Adult Animation Found a Champion in Todd McFarlane's Spawn

In The Late Great, Primetimer staffers and contributors revisit shows that were cut short, but still cast a long shadow over the TV landscape.

As the comics-to-streaming pipeline continues to feed the insatiable television market with big-budget adaptations like The Sandman, Loki, and The Boys, overall fan and critical reception have crowned Prime Video’s Invincible king. That almost certainly has something to do with the series’ animated format, which enables its unrestrained exploration of sci-fi concepts and superhero action in a way that live-action television can’t replicate. It also helps that its unabashedly violent and big-hearted take embraces the teenage turmoil and sanguine attitude of Robert Kirkman’s Skybound/Image Comics series instead of softening its edge to court broader appeal. That commitment echoes an older Image animated series whose cult status keeps it in conversation among its modern adult animation contemporaries: Todd McFarlane’s Spawn.

Set to return next month, Invincible doesn’t owe its success to Spawn. But it’s difficult to ignore how both shows' hard-R adaptive approach reflected among audiences a desire for more adult-oriented comic animation upon their release. (The Boys recently attempted to meet demand with 2022’s Diabolical.) Today’s American adult animation — the kind that isn’t beholden to comedy, anyway — is sparse compared to when Spawn lurked on HBO. In 1997, MTV was essentially the only game in town, and its animation line, formed in the primordial soup of Liquid Television, was pushing the format with psychosexually-tinged animated works like Sam Kieth and Bill Messner-Loebs’ The Maxx (itself an Image Comics adaptation) and Peter Chung’s Æon Flux. As a cable entity with deep pockets and a desire to compete, HBO wanted in on this action.

Over in comic book land, Todd McFarlane was hard at work making Spawn a household name. After triggering an artist exodus from Marvel Comics in 1992 to form Image (alongside fellow creators Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, Erik Larson, Marc Silvestri, Jim Valentino, and Whilce Portacio), McFarlane’s Spawn quickly became one of the industry’s best-selling titles. By the mid-’90s, he was courting film offers. When HBO came knocking with an idea to bring his dark comic book to life — which featured a deceased Black CIA agent named Al Simmons who sells his soul to be reunited with his wife and becomes a catalyst for Armageddon in the bargain — Todd, concerned that a hasty business decision might blunt the edge of his creation, wanted to know one thing: could his character say "f***k" on TV? HBO and McFarlane were in business.

Teamed with showrunner Alan B. McElroy (Star Trek: Discovery), McFarlane got to work finessing the sordid origin that gives Spawn's 18-episode run its moody powers. The story goes that every 400 years, a hellspawn is brought to Earth; now, it's Al Simmons' (Keith David) turn. A killer done in by the unhinged assassin Chapel (Ruben Santiago-Hudson), Al cuts a deal with one of Hell's devils (Malebolgia, whose ridiculous visage thankfully never appears on the show): his soul in exchange for a new lease on life with his former spouse, Wanda (Dominique Jennings). As befits stories with such infernal bargains, Al doesn’t read the fine print.

Five years after his untimely demise, Al wakes up, his body burnt to a crisp and wrapped in a tremendous, shifting red cloak. Chains fall from his body and move to his psychic commands. Wanda has married Al's best friend, Terry (Victor Love/Michael Beach), and they have a little girl named Cyan. Dejected, Al haunts the churches that overlook Rat City, a haven for New York's unhoused population, and it's perversely lucky he's there; Rat City is where bad people go to dump their problems, and soon Al, who can't help but disrupt the exploits of evil men (even when he doesn't want/care to), finds himself embroiled in the affairs of Tony Twist (James Keane), a mobster with ties to CIA director Jason Wynn (Æon Flux's John Rafter Lee). Jason, we discover, is the man who put the hit out on Al.

As Al gets his bearings, he's flanked by two voices on his shoulder in the form of Cogliostro (Richard Dysart), the seemingly ancient vagrant and would-be angel who knows more about Malebolgia's hellspawns than he's letting on, and Violator (Michael Nicolosi), a vulgar demonic spud prone to sticking his hands down his pants whenever he pops up to provoke Al or provide wee morsels of information about his situation.

