I did not know Spawn still walked the earth. I thought he had gone the way of Saturday morning cartoons and video store carpets, sealed up with dust and memory. Then I learned a new generation had arrived. Born, schooled, credentialed, and voter-registered, all with the chance to meet Spawn for the first time. The idea struck my heart like neon. I glowed. I read Gunslinger Spawn Vol. 1 with the eagerness of a child opening a forbidden box.
I opened it and felt the quiet disappointment that comes when you unearth a relic better left underground. Some things deserve to grow old with us. Others belong to their era and nowhere else. Spawn belongs to that second category. This book makes that painfully clear.
The pages gleam. That much cannot be denied. Philip Tan paints with reverence and skill, echoing the grand excess of Todd McFarlane with steady confidence. Every panel labors with detail. Shadows cling. Capes billow. Gunsmoke curls through the gutters. It is a beautiful object. I expected nothing less from an artist who once gave weight and wonder to other worlds. The comic is handsome. It is polished. It is empty.
What follows the beauty is noise. Dialogue that clangs like dropped tools. Characters who shout but never speak. Gunslinger Spawn should carry the silence of the frontier and the menace of a legend. Instead he arrives wearing a costume and cracking jokes that rot on the page. He gestures toward the myth of the Man With No Name and lands somewhere closer to a cartoon echo. The promise of mystery collapses into parody.
There is a story buried here, though it struggles to breathe. Heaven wants him dead. Hell wants him dead. Others want him dead for reasons that blur together. He kills them all. We have read this story before. Many times. It once felt dangerous. Now it feels rehearsed. An angel dies. Its body is defiled. The book pauses, waiting for awe or horror to bloom. Nothing comes. The moment passes without weight. Violence without meaning is just movement, and movement without meaning leaves no mark.
Page after page, things happen. Swords swing. Bullets fly. Voices snarl. And the heart remains untouched. That is the quiet failure of this comic. Not that it offends, but that it forgets to matter.
I’m not going to spoil everything just in case there are readers who want to give it a go, but by the final pages of Volume One, the trail widens and the horizon darkens. Revenge still rides with the Gunslinger, seated beside him like an old ghost that refuses to dismount, but another presence has joined the journey. The world is larger now, louder, and crowded with unseen powers moving behind the veil. What began as a private reckoning opens into a war he did not choose but cannot escape. As he learns the strange rhythms of this new age, his anger sharpens into purpose, and the road ahead promises storms yet to break.
“You young folk and your gadgets!”
In the end, Gunslinger Spawn Vol. 1 (collecting issues 1-6) stands as the Spawn saga often does… A striking idea wrapped in strange choices, chasing echoes of better stories without understanding why they once worked. The fire is gone but the smoke remains.
Gunslinger Spawn Vol. 1
Image Comics
Writer: Todd McFarlane with Additional Plot by Ales Kot
Artists: Brett Booth, Kevin Keane, Thomas Nachlik, Philip Tan
Colorists: Andrew Dalhouse, Ivan Nunes, Nikos Koutsis, Marcello Iozzoli, Marcelo Maiolo, Fco Plascencia
Inkers: Adelso Corona, Todd McFarlane, Sal Regla, Jonathan Glapion, Daniel Henriques
Letterer: Tom Orzechowski
Reviewer: David Paul Harris
Summary: Gunslinger Spawn is a man out of time, lost in the future and in search of a way back to his past. He has many scores to settle with those who’ve done him wrong, but after he’s thrown headfirst into a far greater conflict—one concerning the fate of humanity—he finds his revenge might just have to wait for a bit.
