"It can't really happen today the way it did back then and part of that is because I think there's a bit of a competitive scare over at Marvel and DC so they lock guys up with exclusive contracts." -- Todd McFarlane
Todd McFarlane (born March 16, 1961) is a Canadian cartoonist, writer, toy designer and entrepreneur, best known for his work in comic books, such as the fantasy series Spawn.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, McFarlane became a comic book superstar due to his work on Marvel Comics' Spider-Man franchise. In 1992, he helped form Image Comics, pulling the occult anti-hero character Spawn from his high school portfolio and updating him for the 1990s. Spawn was a popular hero in the 1990s and encouraged a trend in creator-owned comic book properties.
In recent years, McFarlane has illustrated comic books less often, focusing on entrepreneurial efforts, such as McFarlane Toys and Todd McFarlane Entertainment, a film and animation studio. In September, 2006, it was announced that McFarlane will be the Art Director of the newly formed 38 Studios, formerly Green Monster Games, founded by major league baseball pitcher Curt Schilling. McFarlane used to be co-owner of National Hockey League's Edmonton Oilers but sold his shares to Daryl Katz. He's also a high-profile collector of history-making baseballs.
"A lot was happening, plus there were an enormous number of people in the industry that were going to conventions, so it was a pretty fun time. Also there was a lot of controversy and I was at the forefront of some of that.""Anthology shows as a whole scare people. The networks can't quite get their heads around it.""But again, I put in my time with Marvel and DC so there was that period of my life of trying to learn how to draw and tell stories in a proper fashion.""Given that I have to share my computer with my three children, it's not usually a site that I get to spend that much time on. I'm usually on the Nickelodeon site, coloring with my little five year old or something.""Here is a fear for me, I never wanted to be one of those guys that was defined by a body of work 20 years old.""I even knew some of the dialogue but it was definitely cool to look at. We always argue that the movies should be loyal but in this case I could argue that it might have been too loyal.""I guess The Grudge made over $100 million, but none of them had long legs after they came out but they all opened up and found an audience. If you could make those movies for a price, which is what I want to do with Spawn, then you could have some success.""I still do some inking here and there and I've actually got a book that I'm going to ink entirely.""I think people would actually be surprised by what we put out. Unfortunately the shadow that the original founders cast was that they were just artists that can't write books so people swept the whole of Image with that paintbrush.""I'm a guy who likes to watch something cool, creepy and suspenseful and there is no show to watch as an adult that would scare me at for even four seconds.""I'm tired of trying to get other people to see into my brain. I'm done.""I've been fortunate to come on places where the question isn't why did I do it? The question to me is always, why didn't anybody else do it before me? Those are the ones that I scratch my head about.""If I ever do anything, it actually might be some fantasy elf thing or even some cute, funny thing. Just to do something a little bit out of the ordinary. I've done my superhero gig.""Image has to be its own fortress, in spite of the owners. People can't separate that or they don't comprehend that you can turn that on and off for each one of the different entities.""It works in the comic book, but as the audiences have gotten older and more sophisticated, I think the stories need to grow up with them. This is a story about a couple of rival gangs and what goes wrong in a couple of days.""Obviously Spawn was at the top of the charts at that point so you get a lot of opportunities.""That became a big time in comic books because it's when people were starting to break out into independent stuff, the market was getting choked with speculators and everybody was trying to do their own trick covers.""That was my fear, which is why when I was took over a book, I was always trying to tweak it a little bit so that it looked like I was trying to add something instead of keeping the status quo.""The attempt is that we want to get a couple of minutes under our belt, depending on how good the tests are and take that into Hollywood. The fallback is we're going to DVD anyways. We've got that covered.""The deal is that you can do it, you don't really owe me anything, but at the end of it, I own the film. Then I can actually go out and reprint or not reprint if it I want.""To me, I was always just standing on the sidelines because up until issue 50, we were just doing Spawn. I wasn't recruiting anybody because I didn't have any books for people to work on.""You've got to let it go and say it was the best I could do at that time and place in my life. You hope that the thing you're doing next is a little bit better."
McFarlane was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He graduated from William Aberhart High School. As a 17-year-old teenager, he discovered comic books and was a fan of stars such as fellow Canadian John Byrne and Americans Jack Kirby, Frank Miller and George Pérez (as well as the writing of Alan Moore), but was especially drawn to the more atypical art of Michael Golden and Katsuhiro ?tomo, creator of the manga Akira. Gil Kane was also a major influence on McFarlane.
