Spider-Man to Spawn, How Todd McFarlane Became the Biggest Comic Book Artist Ever | Blueprint

I always find it interesting when I do these that I feel like at times you're on a couch and you're psychoanalyzing yourself when you're just doing your career when you're living your life you're not thinking about it that much over time all of a sudden you look back and you go well I guess there was an impact it's always interesting people then don't we'll walk us through how you got there probably most people will tell you it's not it's not as well planned out as you may think from spider-man Illustrator to Image Comics entrepreneur to action figure impresario Todd McFarlane became the most successful comic book creator ever by constantly asking one simple question why can't this look cooler this is his moment during college you're drawing literally in a trailer trying to perfect your skill set from 10 o'clock to 2:00 in the morning or whatever it was what exactly does that involve I bought comic books at 16 and I was smitten by the style right up to that point I'd never bought comic books I went wow so I had been the incessant doodler since I was five the classic best artists in the class kid I was always that kid there's no focus we just random doodling and probably a hundred different styles and then when I saw the comic books I want I'm gonna teach myself this so I fell in love with comic books I bought him by the hordes and I just started doing it the process was this simple for a week I would just draw the forearm that's all I did I went trying to draw a Superman I'm just trying to draw his forearm the next week I would do hands it was almost a jigsaw puzzle and I was just trying to learn Anatomy one piece at a time so that I could become semi-functional at it so that at some point you could start twisting the body and moving it around and doing all the things that make comic books interesting so for me when I was in college there's two things I used to draw a sum of the classic superhero of the Superman's and the Batman's and the spider-man's and x-men was popular back then but the ones that I used to draw just equally as much were the characters that were the unknown because they were the books that I thought I had a legitimate chance for you're never going to replace the all-star who you may replace is the one that's on the bubble the bubble athlete right so I there there are lots of books that I would open up in college and gone wow I like the eyes will crook it to me the anatomy was I go I can draw crooked eyes about Anatomy so why don't I draw that character and send it to that editor and maybe you might go yeah just as bad as this other guy and give me a chance and and after two and a half years of doing that over 700 samples over 300 rejections and at some point people should have been asking Todd at what point were you going to actually stop being delusional how many knows before it's real that the answer is you're not really good but I was determined after 300 that I was like I'll show them all I just ended up getting a job because I deluded every editor at every company every month and I think they just called uncle we keep getting 10 20 of these packages every month from this kid with somebody here one editor give him a job so we get one package from this kid instead of 20 and I think I just warm out I think from a distance I warm up there's a certain amount of you know meticulousness and tenacity that it takes delusion and immaturity you could those a fine line okay they just say those are fine line but but where's that coming from I don't know um I'm just taught i-i-i don't really sort of analyze myself against anybody else some of the stuff that I've gotten credit for of my career I don't know why they're giving me credit for because anybody else could have done it decades earlier spider-man when you came on was very much still stuck in the sort of John Romita mould of the 1970s you came and you made Peter look you know contemporary he made Mary Jane look contemporary right every artist before me for the previous 20 years could of I was just gone hey it's 1990 let's make it look like it's 1990 my gosh Todd you're a genius right what for making it look like today okay I'll take the street cred but I don't get it let's give you an example Steve right he took everything that pre-existed and he made it sexier and he made it prettier and he made it sort of fun to be wet what did the iPhone do it dialed every other phone did right it took tax every other phone did he goes yeah but when you text and you write you don't touch buttons you touch the glass Oh oh my gosh and that was it that was ingenious we put sexy into it so now I do those move and all of a sudden I don't invent anything new I just put sexy in it and and you get a lot of credit so I got to a point where I didn't really care if the editors got mad at me and they were they wanted me to stop everything why because it was their status quo he was everywhere he was their stamp and then here comes this little Canadian kid and he starts messing with it I was in multiple meetings with the editor-in-chief and they pointed fingers at me more than once saying stop it stop it stop making his eye so big on spider-man stop making his costume so dark stop putting them out jumping out of panel then he go stop that spaghetti webbing right and it was it was a glowing moment because I had I didn't have a name at that point Wow cool just in his anger gave me the name something that he doesn't want me to do 88 you do Batman year one those covers and and all of a sudden no honking start and I know and the Hulk and there's a huge shift there and you you see the capes get bigger and flowier and more dynamic looking people start popping out of the panel's my degree is in graphic design right my college degree so I was applying some of that onto the pages why because I knew I was an average to below average artist so if you look at those early infinity I was just getting you to look at sort of this glitchy stuff the paneling layout hoping you weren't actually looking at the drawings and going if not very good he's not very good and I was hoping that over time I would then get better and I