Spawn was even more camera ready than most. Concocted by McFarlane in 1992 right after he and some fellow comics all-stars bolted Marvel in a creative rights dispute and started their own firm, Image Comics, it's the saga of murdered government assassin Al Simmons who deals with the devil in order to be reunited with his wife. The catch: Simmons is returned to the land of the living with a face that looks like something out of the Dumpster behind Jack in the Box only to discover that his widow has started a family with his best friend. Sure, Simmons also now has incredible powers and (as the kids will tell you) a totally kickin' costume covered with chains, spikes, and skulls, but that's small consolation. Once his extended lease on life has expired, he's contractually bound to head back down under and become general of hell's army.
For a comic that reaches many preteens, Spawn is awfully grisly; early issues showed one villain tearing out his victims' still-beating hearts and depicted an ice cream truck driver-turned-serial sicko impaled with a scooper and Popsicle sticks. But if it all sounds somewhat harder-edged than the usual comics-to-screen fare, just remember The Crow, with its bleak story line of gangland anarchy and righteous revenge. In fact, nontraditional heroes with ambiguous moral codes are what have driven the comics business for the past decade--to the point that "grim and gritty," once the marketing buzzwords for them, is now a groan-eliciting cliche in comics shops.
"For whatever reasons, today's audiences seem to enjoy dark stories where reality comes unglued, be it The X-Files or Millennium," says Larry Marder, Image's executive director. "Comic books have been mining that vein for a while now, so we're a good place for the studios to look for dystopian fantasies that are well worked out and self-contained."
It seems, then, that there's a fair amount of market sense in McFarlane's Spawn sensibility. "We know more and more about what goes on in the world, so the material we read has to change to match," reasons Alan McElroy, writer of both the Spawn film and an ultraviolent adult-themed Spawn cartoon series debuting this spring on HBO. "And as we grow closer to the millennium, that always brings up issues of the veil between good and evil growing thinner. How do we face that? I think Spawn touches on that."
Back on the Spawn movie set, costumed baddie John Leguizamo is being hoisted via a forklift to the top of a hazardous-waste disposal truck. Such is the suffering the actor is enduring for his art: He's unrecognizable as Spawn's arch-nemesis, Violator, a shape-shifting demon whose bloated "human" guise looks like a cross between Danny DeVito's Penguin and The Simpsons' Krusty the Clown.
Along with Martin Sheen, who plays Al Simmons' double-dealing former boss, Leguizamo is the biggest name in the production. (Michael Jai White, last seen in 2 Days in the Valley, plays the title role.) While Columbia Pictures was courting McFarlane with name directors and producers shortly after the comic first hit, he ultimately went with Mark Dippe, Clint Goldman, and Steve "Spaz" Williams, a trio of Industrial Light & Magic staffers whose collective resume includes effects work on The Abyss, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, and The Mask, and who were itching to make a film of their own.
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