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How about a comic about one of my least favourite characters in all comics? Chapel is the most one-dimensional character I've ever read, created, as far as I can tell, solely to facilitate Spawn's origin story, and then dragged along because someone thought that a dude with a skull on his face that killed people was an awesome idea.
It's not. It's derivative as fuck, and, as I've said, is barely a character. But because I've decided to read through my Awesome Comics stuff, Chapel must be read.
To be fair, it kind of nicely dovetails with the Fighting American series I've just finished, as it takes place in a much more grim, and much more violent, corner of the Awesome Universe than most of the other stories. I've no doubt that such brutality is implicit in any superhero universe, but I felt that the point of the Awesome U was that it was much more Silver Age, much less prone to violence. And then Liefeld has to bring his early Image sensibility back in and ruin everything. Wait until we get to the sadly aborted Joe Casey Youngblood, in which Liefeld literally kicked the creative team off the book mid-story, produced one extremely mediocre issue afterward, and then the series collapsed. Why does he do this?
One interesting thing about this issue is that it tells the story of Chapel's last mission before being ordered to assassinate Al Simmons. They only ever call him "Al," which is nicely ambiguous given Spawn's ownership by Todd McFarlane, but it does fill in a blank from that character's history. But that's just the problem - this probably should have been a special issue of Spawn, not an attempt to add character to something that is basically a plot device.
Ah well. As I've said before, and will undoubtedly say again, you can't love them all.
More to follow.
Further Reading and Related Posts
More thoughts, though not that many, on Spawn.