wouldn't have to rely on the glitz and then when I get over to Marvel they were in this period where they go we don't want any quest and they go can you just do like a grid page that's basically two two and two so what I needed to show them was can I handle a deadline let me just out any person ever want to break into our industry deadlines are goal number one so if you're mediocre and you can do deadline you will have a long career and so to me I was trying to show them that I could draw fast so I got sure I'll make it boring but I'll do it fast and they were gone well he's not the best kid here but he's quick and he's got a little bit that's something there and then once they gave me the job and they weren't looking I started then pushing back and bringing in some of the glitz and doing this and doing this and doing this and it was some of the stuff that eventually got me in trouble on spider-man by the time I ended up getting into that meeting with the editor-in-chief for the fifth time you know I was able to just go Tom you hired me for one goal to sell comic books that's what your business is you sell comic books I sell more comic books in anybody you employ why we having this conversation what do you care what it looks like what they were doing is they were taking a personal affront that because I was changing their status quo I must have been doing it because I thought what they were doing was wrong never that would never cross my mind ever I was doing it because I want I needed to do something different to survive as a young artist and I was doing a different because being an artist or a novelist or whatever it's a lonely occupation and if you can't get through 12 hours a day with what it is your work is you're going to drive yourself insane so who was i entertaining every day I got to tell you me so I was going to move would be cool smarter man look like this wouldn't be cool if Batman's cape look like this and I was lucky enough that there was enough people out in in the world that had the same attitude going yeah that does look cool Todd and so they were buying into my style what is your financial aspiration for this career as a comic book artists what are you thinking is this guy you know the limit 80,000 that was that that was I do I draw a line in the sand and I go if if I ever make $80,000 I will never asked for watt for more just so everybody's cool I'm in business for only one one reason to drive my art to drive my ideas and really what it takes isn't the idea lots of people have great ideas it's the money and the time and the gumption to do it and so I taught myself business as a second language I consider myself to be bilingual I'm an artist and I can talk business so you want to put me in with bankers I'm good I'm good I can talk their language they think I'm actually a businessman who's in who's a quasi artist here's the driving point you can either go I want to get in business because I want to make a million dollars and I've met plenty of those people I think they reverse engineer they go I want to be rich what do I got to do oh I got a calling with a good idea what's my good idea I think it's wrong come up with a good idea do the thing that you like put it out there and if it is of quality and people like it to buy product is cash and and then you get into it that way here's why the business matters because if I can maintain a certain level of success not because I care all that much but it allows me to walk into rooms and pitch more ideas and ask for their ideas so that I can use them in my toys because I use their movie ideas and bring them in or their video games or your TV show and bring them in and there's only one way they're going to say yes to any of it what you have to go to do is walk in there and say look at here's what happened on the last three things we did boom boom boom do you think that the same momentum will be here if you do let's go and then make these quick calculations and they go Todd sit down let's have a talk and I go good I got him where I want which is I get to now talk about art and as long as I have a certain level of business success they will allow me to get up every day and do art and that's the victory in half a decade McFarland had become the most popular artist the genre had ever seen but rather than stay in pocket he bet on himself and went independent launching his own imprint Image Comics and his own character spawn this is our very first meeting of Image Comics has an official company and we all walked in and we talked about what books we were going to then publish I walked in the door saying hey there's this character called spawn I did when I was 16 and I want to pull him out and here's sort of all the pieces I've got has anybody got anything to add to it so that's it 25 years ago that was the start of it right there in 1992 you had an incredibly successful run on amazing you get to the end of this and you decide that you want to go out on your own and completely disrupt the industry that comes from a place of wanting control not a place of feeling under compensated I I started running around trying to ask people if they want to start a union I was normal right my attitude was if we can stop drawing they got nothing to sell so we had the power so what in the bathroom things I talked to a couple of people who then in the future become my partners the seven of us accounted for 44 of the top 50 selling books of 1991 out of 8,000 books that were printed we did 44 of the top 50 that's who was leaving we were we were some of the elite guides at that point we didn't go there to negotiate the demand and we just want to say we're leaving here's why and oh by the way if it was us I'd do something about it because how did you know you're not gonna get another seven creative people next week in the week after and the week after and then we went over to DC we just basically gaming same conversation we're not here to work for you either we just thought it was worth repeating because you guys have a bunch of creative people and we laughed and that was it that was the beginning of it in those first two or three years were there behind the scenes machinations made by these big players to try