SPAWN THE BOOK OF THE SOULS #1

Release date : Feb 1, 1998 IMAGE COMICS
SPAWN #69	CURSE OF THE SPAWN #16
クロスオーバー作品等を参照しても本編に戻れるようにしてあります。月内に刊行されたサブタイトルは順番にリンクしています。
CURSE OF THE SPAWN #15	SPAWN #75

SUMMARY :
Spawnの連載開始から４年が経ち、SPAWN #50という節目を迎えたところで発売されたキャラクターブック「SPAWN BIBLE」をタイトル名を変更して再販したもの。
それぞれのキャラクターについてかなり事細かく記載されている。掲載されているキャラクターは以下の通り。
Spawn/Al Simmons、Clown/Violator、Wanda、Cyan、Terry Fitzgerald、Jason Wynn、Angela、Cogliostro、Malebolgia、Tony Twist、Overtkill、Sam、Twitch、Medieval Spawn、Redeemer、The Curse、Cygor、Tifany、Tremor、Granny Blake、Bobby、Bootsy

BET Action Edition

BETのプレミアム品は表紙左上、イメージ・コミックスのロゴの下に通常は記載されている価格表示が無い。そもそも発行部数が少ないためにレア品として扱われている。オークションではなく良心的な価格で販売しているmycomicshop.comのサイトでは2,000ドル、日本円にして30万円以上で販売している。私もコミックスのコレクターだが、①「こういう作品もあったんだ。」②「こういう作品にも登場していたんだ。」この2つが大前提であるなかで、③「このコミックスは希少品でレアだ。」ということから集める面もある。ただ、それは自己満足であって「自分的にはこれは要らないかな」と思えば、とんでもないお金を投じることもないですね。

SPAWN / Al Simmons
His real name is Albert Simmons.
The hushed whispers in the dark tell of a curse that has beenwith man since before the day when he scrawled pictures of bison on cave walls. It is a curse tired to mortal man, and his sins, to those people that die and end up in the place known as Hell.
It is written in the scriptures and prophecies of the apocrypha that there will come a day of great battle, called Armageddon. On the day, the heavens will touch down to the Earth and Hell will rise up to meet it, mixing the smell of incense and eternal spring with the stench of brimstone and sulphur. All manner of sinful creatures that hid in the dark, destroying lives, will step forth to combat the light. It id the one chance that Hell has to conquer humanity. But to succeed in the this fight, it is a matter of numbers. Hell needs all the souls it can corrupt into its armies to overwhelm the force of Heaven, forever banishing goodness from human existence.
Hell is a place of many complexities, with many levels, each ruled by the blackest of evil lords. The eighth sphere contains by far the worst, known as the Malebolgia. His only goal, as that of all in Hell, it total annihilation of enemies he cannot yet defeat: Heaven and God. He keeps his army about him, preparing for the battle to come. But an army is only as good as the officers that lead it.
With this in mind, the Malebolgia has hand-picked a certain group of souls to be his captains and generals, his Hellspawn. They are both his playthings and servants, chosen for questions they possess or have the potential to manifest. The Malebolgia is searching for souls with the right wiring, capable of doing and being everything he excects them to be. He has waited an eternity and can afford to take his time on their training and torment.
These Hellspawn are chosen about once every century, at a great cost of energy and essence to the Malebolgia, for they are special. They don’t have to be evil to begin with, though the seed must already exist within them. To that end, the Malebolgia has each chosen soul trained, nurtured by violence, so that they bloom a hideous fiower of evil and murder. In the end, none of them will have a heart nor compassion left to speak of and will thus be fit to lead an assault of sinners upon the very Pearly Gates themselves. One such officer-in-training walks the Earth today, known as Spawn. In life his name was Al Simmons.
Al was born to loving middle class parents who lived in a quiet neighborhood outside of Pittsburgh. He grew up like any other kid, going to school, and playing a few sports. However, his competitive mature set him apart. He was always driven to win and accepted no less than total victory in everything he did, whether it was on the ball field, or just having a conversation. He would never start a debate unless he knew he could get his point across. To Al, there was no point in starting anything if there eas no way he could win.
Al went from high school straight to college where he was first noticed and then recruited into the CIA. As part of his new job, he joined the military, rapidly going up through the ranks, and gaining a place on a special elite unit set to guard the president. While on duty with this unit he saved the president from an assassin’s bullet for which he was rewarded a huge promotion to Lieutenant Colonel. His combat skills and aptitude for quick learning brought him to the attention of Jason Wynn who became his personal mentor, drawing him publicly into the intelligence community.
Jason Wynn was a master of manipulation, and led Al Simmons into believing, at least at first, that everything they did had a purpose and was for the good of American security. The missions became more bloody with fewer rational explanations, some even causing civil wars. What was once a strong friendship, or so it appeared to native Al, rapidly deteriorated as Simmons began to question his commander Wynn and his motives. This continuous butting of heads would not be tolerated by the likes of Jason Wynn, nor would it go unpunished.
It was a mission just like the eight previous, where Al was going to kill in the name of his government when he was turned on by two of his fellow agents, Chapel and Priest, ironic names at best. The two agents opened fire on Al with laser weapons, burning him beyond recognition. Al had been set up by Jason Wynn because he’d become a thorn in the man’s side.
Al Simmons was buried with great media fanfare because he’d been their darling since his televised rescue of the President many months before. He was a hero, his coffin draped in an American flag which was given to his widow Wanda Blake while the country watched. Stories ran for days of the lad buried in Arlington National Cemetery who’d risked and lost his life, all in the name of his country.
But existence didn’t end for Al when he was burned by his treacherous comrades. At the moment of his death, he made a pact he’d later barely recall. Al had always had an Achilles’ heel, ill-affored to a killer in his position. Al loved his wife beyond bearing and the deal hinged upon this. Though he was an atheist at the time of his death, Al would do anything to see his wife again and the Malebolgia took him at his word. In a split second, or so it seemed, he was returned to Earth. Al Simmons had now become an officer in traing, one of Malebolgia’s hand picked Hellspawn for this century, bound to a symbiotic uniform and infused with hell-born energy. Al was able to follow orders, had killer instinct, and was willing to make the bargain; all of the Malebolgia’s requirements.
At first Al was disoriented which was part of the Malebolgia’s training plan. What had seemed only a second was actually five years. Soon, Al was begining to learn however, taught both by a demon chaperone, and with some knowledge from the Malebolgia himself. Al was faced with the choice of doing nothing with his new powers or using them, for good or for ill. If he did nothing, he would be allowing evil to continue and that would help serve Hell. But he also knew that if he became a force for good and killed those that were evil with his hell-born energy, as his instincts told him to do, he would just increase the population of the armies in Hell readying for battle with Heaven. And even if he became evil, and used the power, accepting what he had become, learning to hone and harness his abilities, he became that much more valuable to Hell. He was and is now thrice-damned by Hell.
Worst of all for Al, Hell is not content to wait for him to make his decision. His guardian demon, the Clown, is there to dog his steps and push and prod him. This demon, who transforms into the hideously disfigured Violator, a creature born in the pits of Hell, has chosen to target the loved ones from Al’s life, and to put Al at odds with law enforcement and humanity in general. Spawn is hounded by them now as the mob, the government and the cops all seek to stop this “cloaked enemy of society”. It is this harassment that Hell hopes will drop the Hellspawn back to his instincts, those of a government-trained assassin, who would kill without questioning and act without thinking.
But it turns out that Al’s Achilles’ heel is Hell’s as well. He loved his wife and came back to see her. He has discovered that she remarried, to his best friend Terry Fitzgerald who was able to give her the child he never could. Although frustrated, he realizes that she is happy and so he’s moved on to search for a new identity and a way to come to terms with his new condition. His love for her was so deep that it actually helped salve some of his wounds and he’s begun to heal spiritually. He now has to find a way to go on, because this game too must have a way to win.
The easiest and most immediate purpose he sees is to exact revenge on Jason Wynn, whom he’s discovered ordered his death. He’s taken to living with the homeless people in the alley’s of the Bowery, where he was first returned to Earth, and has become their defender of sorts. He knows he should do something more for them and himself, but he now knows that finals curse laid upon him is that his power on Earth is finite. Once he is emptied of his Hell-born energy, he will be returned to the malebolgia and become a favored slave leading an army of the damned with no hope of redemption. His task now is to use his powers wisely to figure out a way, if any, to break this contract, one that has never before been broken.

