Todd McFarlane Talks New Spawn Spinoff, Long-Form Storytelling: “Don’t Ask How It Ends – Ask How It Lasts 30 Years”

It’s been more than 30 years since Sherlee Johnson went missing in the pages of 1992’s Spawn #5. The issue — written, penciled and inked by series creator Todd McFarlane — saw the 7-year-old girl become the 28th victim of ice cream man and “Kiddie Killer” Billy Kincaid, who would lure children to his ice cream truck to commit his chilling crimes. The mercenary Al Simmons, resurrected as a vengeful Hellspawn, tortured and killed Kincaid, leaving his corpse for police detectives Sam Burke and Twitch Williams with a message: “Boys screamed and girls screamed so I made him scream and scream and scream…”

Mister Chill-ee was outfitted with his own parasitic suit by the demonic Vindicator when he was sent to the Eighth Sphere of Hell, where the murdering pedophile was slain by Spawn a second time in 1996’s Spawn #53. The blood-chilling serial killer would return as a ghost serial killer in 1999’s Spawn #80-85, and died a fourth and seemingly final time in 2005’s Spawn #152.

But 20 years later, the ghosts of the past will return in The Curse of Sherlee Johnson, a new bi-monthly Spawn spinoff series written by Gunslinger Spawn cover artist Daniel Henriques in his writing debut with interior art by Spawn cover artist Jonathan Glapion.

Spawn: The Curse of Sherlee Johnson #1 (on sale May 21) hits stands alongside a reprint of Spawn #5, the first appearance of Sherlee Johnson and her killer Billy Kincaid.

“We’re going back to 1992, the infancy of Image Comics. I wanted [Spawn] issue five to basically be my message that said: ‘He is not Batman,’” Image co-founder McFarlane, who continues to script what is the longest-running independent series in comic book history in the ongoing Spawn, told ComicBook. “And so when you see that last page [of issue five], of the brutality of what he did to Billy Kincaid, hopefully people got it, one way or the other, whether they liked it or not.”

“That was just to say, ‘Get ready for this new character called Spawn. He’s not going to be like the other corporate-owned characters,’” McFarlane continued. “We fast forward, and Daniel and Jonathan took one thread out of that thing and said, ‘We’ve got an idea. How about this?’ And so here we are 30 years later with a followup.”

In circling back to one of the earliest issues of Spawn three decades later, McFarlane noted that it speaks to the longevity of the creator-owned publisher’s longest-running character as he prepares to head back to screens in the Spawn reboot that has long been in the works at Blumhouse.

“[Hollywood producers] ask what to me is one of the oddest questions: ‘So, how does it end? What happens to the character in the end?’” McFarlane said. “I’m not trying to tell a story that’s got a beginning, middle, and end in the truest sense … and they’re going, ‘But how does it end?’ And my answer is always the same: ‘How does Batman or Superman end? Why do you want it to end?’ Your question should be, ‘How can I keep it going for 30 years,’ not what’s the end [of the story].”

“What happened to Sherlee Johnson, the seven-year-old victim of the infamous serial killer Billy Kinkaid?” the official synopsis asks. The new chapter in McFarlane’s Spawn Universe “explores the fate of the innocent young girl. Her harrowing adventures with the Stranger are laid bare as her story and the world she now inhabits is revealed.”

“The Stranger, we begin not knowing a lot about what he is. One of the things we know is that in [2019’s] Spawn #301, we had the big necroplasmic explosion that opened a lot of things — from time travel, dimension travel everything,” Henriques teased, referring to what McFarlane calls the Time Rip. “The Time Rip allows us to play with a lot of things, and that is what enables the Stranger to meet Sherlee. But it has a meaning behind it that we eventually will discover: Why does Spawn’s necroplasmic Time Rip bomb have this connection? Why does it go towards Sherlee? Why does it impact their past? There is a reason that they’re connected, and part of what they’ll do next, it has its own ramifications in the universe.”

“Even though we’re telling our own story, it is within the Spawn Universe,” he continued. “And even Sherlee’s actions, or even the Stranger’s actions, be it more compassionate or more revenge-driven, it’s going to have different ramifications in the universe.”

The 48-page The Curse of Sherlee Johnson #1 goes on sale May 21 from Image Comics with covers by Glapion and variant covers by McFarlane.