to negatively affect the success of image yes like what kind of stuff we would hire some of the kids to do books and then marvel come along go hey how would you like to draw Ironman for us March so they would pick off our roster and go and then they just cache whipped a couple of my partner's so all of a sudden a couple of the founders of image are doing work and Marvel I probably had just myself in my studio twenty people who I found off the streets gave him a big chant and then Marvel came along in a year or two and went and took them I don't put anybody under contract right so I was like if you don't want to be working for me I don't want to force you to work for me and Marvel and DC got into this place where they started putting everybody under contract because they didn't want them coming back to some of the independence especially to us what gave you the feeling of security that you felt like you know what like financially I'm in a place right my career wise I'm in a place I can just I can walk away from the biggest company in the space and I have no plan right here's the math out of a hundred percent of the Spiderman pie or any Marvel comic book pie we were getting four percent okay so okay four percent so that meant that we could now sell 125th the amount of books 125th but since we were getting a hundred percent of the 125th it would equal financially the same four percent so we could get killed in sales and it not take any kind of a hit financially and we had total creative freedom that's a win and guess what happened it didn't go from here to 125th it went from here and it actually went up it went up and we got a hundred percent of it how long did it take the seven of you artists to hammer out the business terms of this sort of cooperative that you would create Oh six seconds here's how it works image comic books in 1992 an image comic book in the year 2017 right don't doesn't own anything just so we're clear image owns zero not only is it the best view on comic books it is the best deal and entertainment period nobody gives you that deal so why are we successful now 25 years later because we're letting people basically own their own ideas and their properties that's why we've created a haven for image comes out the gate over the next say three or four years there's a splintering and the levels of success start to become stratified what is going on internally during that okay so here so here is so you now have seven personality wired seven different ways and they all have to deal with this giant success in any way they see fit so what happened some people folded some people sort of when the field was it some people try to expand too quick and again remember we were trying to learn how to be business man and now you're gone so how does this all work I am Telling if we took care they were making 30 grand and they do a book for us and we're handing them a cheque on their first book half a million dollars right again over 15 years worth of income for one block for one issue or one issue and then couldn't get them on the phone why they're in the Bahamas there have got a bicycle they've got a more of like there's nobody talking about then you've got 15 years of income there 23 years old and they're off to the races and we don't have any power in our system to tell them to get back to the drawing board and write and draw get the comic books out we don't have that power why could we have any ownership and Hollywood was coming why because we now owned our own own IP and since we own our own IT people not have to come to us and so now we were taking meetings and and every time you take a meeting that's hours away from the board drawing comics is incredibly physically taxing and you're now making millions of dollars per month as an artist is it hard for you to sort of keep yourself in that zone of like I'm going to go spent ten hours a day by myself working what drove me was I knew that for longevity to have any kind of meaningful impact beyond just the first year the second year there was going to there's going to have to be some sustainability so I for me I I made a pact with myself I said I'm not going to do any other book other than spawn for at least fifty issues I'm not going to think about doing this a miniseries a spinoff character and I want to establish spawn for fifty issues get them cemented into the psyche of American comic book buyers and then I'll worry about the other one in its simplest form it's just the Three Little Pigs story you can build it out of straw out of wood or out of bricks and it's harder to build it out of bricks and it takes a little bit longer but it will sustain itself a lot longer I was just the pig building the brick house when we draw we draw on ten by fifteen pieces of paper with a little bit of border this gray was because it had the lettering on it so that's why you even have like the tip that's an acetate leather like an overlay that's exactly it here's you know me putting a note saying make sure that the colors right or whatever it is blah blah blah you have to draw debris you have to put doors there's a lot of boring stuff you have to draw that most people you know don't really pay attention to because they want they want the big sexy page right one of the things about spawn that I think is arguably one of the most interesting is that he's an african-american character in the history of comics there are not very many african-american characters that have sold particularly in that period in the you know early 90s that we're selling on the level that you were selling say spider-man or Jim was selling x-men right fine at any point did that cross your mind as potentially a gamble in and of itself no maybe in hindsight it shut off but it wasn't and here was the here was the thinking in the rationale to it spider-man's dressed from head to toe yet we always talked to him and we always spoke to him and we always wrote the stories assuming he was a white dude why he's covered from head to toe I don't see one ounce of flesh so spawn was always clothed from head to toe I just wanted to make him a hit who just happened to be a minority and could I sell that to white people and I had those days where I