Such a sweet boy.
As one of the darkest comic books of The '90s about a government assassin who came back from Hell, Spawn has some pretty scary stuff.As per Wiki Policy, spoilers are off on moments pages. You've been warned.
- Let's start out with Spawn himself. In life, he was Al Simmons, a trained killer eliminating threats to the US government on orders from his diabolical and corrupt superior, Jason Wynn. He was already plenty scary back then, but then he came back as a burnt walking corpse with a hellborn parasite attached to him that gives him the powers of Hell itself, Cast from Lifespan which will send him back to Hell for eternal slavery when the cast hits zero. He's not the nicest guy around, either, but he's the good guy here.
- Violator. One of Spawn's most enduring enemies, effectively being Beware the Silly Ones incarnate who oscillates between being a crass and perverted jokester and Butt-Monkey to the violent and sadistic demon he really is. Getting tired of Spawn's interference, Violator took control over Jason Wynn and has him hire prostitutes that looked like Wanda and then murder them. Violator then used his powers to turn random citizens into "clowns" using a supernatural Hate Plague, which made them extremely homicidal, and has them go on a violent rampage throughout NYC, resulting in massive property damage and several deaths. The stress of the carnage and having to Mercy Kill several of the clowns possessed victims temporarily drove Spawn to a Heroic BSoD.
- Billy Kincaid, who's even worse in death than he was in life and in life he was an unrepentant pedophile and child Serial Killer. After his earned death and rebirth in Hell, Kincaid happily accepted a task from Hell to gather more souls for their army and the chance to stick it to Spawn. Using the Diabolus Interium curse, Kincaid possessed innocent people and made them act out their worse impulses, forcing them to commit murders, resulting in dozens of innocent lives lost and the damnation of those people to Hell while Kincaid got stronger tormenting the damned souls. After Malebolgia was killed by Spawn, Billy Kincaid started acting on his own, making a hobby out of torturing the souls of children and continued to return to torment the soul of one of Spawn's allies.
- The Armageddon arc. This was the series' first Art Shift in a while, giving it a far grittier appearance than previous issues. Even Spawn, who had been temporarily been given back his human appearance, has changed. Now he's not just a burnt corpse, he's fused with his costume, giving him a mouth full of sharp teeth, and his head is burrowing with insects that speak to him.
- It's based on the biblical depiction of The End of the World as We Know It, complete with rivers of blood, swarms of frogs with mouths on their bellies, zombies, and all the monsters known to man being spotted across the globe.
- Wanda's new children have turned out to be monsters. They regularly get into fights, delivering wounds that would prove to fatal to any normal human being, tormenting Cyan, and finally attempting to kill their family members. And this is all before they find out that they're the human hosts for God and Satan, with much of their monstrous pastimes coinciding with the carnage spreading across the globe.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They don't look anything like their biblical counterparts, instead resembling something like a cross between Kaiju and Eldritch Abominations. And the death they leave in their wake is probably some of the most gruesome stuff in the comic yet. Even worse is that they're bonafide examples of Hero Killer, killing Sam through slow starvation and swarming Twitch.
- The Voice Hearers arc, set shortly after Armageddon has come to pass, once Spawn has used his newfound godly power to recreate the Earth, bringing back everyone who died, closing the portals to both Heaven and Hell, things still haven't improved much. Especially since Spawn made sure everyone kept their memories of the Apocalypse, forcing much of humanity to act in denial and believe the entire Armageddon arc was a mass hallucination even to stay remotely sane. If anything, they've steadily gotten worse, both with an even grittier Art Shift, and with Clown back in action and corrupting the tenants of a filthy apartment into acting out on their worst impulses.
- To start with, a man beat his roommate to a bloody pulp with a statuette for leaving the cap for his toothpaste off.
- A beautiful tenant named Celia Eddowes has a bad habit of chewing at her fingers, but Clown manages to make it worse by goading her to keep chewing away. It all culminates in her peeling off her own skin with a knife, telling her boyfriend that she "had to see what was underneath".
