Spawn #296C, McFarlane & Mattina Black & White Cover, Image '19

First appearance of Mother Mary. Todd McFarlane and Francesco Mattina black-and-white variant cover.

Spawn #296 arrives in April 2019 as part of the long-running Image Comics series written and shepherded by Todd McFarlane, with interior art by Jason Shawn Alexander. The Cover C variant presents the McFarlane and Francesco Mattina cover artwork stripped to black and white, a presentation that trades the saturated color palette of the standard covers for stark, high-contrast linework. The result puts the draftsmanship of both artists front and center, and it reads as its own distinct object rather than simply a desaturated version of another cover.

The black-and-white variant format has a real history in the Spawn line, going back to early sketch and incentive covers that treated the absence of color as a feature rather than an omission. Cover C at issue #296 sits late in Spawn's original volume run, a stretch of the series building toward the milestone issues that would follow. The issue's story arc, 'The Life and Deaths of Al Simmons,' keeps the character's mythology and continuity at the center of the narrative as the series approaches those landmark numbers.

This issue is the first appearance of Mother Mary. The cover is a black-and-white Todd McFarlane and Francesco Mattina collaboration, first print, published April 24, 2019 by Image Comics.