Violator is a peculiar foil for Spawn — he shifts from a pudgy clown to a spindly nightmare of limbs and teeth and whispers horrible things in Al's ear (we also get the impression he took part in Al’s hellacious tortures) – but early into Season 2, Violator gets lost in the series's shadows. (Season 4 might have brought him back as the war between Heaven and Hell ramped up.) Cogliostro serves a clearer function, articulating the series's bleak morality as he guides Al (and the viewer) through this impressionistic hellscape, as he does most effectively in the series' best episode, Season 3, Episode 1: "The Mindkiller.”

Todd McFarlane's Spawn is unique among TV comic book adaptations. While it shares the lusty character models of superhero shows like Fox Kids' X-Men, where square jaws and broad shoulders define the male form and female characters share supermodel heights and curves, the similarities stop there. McFarlane invoked Silence of the Lambs, The Godfather, and Seven when he promoted the show; he wanted audiences to take this series as seriously as they would anything else from HBO. As such, there’s an open hostility to broader comic book tropes that grows as the show progresses. In the Season 1 episode "No Rest, No Peace," Overkill (James Hanes), a big, nasty cyborg Spawn fights in the comics, is unceremoniously killed by Al offscreen.

After their explosive first round, the outcome is intentionally anticlimactic; the wars Spawn fights are meant to be cerebral. Despite the show’s level of violence, which is substantial, McFarlane favors the psychological aspects of these characters over the action-oriented (re: mainstream) functions of the typical comic-based cartoon — or, ironically enough, the live-action movie he would also release in 1997.

Shadows cloak everything; Eric Radomski, the animator who co-created the "dark deco" aesthetic of Batman: The Animated Series with Bruce Timm, helped fashion the series's enigmatic visual identity. In Spawn, darkness is heightened to such a degree that elements on the screen — be it people, buildings, or automobiles — effectively morph into abstract shapes. Sinister imagery is the series's dramatic signature, but its sound editing delivers the disquieting aspect of a horror film. When characters speak, they rarely register above a coarse whisper, either because the people speaking are terrified out of their minds, a part of some hideous conspiracy, or, in some cases, a chilling mixture of both. The silence is often so great that whenever Keith David speaks, his baritone rumble packs apocalyptic power. It’s not hyperbole to say Spawn is a visual and auditory experience that totally sets it apart from similar fare. (While the two accomplish very different things and were made for very different audiences, the first season of Batman: TAS might be considered its closest thematic cousin.)

It's wild to flip through an issue of Spawn and then watch an episode from this series; the styles between mediums are so distinct. Yet this doesn't change the character's essence or, more importantly, what the character represents. Todd McFarlane's Spawn remains the optimal version of Al Simmons (despite that movie and hundreds of comics besides) because the medium challenged his creator to reinvent the concept from the ground up without losing what made Spawn so viscerally appealing in the first place. (As to his enduring popularity, just refer to this now-infamous quote from McFarlane: "Kids like chains.”) Two different mediums, two different approaches, same ol' Spawn.

Of course, since there was no Season 4, the series ends abruptly and leaves us with too many lingering questions. If Angela (Denise Poirier, Æon Flux herself), the warrior hunter of Heaven, ever faces Cogliostro again (or meets Spawn), it'll have to take place in our minds. The final fate of Jason Wynn remains a mystery. Will Wanda keep her Armageddon baby? We may never know. Spawn ends, at least, with Al Simmons finally making a decision — fittingly, it impacts his fate and the world around him. "I want my humanity back," he says, Keith David's booming voice being the final thing we hear as this fever-dream series fades to black, Shirley Walker's chilling score pinning us to our seats one last time.

Todd McFarlane's Spawn is a relic of its time, an ink-black apotheosis of the edgy antihero stuff that proliferated on the comic racks in the ’90s. The world it shows us is a dead-end alleyway where hope crawls on its hands and knees and dreams bleed out on the concrete. Much has changed in the TV landscape since its inception. But if Invincible's success proves anything, there's still a market for adult animation that comes off a bit rougher, pushes a little harder, and experiments with our expectations before smashing them entirely. In time, who knows? Maybe Todd McFarlane will return to TV and find Keith David waiting for him — and HBO, too. Maybe they'll get a chance to finish what they started years ago, and viewers can once again visit this animated series that was once so dark that its creator urged us to turn off our lights to truly see it. Twenty-six years on, it's still good advice.

Jarrod Jones is a freelance writer currently settled in Chicago. He reads lots (and lots) of comics and, as a result, is kind of a dunderhead.