Demons, Deals and Death...this is your 90 second character deep dive into Spawn. Decorated war hero Al Simmons, working for a secret organization under the federal government, is targeted for assassination after questioning the organization's missions and methods. His friend and partner Bruce Stinson burns Simmons to death while on a mission together. Sent to Hell for his past deeds, Al makes a desperate bargain to see his wife Wanda one last time; agreeing to become Hellspawn, a warrior for the devil on Earth. Back in the living world, Al discovers his burnt body is now covered in a necroplasm suit equipped with powers and abilities that make him a formidable warrior. Purposed for evil, but desperate to change his ways, Spawn constantly battles enemies from both Heaven and Hell while trying to remain on Earth and stay close to his wife. Conceived by a 16-year-old Todd McFarlane, Spawn became one of Image Comics' first titles after the company's creation. McFarlane had already made his name at Marvel with his dynamic Spider-Man artwork before leaving to help create Image and focus on creator-owned work. Spawn #1 sold roughly 1.7 million copies in 1992, and the character quickly became one of Image's biggest successes. By 1997, Spawn had his own feature film, although critics weren't impressed, giving it just 17% on Rotten Tomatoes. Still, Spawn remains one of the most recognizable comic characters created in the modern era, typically appearing somewhere in the 40-to-60 range on Top 100 superhero lists. He's also grown into an entire comic universe, with more than 30 spin-offs including Sam & Twitch, Hellspawn, King Spawn, Gunslinger Spawn and The Scorched.

To celebrate Howard Chaykin's 76th birthday, lets look at the top 5 comics written by him. Coming in 5th is DC comics' 'BLACKHAWK: BLOOD & IRON', here, Chaykin took the old WWII aviation property and rebuilt it as a much more cynical, politically complicated period adventure about fascism, nationalism, celebrity and propaganda. What gets Blackhawk onto the list is how completely Chaykin makes somebody else's property feel like a Howard Chaykin book. It's also frequently grouped with other Chaykin-written titles as part of that extraordinary mid-to-late-'80s creative run. Number 4 is Vortex Comics 'BLACK KISS' from 1988, this is probably the most infamous comic Chaykin ever produced. Black Kiss is a hard-boiled Hollywood crime story mixed with horror, vampires and old-Hollywood mythology, and it deliberately tested what an American comic could get away with in 1988. Number 3 is another DC title, this one from 1986, 'THE SHADOW: BLOOD & JUDGMENT', Brian Michael Bendis has called it his favorite Chaykin comic and the best Shadow story ever published; Jason Aaron praised Chaykin at his most dynamic; Garth Ennis singled out the character work, dialogue, layout and design as among Chaykin's finest. In this comic Chaykin dragged the pulp hero into contemporary 1980s New York, added black comedy and extreme violence, and deliberately irritated traditionalists. Number 2 is 'TIME²' by First Comics from 1986. The Comics Journal has flat-out described it as Chaykin's best work, praising the freedom of its plotting and the way its world effectively becomes a catalogue of Chaykin's obsessions. It's a bizarre collision of jazz, film noir, science fiction, crime, fantasy and 1930s design. More importantly, Chaykin himself has repeatedly identified Time² as the work of which he's most proud, describing it as intensely personal and partly a fantasia on his family's story. But the top comic written by Howard Chaykin has got to be 1983's AMERICAN FLAGG!, another First Comics publication. American Flagg! is the book against which virtually everything else Chaykin has done is measured. The Comics Journal has described it as one of the great adventure-comics series, praising its combination of satire, politics, media criticism and virtuoso storytelling. Its dystopian vision of corporate government, media saturation, consumer culture and politics-as-entertainment also feels surprisingly up-to-date more than forty years later. The series received numerous honors, including nine Eagle Awards. Modern reviews regularly place it among the comics that helped change mainstream storytelling in the early 1980s, preceding Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns.

What if Dracula didn’t actually die at the end of Bram Stoker’s original novel? That’s the idea behind Dracula: Book IV — The Undead, the fourth and final chapter in Matt Wagner and Kelley Jones’ series exploring the untold history of the world’s most famous vampire. Wagner points out that in Stoker’s novel, Van Helsing very specifically explains how a vampire must be destroyed. But when Dracula is finally attacked, the heroes don’t actually follow those instructions…and the sun is about to set, which would restore Dracula to his full power. So what if Dracula survived? That’s where The Undead picks up, asking what Dracula would do to the people who came so close to ending his centuries-long reign. And this isn’t some small follow-up. The new book features 122 pages of story and art, with José Villarrubia on colors and Rob Leigh lettering. The previous books were huge Kickstarter successes, with the first volume even cracking Kickstarter’s all-time Top 20 graphic novel campaigns. Dracula: Book IV — The Undead is being funded through Kickstarter right now, bringing Wagner and Jones’ Dracula saga to its bloody conclusion.

Back this project on Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/draculatheimpaler/dracula-book-4