Posted in: Comics, Image | Tagged: image comics, spawn, todd mcfarlane

The Pressure Of 4 Spawn Comics On Todd McFarlane – So How About 12?

Recently I talked to Spawn creator, Todd McFarlane, about the current state of play of his comic book publishing empire. Which, after 2020 and 2021, is a little more of an empire than it used to be. As he moved from publishing one monthly-ish comic book to four, Spawn, King Spawn, Gunslinger Spawn and The Scorched. And it was a little tricky, especially at the end of last year.

"2021 was sort of laying the foundation for all four of those books" he told me. "Getting them out of the starting gates right. Originally, Scorched was supposed to come out in December but because of printing glitches and everything, we had to move to another printer. A couple weeks into January was the best that I could do. If I can organize them for the next few months, the theory is there should be a book a week, every time you walk in.  I've always said, Rich, that once you lay down a foundation, it will bear a lot of weight. Which is why skyscrapers exist." I've never heard of that metaphor for comic books before.  "The foundation is capable of taking the weight, that you start piling up on top of it. I went from the foundation of the one character, now we've got a four corner foundation. How high can I build it? The answer should be as high as you want, the question is how high do you want it to be?"

It certainly seems to be that Todd McFarlane has a habit of shooting for the moon – as long as that's not female action figures. But time after time, he has launched comics, toys, animation, TV, movies with success a secondary measure due to trying to see if he could just do it. He tells me "if you study sort of the life and times of Todd you'll see that I'm not a very aggressive overplanner. It took me 30 years to get to here, so I think it can get big, it just may not be in my lifetime. Because I'm a patient sort of man. I will just probably add in a more methodical way, in books or series of characters that I think will matter, that they need more spotlight on them. Or I just go the whole hog and put out twelve books of course." If I was a betting man, the glint in Todd's eye suggests that's where I would put… well… his money.

"You and I right now on the Skype could come up with ten characters and implement them if we wanted to, right?" Um… that's putting me on the spot. " But that's not the goal, the goal is to just see if there's a bit of a more natural organic way to get to a bigger shared universe, instead of saying we've got to have 12 by this time and 24… those are corporate decisions, I'm not going to do it." Damn it Todd, I've got three characters here already, you gave me false hope. "So how many will we have by the end of the year, I wouldn't be surprised if I added three more. I  think there would be some mini-series and one shots, things of that nature. I think you'll see that, just to get a gauge on which characters I think can hold their own but that's it.  All in good time, as long as everybody wants to get old with me and you, at the same time, we'll eventually get there." I can feel my hair thinning with every sentence.

We also talked about the recent successes of Image Comics. "The industry as a whole has shifted, obviously, with the pandemic, but since the pandemic maybe we've had 35 to 40 books that Image that have sort of debuted at like you know 50,000 and above where the prior three years you could count those on your fingers. Now we're talking dozens and dozens, so obviously there's some dramatic shift that's happening here, and the only question we're going to ask is how sustainable is it. We may find, Rich, that it may be sustainable but not for every book. Those who have a quality book and or those that are going to hustle on the marketing and PR end of it may have a longer sort of bell end"…. I think he meant Bell Curve, but you never know with Todd… "than those who just think that the marketplace is going to take care of them because they came out of the gate right."

I asked how he was coping with the new work pressures of four monthly titles. "I would say that I think I'm better being a showrunner,  quote-unquote editor, than actually being at the forefront of the stories themselves." He talked about issues his own blind spots and having unhibited creative direction. "It allows you to be unfettered, which is good from a creative end, but it also allows you to get self-absorbed at times or  blind creatively. Bringing on other people right now, I've got two wonderful writers Sean Lewis and Rory McConville, who's on your side over there." He's British, basically. "… like my thing is, just like if I was to bring you on…" He was really teasing me here, right? "…is just download you with what I think the last 30 years of Spawn had been, here's where I think the chess pieces are, here's what some of the relationships are, or where I had intended them to be, and if you want to redefine some of that, you want to add to that, you want to invent and scrape some of it off, or more importantly there are so many gaps in between each one of those characters with other stories and characters then do all the filling in that you want to, let's go. And then what I'm finding is certainly fun on my part. is now I'm reacting to their ideas. I'm saying, "oh my god that's cool, but let's just sort of talk it out a little bit". That character and that character used to have this relationship, so we can't ignore that, so as long as we can get past it, whether that's with one-word balloon that just said, "I used to like you but f*ck you, right?" At least we did a little bit of continuity to for those long time readers that are out there. Or what I think is a more meaningful conversation, which is those two were enemies, what if we actually somehow figured out a way to make them allies? And what would have to happen for that to have to to to get to that point. I think those are sort of more thought-provoking conversations that we continue to have."

I asked what specific blind spots he thought he might have had and it seemed to mostly be about only having one comic book a month. "The totality of that reading of Spawn is under the guise and the vision of what Todd wants. If you don't like that kind of storytelling and or writing, there's no other option for you. I sort of do these weird things, I was writing books at a point where I said I'm gonna treat them like a movie, so I will never have a caption, no thought balloons, nothing. From time to time, you can do a voiceover because they do that in movies. I thought it had some success, I enjoyed it, but again you can see that you're limited in saying anything big unless you want to sort of extend it out. So once I open it back up to captions… Ii noticed that both Rory and Sean do that in a more superior fashion. They're not concerned about trying to upgrade the artwork, and maybe that's my little bit of a bias because I'm an artist, I want to draw attention to the art of their storytellers.

I asked how he was finding Scorched as a team book, not something he has often worked on. "The biggest order for me is to give a reason why they're together, and that each individual is there for a reason. It can't just be, hey, there's a big bad guy, let's get five of us together, let's go save the day. So it's one of the things I keep sort of nudging Sean, to just say why is Gunslinger Spawn in the book and, second, once he is in the book, what's his relationship to those other people. So it's like being on a sports team, they're all teammates and you will go and die on the battlefield with them but, you don't have go out and have a barbecue with every one of them."

"We're not planning any sort of quote-unquote big event right now the big event was last year, I don't think it's overly prudent to keep trying to pickpocket your loyal readers. I just always go back to the 16-17 year old Todd and, you know I'm older than you, but those big giant events weren't really a thing back then. What was big to me was they had the Marvel Two-In-One and the Avengers Annuals, because annuals to me were events, double-size issues, anything with double-size was an event to me. And then they took two of those annuals and they crossed them over, this was the Jim Starlin Thanos thing, and to me that was the biggest thing I could contemplate. It seems quaint in comparison to what they've done in the past, but they have an event book and then they tie into the monthly books, I never liked them for me for me personally, and part of it probably was, Rich, I just didn't have the money to be able to do it. I felt like, even if I just picked four or five, I still was missing something, because somehow it was trickling down to the other books and I felt a little frustrated, instead of being exuberant over this big event. So for me, there's still that scar that's in the back here, saying if I do a big event, does it cross over into the other? Someone's gonna have to give me a hell of a reason. At least I've only got four books, because sometimes they do it to 20 or 30, the entire line for a month, sometimes longer." Four books for now, Todd, four books for now. "I'll probably come up with big type events, let's call it that, but not so much for this year."

So… twelve book crossover event for Spawn in 2023, can we call it now?

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