VIKING SPAWN
Introduced in Series 5 July 1996; after Medieval Spawn, the Viking Spawn is the second European Dark Age-theme Spawn. Officially there are three versions with an intentional variant in the repaint series.
“Thousands of years ago, when this Spawn inhabited the Earth, the world was a very unruly place to live where hordes of evil invaders battled for control of the land. This Spawn, a heroic warrior, was forced to be as tough and ruthless as his opponents, and was often misinterpreted as an evil gladiator by those he was trying to help. Viking Spawn’s costume protects him from both the elements of nature and his fierce enemies.” (Back of Card)
July 1996 Series 5 Original: Viking Spawn
The first version appeared in July 1996's Series 5 Original Edition.
The body is lightly tan or flesh-coloured with a black beard, reddish-brown trims and the bag at the waist is brown. The weapons are silver in colour; the armour is grey and the cape brown.
Poor quality control results in figures with different detailing as shown above. Figure A on the left has black ink detail on his arm while Figure B on the right is devoid of black-wash.
Another look at the same figures: Figure A with maroon furs and Figure B with orange furs. If you are a collector of variants, you would learn eventually that the quality control of painting on the accessories are also pretty dismal...but that is of course to the delight of variant collectors. (discussed briefly in End Cap February 1997)
October 1996 Series 5 Repaint: Viking Spawn
Viking Spawn gets more interesting with the repaint in October 1996. Grey-skinned with brown bag.
The skin has turned grey, probably due to the coldness of the Scandinavian winter and it has grey furs instead of orange/maroon.
October 1996 Series 5 Repaint Variant: Viking Spawn
I have checked and the staff at McFarlane verified that there was an intentional and official variant of the repaint - grey-skinned and green bag. See also End Cap February 1997.
For a long time, I thought that when the production operators in China ran out of brown ink, they simply replaced it with green paint. Not so, this is an official variant. But fear not, there might be a blue paint version that is unintentional.
Bootleg Viking
My favourite Viking Spawn is this guy. He appeared on a Crutch card from Series 7!
While the real Viking stands an impressive 15cm, this bootleg Viking from early 1997 has to jump to clear 11.5cm.
He was subsequently reproduced as a multipack. Image courtesy of Joe Madeira. Check out his blog.
deviantart.com is a hive of Spawn arts and one by "DeathWish" is Viking Spawn with red instead of green eyes.
The Viking Spawn collectible figure helps to inspire the art found in Spawn FAN Edition #1 to #3 - Nordik the Norse Hellspawn.
