Matthew Rosenberg did not plan on spending the next chapter of his career writing Spawn.
By his own account, he had made a firm decision to focus on creator-owned work for a while. After years at Marvel and DC, and with projects like We’re Taking Everyone Down With Us taking shape, Rosenberg felt it was time to build things that he could cultivate and maintained
Then Todd McFarlane called.
“Your phone rings and it’s Todd McFarlane and all of your plans go out the window,” Rosenberg said. “That’s not a call you get very often.”
The result is a major new era for Spawn, with Rosenberg stepping in as writer and helping to launch a fresh starting point built around a one-year time jump and a reworked status quo. The move is meant to welcome in new readers while still honoring everything longtime fans love about the book.
Rosenberg said that McFarlane’s initial interest came partly from seeing his name turning up in his weekly comic pulls.
“He said to me, ‘Your name just kept being in my stacks frequently,’” Rosenberg recalled. “He said, ‘The stuff you were doing at DC was just coming up over and over again.’ He said it felt different…interesting.”
At first, Rosenberg thought McFarlane might ask him about writing Sam and Twitch. Instead, the conversation quickly turned to Spawn itself.
That led to a lengthy back-and-forth, one where Rosenberg said he initially made the mistake of trying to pitch what he thought McFarlane would want rather than what he himself would do. Once he shifted into his own voice, things clicked.
“It became very clear that he’s not trying to get me to be him,” Rosenberg said. “He’s trying to get me to be me.”
Expect big things in May’s Spawn #375. Courtesy of Image Comics.
That very approach is shaping Spawn‘s new direction. Rosenberg stressed that he has no interest in wiping away continuity or disrespecting the book’s history. Instead, he wants to bridge the gap between the book’s past and future.
Rosenberg added, “My mandate on the book was that I want people who’ve never picked up a Spawn book to pick these books up and have no trouble understanding what’s going on, but people who have read every single issue to be like, ‘This is all in line with what Spawn is. This is true to what it is. But it’s something I’ve never seen before.’”
To make that possible, Rosenberg pitched a time jump. McFarlane had a lot of plot in motion, and rather than delay the hand off for months of wrap-up, Rosenberg saw an opportunity to move the timeline forward and let the mystery of what happened become part of the hook.
Rosenberg admitted that his instincts initially pushed him in a very different direction, one shaped by years working at Marvel and DC.
“I made the amazingly clumsy suggestion of, you know, it’d be cool if we launched with a new #1,” Rosenberg said with a laugh. “That’s just how my brain works after working at the Big Two for so long. You want to make it pop, you put a one on it.”
McFarlane quickly shut that idea down, reminding him what Spawn represents.
“He was like, ‘You make it pop by making a good book,’” Rosenberg said. “And he’s right.”
That exchange helped clarify the larger approach. Instead of rebooting or renumbering, the goal became evolution, using the time jump to create a fresh entry point while preserving everything that came before.
“One, it makes it easier for new readers,” Rosenberg said of the time jump. “Everyone is coming in a little bewildered. If you’ve read the last 375 issues, you’re going to be on the same ground as someone who’s read no issues.”
Courtesy of Image Comics.
He added that the jump also lets the book reveal pieces of the old and new status quo gradually. Readers will not be dumped into a blank slate. Instead, Rosenberg plans to peel back what happened and why over an extended period of time while introducing major changes for both Al Simmons and the larger world around him.
“There are big status quo changes in the time jump, and then from there it’ll be big status quo changes for Spawn [and] for Al,” Rosenberg said. “We’re introducing a whole bunch of new characters, but then some familiar characters are coming in.”
The appeal of this approach, Rosenberg said, is that Spawn is already rich with exactly the kind of dramatic, strange, and unpredictable energy he loves in serial comics. Re-reading the series, and diving into corners he had missed before, only reinforced that connection.
“The thing that just blows my mind always is how often the book just has something where you just say out loud, ‘What the hell,’” he said. “That just happens so much.”
He compared that feeling to the best work by serial storytellers like Robert Kirkman and Brian K. Vaughan, who know how to land a page-turning shock without breaking the larger story. That is the feeling he wants to preserve.
At the same time, Rosenberg also wants the new run to feel like a genuine entry point. He acknowledged that modern readers are often less willing than previous generations to jump into issue #376 of something and simply figure it out as they go.
“I think the rise of the internet and Wikipedia and message boards and Google has dulled that sense,” he said. “So we’re trying to make it like, ‘You don’t have to do that here.’”
Rosenberg said he hopes readers who start with his run will then go back and read the compendiums, but he wants the immediate experience to feel welcoming rather than intimidating.
He also made it clear that McFarlane remains deeply involved, which Rosenberg sees as a gift rather than a burden.
“No one is gonna know Spawn better than him,” Rosenberg said.
That access has apparently been invaluable. Rosenberg described McFarlane as someone with deep, immediate answers about characters, continuity, and worldbuilding, including ideas that never made it to the page but still inform how everything fits together.
“It’s the greatest resource you could ever have,” Rosenberg said. “It’s exactly what I want it to be.”
For Rosenberg, who grew up buying Spawn and sees McFarlane as one of the reasons he makes comics in the first place, the whole thing still feels surreal. But it also feels energizing in a way that he could not ignore.
“Every single conversation I walk away from, I get more excited, more inspired about comics, about what comics can be,” Rosenberg said.
That excitement is clearly what sold him in the end. Even with creator-owned work still calling, Rosenberg was not going to say no to the flagship title of the company he loves most.
“To me, Spawn is the flagship book,” Rosenberg said. “To be handed that ship is…there’s no greater honor I’ve had in my job than that for sure.”
If the new run works, Rosenberg hopes it will feel both familiar and surprising, a continuation rather than a reset, and a bold enough swing to make even longtime fans sit up.
And if it does not work?
“Well,” he said with a laugh, “if I flame out spectacularly, I got up there, and I got on stage, and I tried something crazy.”
That, in Rosenberg’s mind, is the whole darn point.
This “new era” is set to kick off in May, with Rosenberg writing both Spawn and King Spawn simultaneously.
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