In the early-1980s, McFarlane attended Eastern Washington University on a baseball scholarship and studied graphic art. He sought to play baseball professionally after graduation but suffered a career-ending ankle injury in his junior year. During his time at EWU, McFarlane worked at a comic book shop in Spokane, Washington. Drawings he did of Marvel and DC superheros were sold at local shops. McFarlane also attended the Alberta College of Art and Design.
McFarlane's first published work was a 1984 backup story in Epic Comics' Coyote. He soon began drawing for both DC Comics and Marvel, with his first major body of work being a two-year run (1985–1987) on DC's Infinity, Inc. In 1987, McFarlane also illustrated several issues of Detective Comics'Year Two storyline. From there, he moved to Marvel's Incredible Hulk, which he drew from 1987–1988.
In 1988, McFarlane joined writer David Michelinie on Marvel's The Amazing Spider-Man beginning with issue 298. McFarlane was also the first artist to draw the first, full appearance of Eddie Brock, the first original incarnation of the popular villain Venom. He has been credited as the character's co-creator, though this has been a topic of dispute within the comic book industry. (See Creation and conception.)
McFarlane's work on Amazing Spider-Man turned him into an industry superstar. In 1990, after a 28-issue run of Amazing Spider-Man, McFarlane told editor Jim Salicrup he'd grown tired of drawing other people's stories and would be leaving the book with issue #328 to write his own work. Salicrup offered McFarlane a new Spider-Man book, prompting the launch of a new monthly title simply called Spider-Man, which McFarlane both wrote and illustrated. Spider-Man #1 sold 2.5 million copies, partially due to the variant covers that were used to encourage collectors into buying more than one edition. McFarlane wrote and illustrated Spider-Man's first 14 issues, as well as #16; many issues of which were crossovers with characters such as Wolverine, X-Force, and Ghost Rider. After issue #16 (Nov. 1991), McFarlane left the book due to creative clashes with new editor Danny Fingeroth. He was replaced on the title by future Image Comics co-founder Erik Larsen.
Image Comics
McFarlane then left Marvel with six other popular artists to form Image Comics, an umbrella company under which each owned a publishing house. McFarlane's studio, Todd McFarlane Productions, published his creation, the occult-themed Spawn. Upon release, Spawn #1 sold 1.7 million copies, still a record for an independent comic book.
Spawn was launched in 1992 with McFarlane as artist/writer for the first 7 issues. Guest writers Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Dave Sim and Frank Miller were brought on for issues 8 to 11 (respectively) while McFarlane continued as the artist. In order to concentrate on the 1994 Spawn/Batman crossover (with Miller writing), he brought on Grant Morrison (as writer) and Greg Capullo (penciller) from issues #16-#18. Then Andrew Grossberg and Tom Orzechowski took over writing issues #19 and 20 with Capullo still penciling. McFarlane returned as writer/artist for issue 21 and remained so until issue 24. Greg Capullo took over as pencil artist with issue 26, McFarlane remained writer and inker on the book until issue 70.
McFarlane eventually would hand off scripting duties (while still overseeing plotlines) to other writers, and the book continued to retain a respectable following. He has story input and inks covers on occasion.
In 2006 McFarlane announced plans for Spawn/Batman with artist Greg Capullo, which McFarlane wrote and inked, which paid tribute to Jack Kirby. He also began taking an active role in comics publishing again, publishing collections of his Spawn comics in paperback form. Spawn Collection Volume 1 collecting issues 1-12 minus issue 9 (due to royalty issues with Neil Gaiman) and 10 (due to a vow he made to Sim) was released in December 2005. The first volume achieved moderate success, ranking 17 in the top one hundred graphic novels, with pre-order sales of 3227 for that period.
Haunt, an ongoing series co-created by McFarlane and Robert Kirkman, was first announced in 2007, and launched October 7, 2009. The comic is written by Kirkman, penciled by Ryan Ottley, inked by McFarlane, with Greg Capullo providing layouts.
McFarlane Entertainment
Todd McFarlane Productions has also published multiple Spawn spin-off mini-series. McFarlane increasingly concentrated his own personal attention to those other ventures, which resulted in irregular work as an illustrator. By 1994, he ceased to be the regular illustrator of his own "signature" book, and would only re-visit Spawn sporadically, or as a promotional stunt for the title.
That same year, McFarlane created McFarlane Toys. Its line of meticulously sculpted Spawn action figures changed the entire industry by focusing on more mature consumers and non-traditional action figure inspirations such as musicians. The company has licensed the right to produce action figures of athletes in all four major North American sports ... baseball, hockey, football and basketball ... and several recent, successful film franchises, including The Terminator, The Matrix and Shrek. He has also created figures of rock musicians, including the members of Kiss, Jim Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix and toys related to video games, like Halo 3.
