July 10, 2026 | tags: animation, comics, -- (permalink)

The "pact with a untrustworthy entity" trope is as universal as it can be in cultural contexts. It's not uncommon to find in folklore and oralities the idea of God's antagonist, or an evil metaphor, being an actual willing negotiator of a purposed desire. In Guimarães Rosa's "Great Backlands: Paths" (a terrible translation if you ask me), Riobaldo's ascension from Tatarana to Urutu Branco; in Faust, where Dr. Hiendrich Faust pacts with Mephistopheles to expand his knowledge or, why not, Griffith's Haō no Tamago sacrifice to the God Hand in Miura's Berserk.

The devil at the crossroads, in the middle of the whirlwind.

Al Simmons was a CIA merc with a talent to kill, the most over used masculinity archetype in USian male oriented storytelling, that was framed by his chief-in-command, leading to his assassination by a close CIA acquaintance. He goes straightforward to hell for being too successful in his enterprise, and makes a pact with Malebolgia, a fancy nickname for Satan, to go back to earth to the woman he loves and to have vengeance against his betrayers as Spawn, the Soldier from Hell. Very standard plot.

An important detail, though, is that Al Simmons is black. In life, as a soldier, his servitude to the USA government and the industrial-military complex tramples the important detail that he's a black man, although working for the US government, but without much of a background (or even memories).

It's difficult to not take Todd McFarlane's Spawn HBO animation as the canonical Spawn. The sound design, the backgrounds, the bumbs and homelessness of the big city, the cinematography, the human depth of the show, puts it on the pantheon of animation as a form of storytelling, even when western media is reluctant in moving drawings for adults. And, of course, it would be unforgivable to not mention the outstanding Keith Richard's voice acting for the main character, leading to his return to the role in Mortal Kombat's 11 as Spawn).

But that was the 90's, the peak of USA political victory over post Cold War. The mainstream media hijacked rock and roll from the subversive cultural lands, with grunge being the identity of 90's sounds. Movies and TV shows talking about the universal positive human experience of being "western liberal democrat" in a post Berlin Wall fall world. Universality that comes as easy as less melanin you have in your skin.

Spawn was first published as a comic book in 1992 by Image Comics, founded by McFarlane along with Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee after leaving Marvel, and like the other bigger hero publishers, their representation of USian society was mainly white. With the exception of Lee that is a Korean-American, Liefeld and MacFarlane are white man and ones of 90's main names of comics. With that said, it is hard to ignore the lazy writing of a black character that his main physical aesthetic is burned skin. Living in the streets and being good with heavy artillery is the only two USian black stereotypes that we could associate Al Simmons alter ego. But beyond that, he could be white and we would even notice.

This leads to a point of contrast of how other black characters in the 90's where also written outside of the mainstream media and it's inevitable to not remember Static Shock. Dwayne McDuffie is the creator of static and one of the co-founders of Milestone comics and first appeared 1993, a year after Spawn's publication by Image. Dwayne created Milestone as a personal enterprise to write people like him, a black USian citizen from Detroit, although Static is more like a modern era Spider-Man in a city like New York. Surprisingly, after being acquired by DC after Milestone closing, Static remained culturally relevant in his blackness. The aesthetics, his relationships, the way he communicates and deal with human problems is very well stablished in the comics and solidified in his cartoon show in the early 2000's, voiced by Samurai's Jack actor Phil LaMarr. The show is a class of blackness writing with depth and his interactions with Rick Stone and Frieda Goren serve as a background for how can you write a black hero, in a way that even Marvel's Black Panther couldn't. Maybe its the nature of the more human interactions that helps to create that, something that coorporate USA culture would never allow. Perhaps that's why Spawn doesn't feel black: to be black in a mostly white institution such as CIA or the military requires using your white mask. Even Uncle Phil from Fresh Prince of Bel Air, a judge from the court of the city, has his institutionalized black persona, that contrasts with Will's silly representation of a black man "from the streets".

I prefer to be simplistic in my conclusion that Spawn is just a badly written black character. The HBO cartoon is one of my favorites and it has HBO writing quality as a whole. But below his burned skin, is difficult to see Al Simmons as one black archetype. Let's be honest: he would never fit in The Boondocks.