Written by Robert Napton
Drawn by John Stinsman
Published by Awesome Comics

By September 1997, Rob Liefeld had left Image Comics and set up his new imprint, Awesome Comics. In this month he published this Chapel one-shot, written by Robert Napton, who previously co-wrote issues four, five, and six of Chapel’s ongoing series.

Like the first Chapel miniseries, this issue tells a flashback story set during Chapel’s past when he was a soldier doing covert missions for the U.S. Government.

It’s 1989, and a Middle Eastern dictator named Kustan Hakmed has gotten his hands on a stolen sample of X-7, which is described as the “super soldier” serum that Chapel himself had been injected with, which increased the strength and stamina its subject to superhuman levels. The U.S. Government is worried that he’ll use it to create his own army of super soldiers to use for terrorist acts, so Chapel is sent to Hakmed’s small island nation of Liban, located off the coast of Africa, to destroy the lab that Hakmen’d scientists are working on reverse-engineering the sample they have so they can mass-produce it.

As Chapel is sent in alone, he muses how three years earlier, he’d been part of a team sent in to assassinate Hakmed, but they messed up and killed his daughter instead. Since then, Hakmed has vowed to revenge on everyone involved, including Chapel. So much like the first Chapel miniseries, Chapel stalks through a jungle, brutally killing soldiers along the way until he finally has his face-to-face showdown with Hakmed.

I won’t spoil how the fight goes. Suffice it to say Chapel emerges victorious in the end, but you’ll have to buy the comic book yourself to see how he does it. What I will spoil is that when the mission is over, and Chapel returns to the Pentagon, that’s when he’s given his next mission, which is to assassinate Al Simmons. Thus, this issue becomes a de facto prequel to Todd McFarlane’s SPAWN series.

I thought that was a cool little detail to add to this story, and at first I was surprised by it since Rob Liefeld was no longer connected to Image Comics, but in hindsight, I realize that the Spawn animated series had debuted earlier that year, which featured Chapel in it as Al’s killer, so it’s possible that this issue was published specifically to capitalize on the Chapel’s connection to Spawn. If so, I can’t say it’s not a smart move.

It’s a decent story and makes me think a series that focused on Chapel’s adventures as a covert operative could have been interesting. John Stinsman, who had previously done work for Liefeld on the Team Youngblood series at Image Comics and would go on to do more work for him on other titles at Awesome, does a decent job here; he’s got the basic “Extreme studios style” down pat. Of all of the Chapel comics I’ve reviewed here, I’d call that this is the best one.