What if the most iconic moment in Spawn history wasn’t a triumph, but a massive failure?
That’s the chilling premise behind The Curse of Sherlee Johnson, a new limited series by writer Daniel Henriques and artist Jonathan Glapion, dropping this May from Image Comics.
This grim new chapter rewinds the clock all the way back to Spawn #5—when the hellborn antihero famously took out child killer Billy Kincaid. But this time, the story asks… did Spawn actually save anyone?
For Henriques, this story has been gnawing at him for over three decades. “We don’t actually know that she’s dead,” Henriques told ComicBook. “What if she’s not? What has Spawn just done — or what he has NOT done, which is actually save the victim that got him there in the first place.”
That victim is Sherlee Johnson, the little girl found mutilated and bound in Kincaid’s freezer. Spawn delivers his brutal justice to the killer, leaves his corpse at the police station, and walks away without ever checking on the girl. The original comic leaves Sherlee’s fate ambiguous. Henriques saw that ambiguity as a ticking time bomb.
“If Sherlee was still alive, even barely, then what she experienced wasn’t a rescue—it was a nightmare,” he said. “She would have seen him beating the crap out of Kincaid, maybe this giant flash of him teleporting away, and that’s it, and she’s left to die alone. I was always like, ‘This has to go somewhere, what happens next?’”
Henriques isn’t interested in retconning Spawn’s origin or undoing his legacy, he’s looking to complicate it. Kincaid has popped back up repeatedly throughout the Spawn Universe, but his victims? Not so much. That changes now.
This book digs into Sherlee’s trauma and follows the consequences of Spawn’s actions, or lack thereof, through a new lens of grief, anger, and ghostly vengeance.
Even Todd McFarlane, the creator of Spawn, welcomed this uncomfortable confrontation.
“The problem with the hero playing judge, jury, and executioner is, there’s ramifications for it, right?” McFarlane said. “So, we’ve tried to turn over those rocks on the Spawn character.
“You have to assume most heroes think they’re doing good, but at times you can ask, ‘Did this actually make things worse?’ Because there was no vetting, it was like, ‘Oh, he killed kids, I’m going to kill him,’ and he walks away.
“He didn’t really dig any deeper than that, he was just being very simplistic in his actions, that now are going to cause complications here.”
The Curse of Sherlee Johnson launches Wednesday, May 2nd with a hefty 48-page debut issue. Image Comics will also re-release Spawn #5 to coincide with the new series because to face Sherlee’s story, you’ll want to revisit the moment where it all went wrong.
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