The Scorched #33 // Review
Sophia Swain euthanizes people in the hospital. Most people don’t know she’s doing it. The patients don’t know she’s doing it. So some people might call it murder. But given the fact that the people she’s euthanizing are monsters, it’s kind of a morally grey area for some. It couldn’t be more simple for her in The Scorched #33. Writer John Layman continues the series with an issue brought to page and panel by artist Dudu Pansica, inker Júlio Ferreira and colorist Dinei Ribeiro. The series feels appealing enough and a bit deeper than much of the rest of the ongoing titles of the Spawn Universe have managed lately.
Sophia had euthanized over a dozen people, but she’d never had an experience like the one that she’d had when she did-in Officer Starbuck. The cooked cop took a couple of doses to kill...and then the spirit came out of him. That was the moment at which a couple of police detective moved-in to arrest her. (They’d been on her trail for quite some time.) They couldn’t have expected the spirit inhabiting the late Officer Starbuck toe enter Sophia. Naturally, things were going to get more than a little bit complicated from there...
Layman tells a very concise story involving the interesting origin of a single monster...a single villain. Good intentions go from bad to worse and a monster is born. And though the entire thing is told in a single issue as little more than an extended outline, the overall premise that Layman is working with is fun enough to hold it all together. It’s the origin of a new variation on McFarlane and Kirkman’s Haunt from 2009. Honestly, the Sophia version of Haunt feels a lot more interesting than the character’s original incarnation.
Layman’s outline is really, really nice. Even the best synopsis doesn’t work as a standalone story on the page without someone like Panic doing the art. Pansica nails the action to the page with a deft precision that shoots across the panels in a very natural momentum. While it would have been really, really nice to see Panic do deliver the story of The Scorched #33 as a fully realized series, Pansica does a clever job of framing moments in action that feel strong enough to stand-in for fully rendered fight scenes. Ribeiro’s colors add considerably to the atmosphere of the action and the appeal of this particular incarnation of Haunt.
It’s too bad that the Sophia version of the Haunt character couldn’t get her own series. The entirety of the issue would have fit rather nicely into a fully fleshed-out four-issue mini-series. With any luck, Sophia Swain will have a bit more going on in the Spawn universe moving forward. It’s a cleverly simple mutation of the original Kirkman/McFarlane premise that feels like it could have some thematic depth to it. There’s quite a lot of potential in the Spawn Universe, but it always seems to rest on the edge of the panels. Nice to see it shoot across the center of the page once in a while.
