Spawn #343 // Review
He went to Heaven to find a way to neutralize the powers of Sinn. Things have gotten considerably messed up since then. The barriers between Heaven, Hell, and Earth are all...weird. Heaven is invading Hell. There’s a war on. Some don’t want anything to do with it, so they’re just...slumming it on Earth. And then there’s the guy who is kind of responsible for it all. He’s exhausted in Spawn #343. Writer Rory McConville continues to delve into the world of Spawn with the aid of additional scripting by Todd McFarlane. The action is conjured to the page by Carlo Barberi. Color inhabits the visual courtesy of Jay David Ramos.
In the past few days, Hell has lost a quarter of its territory to Sinn and Heaven. They didn’t really see it coming. No one had expected Heaven to come in and attack straight through the portal walls like they did. Meanwhile, the clown comes upon Spawn and Nyx. The two had been pretty solidly against each other in the past. She’s not there to taunt Spawn...just wants to help him clean up his mess. And as luck would have it...even the clown is interested in helping out.
So...war between Heaven and Hell pretty much plays out...like a comic book slugfest. It’s the type of thing McFarlane set up in the title a long time ago, but...McConville and company don’t do a lot to try to make the situation any more interesting or intricate. Forces are drawn against forces in a pre-modern fashion even in a post-modern era. It’s believable and everything. These entities ARE immortal. It’s just...kinda boring. It would stand to reason that powerful entities would have evolved a much more sophisticated way of waging war over the centuries. Humanity has changed tremendously just in the past 100 years. One would think that war between Heaven and Hell would be a lot more fascinating.
Barberi has a pretty solid look going for the issue. Spawn and Nyx look really cool glaring at each other. So that’s cool. There’s some weight to the drama between them. There’s kind of a nice fight between Spawn and a big demon at the beginning of the issue, too. That’s pretty cool. Other than that, it’s a big wallpaper of...people standing around and looking ominous. They all look very appealingly formidable, and it’s not hard to tell that...y’know...something’s going to go on in some way. So that’s probably going to be cool when that happens too.
Spawn continues to echo through politics and personal vendettas and things that go way back and echo throughout the lengthy history of the series and all of its subsidiary titles. It’s not actually bad...it’s just a relentless, boring nightmare of the same types of conflicts over and over and over again without a whole lot of new elements being thrown in. So it’s...it’s just a lot. And there’s a war between Heaven and Hell. So that’s...y’know...that’s cool.
