The She-Spawn Jessica Priest has returned to work for Jason Wynn. She’s going to find herself fighting against her, Things are going to get messy and dangerous, but at least she knows who she’s up against. She knows because she used to work with them. Things get uncomfortable in The Scorched #32. Writer John Layman continues the saga of the Spawn universe in another issue brought to the page by artist Stephen Segovia. The overall pacing and plot structure of the 32nd issue of the series. There’s a steady rhythm to the action that doesn’t dwell on drama OR violence for too long.

It’s always awkward catching-up with old co-workers...especially when they’re trying to kill you in China. They don’t actually want to kill her, of course. They just want to make sure that she doesn’t take Zab back to her current employer. The thing is...she can’t do that. She’s got a job to do and she’s going to do it. Naturally there’s going to be a fight. There are going to be explosions. There are going to be ridiculously large, mesomorphic humanoid demons with claws the size of stalactites and glowing, red eyes. It’s nothing the Jessica can’t handle, though.

Layman keeps the characterization to a minimum in an issue that’s largely about the slugfest that happens between two opposing forces in China. A good deal of Layman’s skill here simply lies in setting-up the situation for the artist and then letting him go at it with super-human beings beating the hell out of each other. There’s a little bit of expository narration that inhabits the corners of the action like weird, little pop-up windows, but for the most part, Layman is simply allowing the action to do its thing for the bulk of there issue. 

Segovia has a lot of room to move around the action. In lesser hands, this could have easily turned into a big, homogenous mess. Segovia moves around the action pretty well with clever use of silhouettes and empty space to provide some pretty impressive moments of kinetic violence that work quite well on the page. There’s a little bit of over-the-top splattering and ridiculously intense pummeling, but there’s a graceful kind of ballet with the way that it all shoots across the page. 

Honestly, The Scorcher #32 could have been a hell of a lot worse. The mindless repetition of blood, gore and motion lines throughout the Spawn universe has a tendency to blur and bleed together into a big, congealed mess. Layman and Segovia provide some definition to that as things progress into the next few issues. There’s a definite direction that things are taking as the issue ends in a hospital bed after the bloody violence. Everything’s going to be okay, but there IS a feeling like something might happen that might progress things away from some of the classic tropes of the Spawn universe that have come to be so...tolerable over the years.

Grade: B-