was at conventions I'm sitting in Texas and I got two good old boys in front of me and they're going Todd that's Pawnee my favorite here of all time and I go you remember as a black man and they catch themselves because I took it away so early in the game that they were just like oh he's cool his costumes cool he does cool stuff he's kind of heroic god I was trying to try I forgot and by the way who's fun he's essentially tough he's me if I got hit by a bolt of lightning what would I do I'd come back for the love of my life snow accident the person in the comic book is one that's the name my wife right and the things that he was doing in the first five six issue was an accident that he killed the Billy Kincaid the pedophile you pushed me far enough I'd do the same thing if Batman can't stop him enough times if the system can't stop enough time if after tennis capes the pedophile still on the street I bet you mean two other dads will just pay that guy a visit and he may disappear someplace because if the system can't stop that guy from hurting the children I will stop him from hurting the children done despite all his success even McFarland's outsize talent couldn't supersede the implosion of the comic-book market so rather than go down with the ship he diversified his bonds bringing spawn to Hollywood and launching McFarlane Toys so this is the prototype and this is actually what came out of the package oh wow right so as you can see and the reason we would sculpt this size which is why you've got all these big ones in here yet is because the bigger something is the more dexterity you have with the clay we would take both these versions to the Toy Fair and say our prototype will look like our finished product because other companies would say that but they wouldn't deliver when I first started what sure sure young men and I have to actually start it showing to at the outset of image the entire industry is in its zenith it's a boom right unlike anything the comic industry had ever seen during the course of the 90s though that adds dramatically how does that affect your business it's not an accident that I started a toy company and I started doing some more stuff in Hollywood and I started branching out in other places because the thought was if the comic industry wanted to self implode I wanted to commit sort of business suicide then then I was going to I was going to create a plan that was going to at least insulate me somewhat so that I could survive this because I wasn't going to go down with this ship I started other corporations and I started other businesses spreading the brand spreading the artwork spreading my ideas so that again the chances of all those different areas going down at the same time was highly unlikely what was the moment that you looked at the toy industry is that I can be disruptive in this industry just like I was in comics um it was this simple I walk down the aisles of action figures and I want I don't get why they can't look cooler and so at some point I want hey you know what I want to make spawn toys they couldn't make a deal and all but you know I had roles in motels and jacks and whoever it was there came and and wanted the spawn toys and they were I didn't sell too why because I go guys here's what I think I've got a non-traditional character I think we need to make non-traditional sculpts and we need to sell it in non-traditional places and they couldn't get their head wrapped around it they're a billion dollar model so they're going low boy we know how to make this work we make billions they're going to put me next to Disney product in the same stores selling it the same way it was going to be a failure because it wouldn't resonate with this with that buying crowd it was going to we're gonna have to do something different and then when it didn't work they were going to hand me my brand back and it was going to be broken so I said no I'll just start I'll start my own toy company that so all of a sudden I come along I put some cool arty toys out and it was a shock to the system they're gone what and I remember they're going Hasbro people were gone you can't make that toy and so it for $1 more and so who's going to buy toys or $5.99 Todd you can't tell us $6.99 toy of course you can here's how you do it you give him $6.99 worth of value that simple the price wasn't relevant they just were in their little mindset so it gave a break for me so I started doing stuff and we start winning awards during lots of detail anybody could have painted their toys you like I did there was nothing to prevent it any company for last 50 years prior to my entry that stopped anybody from painting them sculpting them or designing in the same way and then we won dozens of awards on our sports figures as they're handing me the award they're going Todd this is because you make a greatest sports figures of all time and this is great what is your secret how do you make them so real and I give them the answer and I will give you the secret we use a technology if you can't understand what I'm about to show you can go to Google you can look it up it's called a camera and if you take a camera raw and you push a button it gives you a photo and if you take the photo and you don't stop manipulating your clay till it looks exactly like the photo it looks exactly like it so the question is not how did you make it look like the photo the question is how did they not for decades we were using photo reference your genius we're going to give you awards oh my gosh I'm not going wild really all I've done is just made stuff that already exists look sexier I've never invented anything so why didn't anybody else do it I don't know go ask them so when you start McFarlane Toys do you put up all the money yourself sure was that a big gamble relatively your personal fortune at that point you know anybody ever tells you don't spend your own money if somebody who's never spent their own money I'm going to tell you the opposite always spend your own money because then nobody gets to tell you a single damn thing if it failed then I go back and I'm kind of making 80,000 I'm back to my red line again right you're you're under the precepts that all this matters