“Neil Gaiman Writes Spawn 9” Ad from 1992

Todd McFarlane’s Spawn comics (find at Amazon.com*) turns 25 this year, and here we see an advertisement from 1992 that promised great things for the then-new series. Out of Spawn #6 in late 1992, this full-page ad — one of four similar ads in the issue — proclaims that Neil Gaiman was set to write Spawn #9. That actually happened, and the resulting storyline — a “Dark Ages Spawn” — led to toys, a stand-alone comic, several characters, and years of legal headaches.

This 2012 post at themarysue.com speaks of the settlement, and the article gives enough to tell you what was going on, but for now I just want to sit back and remember a time when Spawn was new, Image was new, and the comics industry hadn’t turned on itself and transformed into a complete mess.

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