What If Spawn Failed? Todd McFarlane and Daniel Henriques Discuss Untold Trauma in New Book

Writer Daniel Henriques and artist Jonathan Glapion tackle a very unsettling question in their new Spawn spinoff series — what if Spawn missed a chance to save a 7-year-old girl? The antihero has often prioritized punishing villains over helping victims, and Henriques has been holding onto an idea on this topic for over three decades now. He is finally exploring it in The Curse of Sherlee Johnson, which his shelves and digital stores next month from Image Comics. In an interview with ComicBook ahead of the release, Henriques and series creator Todd McFarlane discussed how this throwback series will impact the Spawn Universe.

The Curse of Sherlee Johnson picks up from the events of Spawn #5 — an iconic issue first published in 1992 where Spawn tracks down child serial killer Billy Kincaid. He finds Billy in the middle of a disturbing scene, playing with Sherlee’s hair and severed fingers and she is strung up inside of his deep freezer. Spawn kills Kincaid and leaves his corpse at the police station, rebuking the cops who failed to stop him.

Since the first time he read this issue, Henriques said he has always wondered why Spawn didn’t check on Sherlee before leaving.

“We don’t actually know that she’s dead,” he pointed out. “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.”

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The idea has always been compelling to Henriques because of its potential for more melodrama, and a different perspective on Spawn’s early days. He noted that if Sherlee was alive and conscious during Spawn’s confrontation with Kincaid, she would have seen “him beating he 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 felt that since Kincaid had come back into the story so often over the years, it just seemed right to flesh out one of his victims as a character as well — especially as the mechanics of the afterlife were explained in subsequent story arcs. McFarlane agreed that this was the perfect way to explore Spawn’s flaws and perhaps the flaws of the superhero archetype in general.

“The problem with the hero playing judge, jury, and executioner is, there’s ramifications for it, right?” he 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 kicks off on Wednesday, May 2nd with a special 48-page issue to start. It is available for pre-order now via your local comic book shop, or digital platforms including Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, and Google Play. Image Comics is also issuing a reprint of Spawn #5 to mark the occasion.