Sunday, June 17, 2018

Patreon Request-Spawn: The Animated Series Review

Patreon Request: Spawn The Animated Series Review from Not The Hero on Vimeo.

Originally a request by Michael Prymula.

On the holiest of days, it's time to talk about the holiest of superheroes...Spawn.

5 comments:

  1. Thing is... you mention it's "accuracy to the comics", but in fact, this animated series is NOT faithful to the comics at all. And that is a very, very good thing.

    The actual Spawn comics contain some of the worst, most nonsensical, trashy, incomprehensible, disjointed, and poorly written narratives, dialogue and characters it's possible for a comic to have. Almost everything that happens in the animated series is nearly completely different than the way things play out in the comics and the comics are much worse.

    The animated show really feels like a second pass of the comics, trying to fix their many, many, many, MANY mistakes and it's awful writing, by trying to actually reorganize things into a coherent narrative and create new, reasonable character relationships and motivations, none of which are present in the comics.

    There is a guy on Youtube, who has a channel called Geekvolution or did a series of reviews of every original Spawn comic, in a year+ long serial of many videos he called "Spawn Year" where he dissects just how bad the original comics are. The comics are really badly written, incoherent, and it is very stupid, senseless, shlock that the HBO series mercifully fixes and vastly improves.

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  2. Oh, by the way, as an extra aside... If you think Spawn is unlikable in the third act of this?

    He is much much much MUCH worse in the comics. He never does anything heroic, he commits much more atrocities combined with things like you see here, and pretty much ALWAYS reacts like a violent, sociopathic, selfish, buffoon but he is also shown to be a horrible person in many more ways that this series tones down greatly. The Spawn from the comics would rape, and kill not just criminals but threaten or attempt to do harm to ANYONE who makes him angry or looks at him the wrong way. That is when his character is making any sense or isn't just using his own situation to justify the terrible things he does, pretty much all of the time.

    Beyond that, the violence is rarely ever used in context to the story, is mostly just there for shock value just like Linkara's mention of Chapel in Youngblood... that kind of writing is routine in the Spawn comics.... the worldbuilding is sloppy and repeatedly contradicts itself, and things often go off the rails into insane tangential directions that rarely make any sense.

    This series while still flawed, only carries along with it the most MINOR of flaws, while still greatly fixing the comic, which has the problems you mentioned in this review of the series, only magnified by 200%.

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    Replies
    1. JESUS MAN! Start your own review series if you've got this much to say!

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    2. Ah, the 90s. If it was any more depraved, it'd be the contents of Vince McMahon's mind.

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    3. Also, speaking of Linkara. Like he brought up, Savage Dragon should've been the Image's flagship book.

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