In 1996, McFarlane founded Todd McFarlane Entertainment, a film and animation studio. In collaboration with New Line Cinema, it produced the 1997 Spawn film and a new Spawn movie, planned in 2008. Spawn, while critically panned, was a modest box office success, earning $54.97 million domestically, a little over $69 million worldwide. It also produced the animated series Todd McFarlane’s Spawn, (featuring voice work by actor Keith David) which aired on HBO from 1997 until 1999. The animated series received significantly more positive press than the film, received two Primetime Emmy awards (including "Outstanding Animated Program (For Programming More Than One Hour))," and was a moderate success when eventually released on DVD.
The studio has produced acclaimed music videos for Pearl Jam's "Do the Evolution" (1998), Ko?n's "Freak on a Leash" (1999) and Disturbed's "Land of Confusion" (2006). They also produced an animated segment of the film The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (2002). He also fully animated "The Guy", the mascot for Disturbed.
McFarlane is an avid baseball fan; he briefly tried to achieve a pro career in the sport as a young adult. McFarlane has bought, at auction, multiple balls from Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa's 1998 race to establish a record for the greatest number of home runs hit in a single season. McFarlane owns Sosa's 33rd, 61st and 66th home run balls, and McGwire's first, 63rd, 67th, 68th, 69th and 70th. (McGwire's 61st was the ball which tied Roger Maris' then-record, while McGwire's 70th, bought by McFarlane at auction for US $3 million, set a new record at the time ... broken in 2001 by Barry Bonds.) He later purchased Bonds' record breaking 73rd home run ball for $450,000.
As well as being a former part owner of the Edmonton Oilers, McFarlane also designed the logo used on the team's alternate (third) jerseys. This jersey has not been worn since 2007.
Recently, baseball pitcher Curt Schilling of the Boston Red Sox has teamed up with McFarlane, forming 38 Studios (formerly Green Monster Games), LLC. This gaming studio will feature McFarlane's art direction and will also feature R.A. Salvatore as creative director. The studio's focus will be massive multiplayer online games of which Schilling is an avid fan.
For the release of Halo 3, McFarlane was enlisted to design a series of action figures.
McFarlane also created the character Necrid for the console versions of the video game Soul Calibur II. Spawn appears as a playable character in the Xbox version of SCII.
A PlayStation 2 game, McFarlane's Evil Prophecy, was released in 2004 by Konami. In it, players battle creatures based on a line of Todd McFarlane's action figures including classic movie monsters such as Frankenstein's monster and Dracula.
In January 2005, McFarlane announced that he was set to produce a half-hour anthology television series for Fox called Twisted Tales, based on the Bruce Jones' comic book to which McFarlane had purchased the rights.
In December 2002, Todd McFarlane directed the music video "Breathe" for Canadian hip-hop group Swollen Members that featured Nelly Furtado. He later drew both the Canadian and International covers for their next album Heavy, released October 2003.
Todd McFarlane is also the cartoonist responsible for the cover art of the albums Ten Thousand Fists, released in September 2005 and Indestructible, released June 2008 by metal band Disturbed, and the art in their single "Land of Confusion", as well as that of metal band Iced Earth's 1996 Spawn-based concept album The Dark Saga and Korn's third studio album Follow the Leader, which was released in 1998.
McFarlane is also doing artwork for the Lord of Vermilion game published by Square Enix.
McFarlane lost judgments in two lawsuits in the 2000s. The first was a 2002 suit in which McFarlane contested with writer Neil Gaiman over the rights to some supporting Spawn characters created by Gaiman in issue #9 of the Spawn series and over payment for later works featuring those characters. In 1997 the two signed a deal in which Gaiman would give his share of characters Angela, Medieval Spawn and Cogliostro to McFarlane in exchange of McFarlane's share of British superhero Marvelman (in reality, what McFarlane actually owned were two trademarks for Miracleman logos, not the character, which would become clear only after the lawsuit concluded). However, this deal was broken by McFarlane, which motivated Neil Gaiman to start the lawsuit. The jury was unanimous in favor of Gaiman. The two were involved in a lengthy dispute over ownership of Miracleman, but no lawsuit has been filed in that dispute. In 2009, Marvel Comics brought resolution to the matter by purchasing the property.
The second was a December 2004 suit in which hockey player Tony Twist sued Todd McFarlane because he named a mobster character in Spawn after Twist.
