“It is written in the scriptures and prophecies of the apocryphia that there will come a day of great battle, called Armageddon. On that 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. Hell needs all the souls it can corrupt into its armies. One lord of hell, Malebolgia, keeps his army about him, preparing for the battle to come. But any 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 qualities they possess or the potential to manifest. These hellspawn are chosen about once every century. 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 flower of evil and murder. One such officer-in-training walks the earth today, known as Spawn. In life his name was Al Simmons. 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. Saving the president from an assassin’s bullet, he was rewarded a promotion to Lieutenant Colonel. He then went to work with Jason Wynn in intelligence. Al believed, at lest at first, that everything they did had a purpose and was for the good of American security. But as the missions became more bloody with fewer rational explanations, Al began to question Wynn and his motives. This would not be tolerated by Wynn, nor would it go unpunished. On Al’s ninth mission, Al was turned on by two of his fellow agents who opened fire on Al with laser weapons, burning him beyond recognition. Al Simmons was buried with a hero’s farewell, his coffin draped in an American flag which was given to his widow Wanda Blake. But existence didn’t end for Al. At the moment of his death, he made a pact. Though he was an athiest 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 he was returned to earth, bound to a symbiotic uniform and infused with limited hell-born energy. At first Al was disoriented; what had seemed only a second was actually five years. He loved his wife and had come back to see her, only to discover that she had remarried to his best friend Terry Fitzgerald who was able to give her the child he never could. Although burning with frustration and pain, he realized 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. 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 the final 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.”

Paraphresed from the Spawn bible 1