Spawn #5: Justice Review
Medium: Comic
Release date: 10/1/1992
Review date: 10/24/2024
Score: 4/10
Wow, another Todd McFarlane classic; if the issue hadn’t finally gotten Spawn to do anything other than just stand around and sulk I would have scored it even lower. In this wonderful entry, convicted child killer Billy Kincaid gets randomly released from prison just because, kills a couple more kids, and through that child murder inspires Spawn to maybe use his magical mystical powers for good. Todd, like many hack writers, decides to take the eye-rollingly easy route of having Spawn’s antagonist be a literal child murderer, which makes Spawn’s anguished “Oh no, should I use my magical mystical powers to stop this cartoonishly evil human being from killing the most innocent members of American society?” even more embarrassing; like, you think Al? You think it might be a good idea to stop all the child killing? How brave of you. There’s a whole backstory with Sam and Twitch, the police detective duo, having put Kincaid behind bars, and Al having been hired when he was still alive by one of the parents of Kincaid’s victims to kill Kincaid in retaliation and how his evil former boss Jason Wynn had tried to bury the whole situation, but none of that is really relevant in the face of just how dumb and predictable this whole issue is. Having a kiddie killer by the catalyst for Spawn’s conscience feels like the lowest possible hanging fruit, and ends up circling back to just being embarrassing. So anyways, Spawn ends the issue by dumping Kincaid’s corpse in Sam and Twitch’s office stabbed to death with popsicle sticks (Kincaid found his victims through an ice cream van) in a graphic that I think Todd thought was badass but actually just looked, again, embarrassing. I’m really struggling to see how this series became as popular as it did - everything I’ve read so far has been middling at best.