Gunslinger Spawn #22 // Review
It should have been totally clear that Spawn and the clown would never join forces. It’s something that might be occurring to him as a bunch of ravenous little clownlings attack him with mouths full of dagger teeth. Honestly...the attack should have been pretty obvious in retrospect as well. This IS a story that’s being written by Todd McFarlane, after all, and this sort of action is pretty much what the author would want to spring on him on the opening splash page of Gunslinger Spawn #22. Artist Brett Booth dutifully crams the action and drama onto the page with the aid of inkers Adelso Corona and Corey King. Colorist Ivan Nunes makes some sense of the cluttered mess of detail on the page.
Gunslinger Spawn is not alone in dealing with the clown and his razor-toothed homunculoid clones. Dakota fights alongside him in her ridiculously large-brimmed hat as well. She’s not just a target and a potential victim who shouts a lot...she can jump around, use a whip, shoot a couple of guns, AND serve as a potential victim. Meanwhile, there’s a giant violator that is locked in combat with a T-rex. (So there’s that, too.)
So, it's not just one issue-length battle. It's actually a few that are interconnected and interrelated. MacFarlane's narration is fun in its own way. Kind of cool to know that both the violator and the T-rex weigh a combined 30,000 pounds. That's fun. So much of what's going on in and within the combat is, however, pretty indecipherable. There's a lot of blasting and tumbling, dialogue and narration. Some of it's almost kind of cool. The drama seems lost, though. The drama that binds it all to the page IS clearly there, glowing through the eyes and grinding through the grimaces and such.
Booth has a lot of panels to fill. The struggle is real. And it's very much present. The kinetics of the actions feel more or less compelling. Clearly, there's a lot of action moving around on the page. And it really feels like something is actually going on. Some of it looks a little ridiculous with the white brooms in that sort of thing. But that's nothing new to this particular title. McFarlane’s going for some sense of mutated cowboy/western horror action, and it IS pleasantly weird at times. The art team does a pretty good job of bringing it all to the page, but the real hero is Nunes, who does a brilliant job of giving it all some kind of intelligible form.
Although it is the case that the aggression of the 22nd issue of the series is kind of overwhelming, there clearly is a dramatic gravity that’s holding it all together. It’s just a bit lost in all of the action that’s scratched into the page. Somewhere under the weight of all that blood and aggression lies a hell of a lot of emotion that’s going to have to wait for issue #23 to really emerge.
