Officer Deke

Stepping out of the gritty shadows of Image Comics' mid-'90s horror boom, Officer Deke made his debut in Curse of the Spawn #5 (1996), courtesy of writer Alan McElroy and artist Dwayne Turner. He's a street-level presence in one of the darker corners of the Spawn universe, rubbing shoulders with a cast of detectives and law enforcement figures — Gretchen Culver, Sam Burke, Detective Brayde, Ray Sparks, and Sergeant Doug Halliday — that gives Curse of the Spawn its hard-edged, procedural atmosphere. His appearances are few, but for collectors who love the texture of that era's mature-readers titles, he's a small, authentic piece of the world Image was building around one of the '90s most compelling franchises.