A massive hellspawn is walking through a facility that might as well be a graveyard. it's not, of course. Corpses are strewn all over the place, though. There's some very advanced looking tack there. Very modern. Very post-20th century. The only question is what killed them. And perhaps a better question is whether or not that might still be lurking about in Monolith #3. Writer Sean Lewis continues a story with art by Valerio Giangiordano. Color comes to the page courtesy of Ulises Arreola. It’s big. It’s ponderous. It packs a punch. It’s the latest chapter in the long and winding history of the Spawn universe. 

It should come as no surprise that the threat in question is big and ugly and looking to kill Monolith. It’s another hellspawn. This one’s called Plague. It spread death to the humans that had birthed it. Now it’s something that Monolith is going to have to deal with while also surviving an attack from Omega Spawn. So things aren’t going to be easy for Monolith in his third issue. Things are going to get quite messy indeed. Lots of motion lines. Lots of splattering. A whole lot of aggression. This comes as no surprise. 

Lewis has a few kernels of interesting ideas circulating around the narrative that accompanies all of the blood and aggression and gore and such. Conflict between the different hellspawns is all interesting enough. It's just too bad that there isn't more time for more articulation of the aggression between them. They are all just attacking each other. And there really isn't much interest in that beyond surface level. There’s real potential for the drama inherent in an entire facility being killed off by this one thing that it created. Lewis doesn’t have a whole lot of time to get into any of it, though. He’s too busy with another big, splatter fight sequence that takes-up most of the issue.

Motion lines. They’re abusing motion lines. Giangiordano can make the action hit the page with a hell of an impact, but all those...all those motion lines. The issue should come with a couple of tabs of dramamine. Really. And the splatters don’t help. When the visuals aren’t busying themselves with being explicitly brutal, they’re busying themselves with being incoherently brutal. Really. There’s a lot of hellish aggression going on and it’d be really cool to see it actually deliver any kind of narrative impact at all. 

It’s not like it isn’t fun in its own way. And it’s not like anyone picking-up a copy of a Spawn Universe comic book would really expect anything different. It comes across with the consistence of a pile of death metal album covers that  seem to lack a whole lot of the type of variation necessary to really tell much of a coherent story.  It’s really...really kind of excessive. There are big things going on at the end of the issue, but by the time the narrative reaches that final page it’s difficult to care.

Grade: D