bell-bottoms.

The coolest part is that Spawn ’77 understands the character is bigger than the costume. Strip away decades of continuity, toys, animation, games and all the other Spawn machinery and what remains? Damnation. Regret. Violence. Deals nobody fully understands until the bill arrives. A terrifying figure standing somewhere between victim and monster. That DNA survives the transplant. Spears’ Spawn looks recognizably Spawn without feeling like cosplay, and McFarlane’s involvement gives the experiment permission to get weird instead of treating the original design like sacred museum property. That is the right attitude. If you are going to show me another universe, SHOW ME ANOTHER DAMN UNIVERSE.

Spawn ’77 #1 is weird, grimy, confident and visually nasty as hell. It takes its time, occasionally more time than I think it needs, but the atmosphere Spears creates is so strong that I kept wanting to turn the page just to see what fresh nightmare he was going to paint next. This isn’t Spawn nostalgia wrapped in a 1977 Halloween costume. It feels like somebody cracked open the original idea, pulled out the demonic heart and asked what that heart would look like beating fifteen years before Spawn #1 ever hit a comic rack. That is a much more interesting experiment, and by the end of this oversized opener I wasn’t thinking about whether it was “my” Spawn anymore. I wanted issue #2. That’s the win.

CRUSADERS SCORE:
4 / 5

Script/Plot: Mark Spears & Todd McFarlane
Art: Mark Spears
Lettering: Tom Orzechowski
Creative Director / Spawn Creator: Todd McFarlane
Editor-in-Chief: Thomas Healy
Publisher: Image Comics / Todd McFarlane Productions
On Sale: September 9, 2026
Price: $6.99