ANGELA
She’s beautiful, deadly, and 100,000 years old. Angela is a hunter, one of few angels to have been granted permits to hunt Hellspawn as part of Heaven’s cold war with Hell. She has been ruthless in her quest to rid the Earth of the Malebolgia’s creatures and has only failed to lill one: Al simmons. Whether by weakness or for some other reason, she has let this Hellspawn continue to live.
She is able to wander the cosmos at whim, riding the Flux to trasport her from place and plane to plane. However, many of her work assignments have focused on the planet Earth. It is there that most of the Hellspawn have appeared, so she’s gone where the hunting is. She keeps her skills honed by hunting other impossibly dangerous creatures, keeping herself challenged while she waits for the paperwork to come through on her spawn permits.
Angela comes from Elysium, the first level of the Seven Heavens, closest to God. It is there that all of the bureaucratic work is hanled, where the angels get their hands dirty doing God’s bidding. Her form is that of a human female, like all of the angels there, possibly the result of spontaenous aesthrtic whim on the Creator’s part. But the form hides her true power and strength, to better camouflage her intentions from her targets.
She has fought the currrent Hellspawn once, and yet he came to her aid during her trial for treason in Heaven. She is still puzzled by this turn of events. Her treatment at the hands of Gabrielle, then-ambassador from Heaven to Earth, as well as her contradictory encounters with Spawn, helped her decide to leave Elysium and go freelance. It is something generally not done, since angels don’t only belong to Heaven but are part of the Creator directly. But Angela is a one-of-a-kind.
Currently, Angela and her friends Kuan-Yin and Anahita, angels also, are wandering the universe in search of freelance work. However, one thing remains magging her thoughts. Though she was from Heaven, and Al Simmons from hell, both have the same mercenary nature, and shared something special. The two are closer than even she would care to admit.