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

Todd McFarlane Wants Your Spawn Cover, Artistic Ability A Detriment

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. He also talked about a planned promotion to highlight fan artists on Spawn. The emphasis on fan, over artist.

"I'm thinking of running a contest, in which I get a couple fans to draw covers that I would ink" he told me. I know he inked writer Donny Cates' amateur affair for a Spawn cover, which is pretty much this. "The bigger ideas sort of came because my colourist on King Spawn, Fco sent me something in an email, saying "my buddy just brought this to me, I'd forgotten about it" and I guess he had done a drawing of Spawn and he gave it to his buddy when he was 14. I said, wouldn't it be cool if I inked it and then you coloured it, so basically the cover would be pencilled by 14-year-old Fco, coloured by 42-year-old Fco, with me polishing it in between. But then after doing my work over Donny, I wondered what if I did a contest and I didn't worry about whether the person who wins each time is necessarily even an artist,  that almost should be a disqualification… I'm going to randomly select ten people who think they can draw at least a little bit better than a stick figure. I need at least that,  and we're going to hook you up and colour you, and we're going to put you out on a cover, and it doesn't have to be spectacular, just has to be sort of fun. And there would be other covers that you can buy that month, so you don't even have to buy that one if you think that it's not very good. But just bring the crowd up on stage for a little bit, so we'll probably be implementing that too."

I mean this is what he did to Donny Cates. And if Todd can do this to Donny, he can do it to anyone.

He also told me "Greg Capullo and  I have had the conversation and we think it's doable, it wouldn't be super pretty, but we think that we could do a book in a day." I then got to tell Todd McFarlane about 24 Hour Comic Day and how it was started by Scott McCloud... looks like he and Greg may be joining in this year. "Because both of us have sort of detailed artwork what would be interesting is what is our distilled simplified look, here's no time for doing all the nice thin lines,  you just kind of put it basically straight down. I don't know if it will all look a bit like Frank Miller." In that case, maybe Dan DiDio might be in touch…

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