LUCIDMEDIA

Still Todd: Lucid Forge interviews McFarlane

Written by Adam A. Donaldson Monday, 14 April 2008 03:46

Fifteen years ago, at the height of the comics boom of the early 90s, there were seven guys, artists, based out of Marvel, who could literally do no wrong. Everything they touched turned to gold, and by gold, I mean million-selling copies.

"It doesn't seem like that much time has gone by, although obviously it has,” remembers Todd McFarlane, he had two pages left in his last issue of Spider-man when his daughter was born, although she was two days early so otherwise it would have been perfect. "Whenever I need to remind myself of the time I worked at Marvel, I just turn to my daughter and go, ‘How old are you again?’ and I go, ‘Wow, it's been that many years?’” In 1992, they didn’t come much bigger than McFarlane, he was the hottest of the hot artists in Marvel’s bullpen and at the time was penning and drawing a Spider-man book created specifically for him when he and six other Marvel artists decided to go their own way and start their own company: Image. McFarlane’s share of Image was Spawn, a soldier brought back from the dead with demonic super-powers. If you were a collector in 1992, nothing was hotter then those first few issues of Spawn. Time’s changed though and McFarlane wanted to do more then comics. He built an empire around his Arizona-based studio that included publishing, TV and movie production and action figure creation. He diversified by directing music videos, drawing CD covers and doing pre-production work on various McFarlane Production projects. The mistake is that McFarlane’s pencil’s been idle for the last several years as he focuses on business.

"The difference is that when I was doing comic books, what I drew is what people saw and the difference today unfortunately is what I do they don't see," says McFarlane on the phone from his office. "The result is the show or the toy or the picture, its something else, you just don't get to see the preliminary stuff, which is where my hand is all the time."

That may be so, but what enquiring minds want to know is: when will McFarlane return to monthly comic work? "It’s not in the cards right now,” he says with a sigh, adding, “But if I ever do come back two things will be driving it. One: I'll just want to do it for myself and at that point I won’t care if the book is popular or not, I'll just have the itch to want to do it again. And two: it will be with a radically different style. I'm not a believer in coming back and trying to do the same thing that you did before."

Several of McFarlane’s Image co-founders have already made that return. Jim Lee has drawn both Batman and Superman for DC and Marc Silvestri and Rob Liefeld have done mini-series and one-shots for Marvel. "No I'd never do that,” says McFarlane emphatically about the possibility of returning to his old haunts. “To put it in context, I’ve worked for both [DC and Marvel] and I enjoyed my time, for the most part, for both. But it’s the equivalent of high school for me and I enjoyed high school and I had a good time there with the people, but I accomplished what I needed to accomplish. I don't have any ambition to go back to high school.”

But McFarlane will go back for a visit though. As we speak he is wading back in to comics, working on a new Spawn/Batman crossover with former Spawn artist Greg Capullo. "I'm not a big fan of crossovers per say because you have to leave everything where you found it;” explains McFarlane, “It's a little bit like Cat and the Hat, you can have a little bit of fun with it but you have to put it back into the same spot." Meanwhile, the main Spawn title has been undergoing a creative rebirth under the involvement of McFarlane along with writer David Hine and former Spawn editor and current artist Brian Haberlin. There was always a philosophical debate about what the book should be, McFarlane says. He has always believed Spawn to be more sophisticated; a “dark, gritty, drama, suspense horror". Hines, on the other hand, said that the kids missed the superheroics that made the book a success in the first place. So, they split the difference. The result has been an entirely new direction for the character in keeping with continuity, but McFarlane says that he’s always pushing his writers to go further and service the character first and not his history. "To me, the best move in comic books has been when somebody's taken the cool parts of what's existed and just rocketed them forward."

It’s about, as McFarlane says, creating a cool, gritty book that just happens to have a character with powers in a costume. The stories should be grounded, urban and self-contained, it’s the same mindset McFarlane has when he’s deciding on a movie to watch. Speaking of which, a sequel to the 1997 live-action Spawn movie is still in the offing and it will reflect McFarlane’s aesthetic because he’ll be writing, producing and directing the film himself. It’s one of about three or four Hollywood projects McFarlane has on his plate right now.

"I don't usually like talking about them too much because in Hollywood someone's always working on something,” McFarlane says. “What's more important is actually selling stuff and even at that there's a 94 per cent chance that they're never going to make anything out of it."

McFarlane’s been a lot of things in his career: artist, writer, entrepreneur, mogul, even coach of his daughter’s Little League team. But to many he will ever remain the guy that can draw a really awesome Spider-man.

"It's interesting that with the advent of the Spider-man movies there's a whole new generation of Spidey fans out there.

We moved out of the house we were living in to another place because we were remodelling and my middle daughter was trying to get the boys on the block to pay attention to her, so she was bragging, 'My dad does Spawn' and they were all staring at her blankly.

“Then after five months of living in this neighbourhood, I drive up with the family, we had been out doing something, and seven boys on their bikes see the car and they come barrelling down the street, peddling as fast as they could saying ‘Can we get your autograph. And my daughter says, 'Look Dad, they finally came around.’ And the kids were saying, 'We didn't know you did Spider-Man.' I guess that was the day the DVD came out for the first movie and I had done an interview for it.

“So they turned to my daughter and said, 'What were talking about with that Spawn stuff, why didn't you tell us he did Spider-man?'

"There's a lot of guys who do cool Spidey's out there, but I'll stack mine up against the best of them. The old man can still pull it out when he has to."