On the subject of Raven Spawn's origin

Cleaning up McFarlane Toys' amateurish bio for today's Raven Spawn review took hours of research, which sounds like a joke, but is not.

If you search for "Raven Spawn" or "Kray-Von Gore," you'll get a lot of results listing this action figure for sale, as well as a few fan-created pages that may not have been directly copied for the bio paragraph, but are still bare and confusingly written. (And mostly seem to be cribbed from one another, with no real sources given.)

As we said, the original "Raven Spawn" was just a different way of drawing Al Simmons, as seen in 2001's Hellspawn issues 9-11. His appearance in 2019's Spawn #297 was just for the visuals, so when 2022's King Spawn #13 identified him as "a death knight of Maleboglia's [sic] southern-most army," that was the first bit of information that had ever been published about Raven Spawn as a separate character, even if Spawn acted like he already knew who Raven was. So that explains the death knight stuff, but what of the rest?

In 2006, McFarlane Toys released Spawn Series 30, "Adventures of Spawn." Rumored to be a legitimate attempt to create a more marketable, less adult version of Spawn that could more easily be sold to the public at large, Adventures of Spawn gave the characters a Bruce Timm-style makeover, and the story did away with all the horror elements. There was a digital comic tie-in released, three pages per week. In addition to the main story, there was also a "Secret Files" section, with written bios of the main cast, a glossary of terms, and, starting in October of 2007, mini-comic bios for some of the side characters - including Raven Spawn. That's where the name Kray-Von Gore comes from, and that's where everything to do with the suit was sourced:

The comic about the suit is interesting, too, showing Raven before getting Spawned:

(Both of those were drawn by Travis Sengaus.)

Basically, whoever wrote those mini-bios (Jon Goff, if it's the same person who did the main comic) just made the name up himself, and now gets no credit from anyone in the fan community for it.

And lest you think the normal character's history would probably line up with that, remember that Al Simmons in Adventures of Spawn was never killed, never made a deal with Malebolgia, and is a public superhero under the name "Spawn X." All the other characters have bonzer changes, too. So this figure's bio isn't just written badly, it refers to two separate versions of the character, who are unrelated except for their design. What the hell, Todd!

Timeline:

2001: Ashley Wood draws Spawn weird.
2002: that design gets a toy.
2007: Adventures of Spawn bio.
2019: the toy is drawn in a splash page.
2021: new toy.
2022: first actual comic appearance.

Thanks to Daily Spawn Archive for saving these images, and Spawndom: the Gentle Madness of Spawn Collection for giving us the first clue that allowed us to unravel this mess.