Issue 22 - Spawn - Capes on the Couch

Issue 22 – Spawn

It’s our second Patreon President selected episode – SPAWN! Find out what happens when an atheist becomes an agent of Hell! Plus references to the Simpsons, Annie Duke, and Pascal’s Wager! Listen now!

SHOW NOTES:

Introduction
Background (08:54)
- Created by Todd McFarlane in Spawn #1 (May 1992)
- Al Simmons, former Marine and CIA black operative, killed by a partner and sent to Hell – made a deal with Malebolgia – in exchange for his soul, he can see his wife again
- Returns to human world 5 years later – wife has now married best friend Terry and they have a daughter, Cyan
- Attacked by Violator, another demon and lackey of Malebolgia, who tells him he’s an agent of Hell
- Meets bum Cogliostro, who knows history of Hellspawns
- Attacked by Angela, agent of Heaven who hunts Hellspawns
- Finds out order to kill him was given by Jason Wynn, his former boss, who is given heavenly powers to become Anti-Spawn/Redeemer – Spawn comes out victorious
- Fights the Freak, tortured by nightmares of his past
- Meets Harry Houdini, who’s a real magician
- Finds out his suit is a living being known as Leetha of the 7th House of K
- Gets caught up in battle between Heaven and Hell – uses power of Greenworld to become more powerful – he & Angela go to hell to fight Malebolgia – Angela dies, and Spawn kills Malebolgia in retaliation
- Gets offered chance to rule Hell and declines – finds out Cogliostro is really Cain, who wants to control Hell and use Spawn to do it
- Rejected by Heaven & Hell, he is on Earth in a warehouse with a rotting, maggot-infested corpse – his body ends up in Hell, and he, along with Sam & Twitch, have to escape
- Discovers that Wanda has given birth to God and Satan (Jake and Katie) – lots of allusion to 12 disciples of Jesus, the 4 Horsemen, Armageddon happens but gets reset after Spawn eats fruit from the Garden of Eden, and gets resurrected as an angel on the same level as God and Satan – forces them to fight each other without armies and shuts them off from Earth
- Returns to Earth as Al Simmons, but can’t reconcile with Wanda because he beat her into a miscarriage the day before he died, so he once again becomes a Hellspawn
- Encounters his brother Richard, who is being tortured by his own sins – finds out Mammon introduced Richard to drugs and convinced young Al to torture animals – then discovers their mother slept with Mammon to create a great evil – Richard sacrifices himself to save world
- Endgame – Spawn’s symbiote is fighting him because he rejected the godlike powers – Cyan stabs Spawn with a mystical knife that wounds K7-Leetha, who leaves Al Simmons – moves to new host, Morana, the miscarried child, who was restored by Mammon – Al & Cyan team up to trap Morana in Hell, and Al kills himself again
- Reborn on Earth as Jim Downing, who has powers of Hellspawn
Issues (27:02)
- Atheist as agent of hell caught up in religious battle – makes deal with devil
- Guilt over what Al Simmons did before he died
- Torn over Wanda moving on after he died, and marrying his best friend and having children
Treatment (43:35)
- In-universe
- Out-of-universe
Skit (57:15)
Ending