Spawn '77: A 49-Year-Old Idea Finally Gets Out
- Jason Daniel
- 7 days ago
- 3 min read
IMAGE COMICS · MINISERIES PREMIERE · 09/09/26 RELEASE · 9 COVERS · FROM $5.59
Some first issues are a new story. This one is an old one that never got told.
In 1977, a young artist had his first ideas for a character he would name Spawn. That artist was Todd McFarlane. Forty-nine years later, Spawn is an international sensation — a movie, toys, games, an animated series, translated into more than a dozen languages, with fans across the globe.
Spawn '77 #1 (Of 3) goes back to the sketch. In collaboration with acclaimed artist Mark Spears, Todd McFarlane brings his original 1977 idea into the Spawn Universe — not a retelling of the character we know, but the version that came first and never made it off the page.
"A wickedly different version of Spawn starts here."
Why This One Is Different
It's the idea before the idea. Not a reboot and not an elseworld pitched by someone else — this is the creator's own first concept, the one he had before Spawn became Spawn.
McFarlane is drawing it himself. He isn't writing from the sideline. His hand is on the covers, including a piece built off the original 1977 art.
Mark Spears is the co-conspirator. Spears' work is unmistakable — heavy shadow, weight, menace. Pairing him with McFarlane's earliest concept is the whole reason this book exists.
It is finite — three issues. A three-issue miniseries with a #1 that will be the entry point collectors chase. There is no ongoing to catch up on.
The cover lineup goes deep. Nine covers on issue one, from a $5.59 Cvr A all the way to a 1:250 McFarlane signed foil.
Nineteen Seventy-Seven
CTX ORIGINAL FICTION — a short piece written from nothing but the solicitation. No spoilers; we haven’t read it either.
The pencil was cheap. The paper was cheaper. Neither of them had any idea what was about to happen on that desk.
He was young that year — young enough that drawing after midnight still felt like getting away with something. The lamp threw a circle of yellow on the page and left the rest of the room to fend for itself. He worked inside that circle. Everything else was somebody else's problem.
It came out of the graphite in pieces. A silhouette first, because silhouettes are easy and lies are easy in the same way. Then the shoulders, too heavy. Then the cape, too long, dragging off the bottom edge of the paper into territory he hadn't drawn yet. He kept going. That's the part nobody tells you about being seventeen with a pencil — you don't stop to ask whether the thing on the page wants to be there.
When it was mostly finished, he sat back and looked at it, and the thing looked back the way a drawing shouldn't.
It needed a name. He tried three. Crossed out three. The fourth one came up out of him without permission, and he wrote it small in the corner, the way you write a word you're not sure you're allowed to own yet.
Spawn.
Then he did the thing you do at that age. He closed the sketchbook.
Forty-nine years is a long time to leave something in the dark. Long enough for a different version of it to get out and get famous — to be printed in a dozen languages, molded into plastic, animated, filmed, sold in every country with a comic rack. Long enough for the whole world to decide it knows exactly what that word means.
And long enough for the first one — the one from inside the yellow circle, the one that never left the page — to get very, very patient.
The sketchbook is open now.
Original short fiction by CTX Comics, extrapolated solely from the publisher's solicitation for Spawn '77 #1. It is not an excerpt from the issue and does not reflect its actual contents.
The Covers
Nine ways in. Every copy on our site is 20% off cover price, ratios included.
Cvr A — Spears — $5.59 (was $6.99)
Cvr B — Spears & McFarlane — $5.59 (was $6.99)
Cvr C — McFarlane Original 1977 Update — $5.59 (was $6.99)
Cvr D — Rios — $5.59 (was $6.99)
Cvr E — Blank Sketch — $6.39 (was $7.99)
Cvr F — 1:25 McFarlane Retro Logo — $19.99 (was $24.99)
Cvr G — 1:50 McFarlane — $39.99 (was $49.99)
Cvr H — 1:100 McFarlane Original 1977 — $89.99 (SOLD OUT)
Cvr I — 1:250 McFarlane Signed Foil — $229.99 (SOLD OUT)
Reserve Your Cover
Image Comics · Todd McFarlane & Mark Spears · On sale 09/09/26. Reserve your cover before the ratios are gone.
Solicit information courtesy of Image Comics. Covers, prices and availability current as of publication and subject to change. Spawn and all related characters are © Todd McFarlane Productions, Inc.
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