No, no offense to Todd McFarlane. The guy's got some good ideas! Great ideas, even! It isn't exactly a timeless tale though, the one told in Spawn Origins. It's not exuberantly unique; at the same time, it's not overtly familiar. This doesn't diminish its quality any, mind. This is a quality production McFarlane's runnin' here. He's got word balloons and multi-issue arcs and he even colours between the lines.
The art style is actually... I don't know. I wouldn't call it "good," but there's definitely an appeal to the grungy, sketchy look that is Todd McFarlane's signature aesthetic. The colours are incredibly bold for what should be a dark and grimy horror-esque tale - bright, chunky onomatopoeia cuts through striking silhouettes, and the framing of the panels varies from utterly pedestrian to nigh-on avant garde. Or, just weird and bad. It can be hard to tell what plane characters reside on, or - if they are on the same plane - how tall they're meant to be. One full-page panel in particular makes Spawn look like 20-foot tall gargoyle, and Clown look like a midget reaching up to his ankles. Their eyelines don't match the conversation (both of them looking off-panel, presumably at something more interesting). The book is filled with quirky, "wrong" elements like this, that makes Todd McFarlane seem like an amateur. He's hardly an amateur, though, not even when he drew these early Spawn stories. So... guh.
