Todd McFarlane Gives A Look Inside Spawn #270

Spawn creator Todd McFarlane has taken to social media to provide his followers with a first glimpse inside of Spawn #270, due in stores next month.

McFarlane provided the story for the issue, with the art currently credited to “Todd McFarlane and friends” on the Image Comics website.

He says he doesn’t want to give too much away, but there’s more than a little bit of a tease here: the gas masks in that tweet appear likely to belong to The Soul Crusher, a new villain whose first full appearance has been teased as Spawn #273 from McFarlane and artist Szymon Kudranski.

Kudranski will be the first officially-solicited artist, and Soul Crusher the first major new threat, since the departure of Erik Larsen, who co-wrote the series with McFarlane and pencilled the comic for a year until #266.

“That story arc was, for the first time in 250+ issues, Spawn going down and coming face to face with Satan,” McFarlane explains of the Satan Saga Wars, which concluded with #262. “He’d never done that, right? I always looked at it as sort of a Dante’s Inferno, that there are a handful of different levels of devils and so he hadn’t gotten to The Devil yet. It needed a bigness to it. Jack Kirby was obviously the King of doing big, and Erik Larsen has a little bit of our modern-day Jack in terms of bigfoot, slam-bam stuff.”

Spawn #269 is on sale on January 11. You can pre-order a digital copy on ComiXology or call your local retailer to reserve one in print.