right it only matter so I can bring the art this is why I can never lose a negotiation because can never take anything of value from me there's only a couple things that I've valued to me my wife and my kids and nobody's ever threatened any of them in the negotiation they've threatened to take away contracts and money and market shares and licenses out Wow I can replicate all those in ten seconds I don't care so was it a risk no I guess at some point you go nobody's making cool toys I guess I'll just have to go and see how hard it is how quickly did that business take off I go talk to business people the young kids at business school and I go beside something nasty and hard work and all those I think you've heard done lock must be a semi-regular friend right you must have a little bit of dumb luck so let's let's go to the dumb lock moment I go to New York Toy Fair this is where you go and you show all your toys and somebody comes in and they decide where they're going to buy your toys McHale has an entire building 12 stories high Caswell has an entire building 14 stories high it's it's massive I'm in a building that's 10 stories high on one floor in one room there's 20 of us my space was 5 feet by 5 feet and there was somebody I was like that's being at a swap meet right there's somebody next to me here next to me here next to me here I didn't even have a prototype this I've done my work I didn't even have a prototype I had drawings that I cut out and I put in packaging and I had him up there right and then the moment my first story fair the door opens up and the buyer from toys-r-us comes in now remember we're going back to 1994 at that point Toys R Us was the biggest toy buyer Walmart was soon to crush them but not at that moment Toys R Us was the God the Toys R Us buyer opens the door and there's a hush and he steps in with his little young aide standing next to him and everybody in the 5x5 stand up to attention just like that the general came into the army barracks and I'm looking going what who's that they're going that's the toys-r-us fire I'm going home okay cool and he walks too and if he walks if he didn't stop at your booth he's not buying your stuff as he walked by them they were going on dude oh dude hot dude and I'm going oh I could just see that the depression has you walked by and they walked in a lot and he stops in front of my booth and did he love my stuff of course he didn't didn't even know who that I was here's the dumb luck his assistant who was 21 who was a Image Comics fan sits there and goes boss this is the guy was talking to you about he's coming out with toys with this thing that's at the top of the charts blah blah blah blah blah and the buyer looked at me and won what's the price I told them can you get it out by this day of course I can I didn't have no idea of course I can write always say yes to any answer right and worry about figuring it out later of course I can it goes good you do that I'll put it in all my stores I'll go storewide with you yes sir and we deliver we delivered it it's sold in whatever aisle that I got school wide I got store wide at the biggest bun with a cardboard cutout right it usually doesn't work that way so look what a dumb luck but the dumb luck comes because of the body of work and the success I had at those other ventures so that's where the success matters because the prior success allowed that kid with a straight face to say to his boss you should look at this these three are the top three homerun balls in Major League history right here 66 70 73 the reason I bought it I was trying to get into the sports toys they wouldn't let me come in they're gone who the hell are you it was my aunt I into the game they gave they gave me a meeting they go on he loves sports he spend a lot of money must be successful he's got toys bring them in and they want you want to do sport yeah it looks like you're successful boom and so I said to people you spend three million dollars on the ball but over the course of 20 years you make 30 million selling sports toys you back out you're three you're still up so two or three years into image the entire industry starts to to wane a little bit you you start to diversify your portfolio you start the toy business the other big thing that you do is start stepping into Hollywood and pretty much simultaneously co-develop the spawn cartoon with it HIV project and the live-action take me through that process okay so so here were here was the thought process I create a brand brand becomes fun right so spawns it becomes the beginning of it he becomes the start of a foundation I now need pillars on the foundation and the pillars to me were toys video games TVs movies if I could if I could somehow find those four pillars you could stack a skyscraper on a good foundation and so I started I couldn't find anybody to do what I want with the toys I started that the video games we started making video games I made those deals and then we ended up making the deal for New Line Cinema for the live-action and very quickly did the animation of a CEO that lasted for three years so I was able to quickly go boom boom boom boom boom now how I'm not smarter anybody else the book was selling and when people now in these places were looking at sales charts they were seeing some of these image books mine specifically spawn a head of characters like spider-man and Batman in Captain America and Superman so they were making these sort of evaluations all must be bigger and more popular than Superman not really because it's sort of brand-new and you don't really know what it is but if you want to come and make an offer and help me plant one of these foundations then god bless you and I was able to do that so with the toys you were incredibly hands-on you took it no one could match the kind of quality that you were looking for for your brand Z so you took it I own that I own that but with the movies and the TV you had to partner with other people how was that it was okay cuz again look at everything you do you just go through the the sort of the pros and cons of all of it right and there's everything from I'm going to do it all myself and all my own money and the heck with everybody - I'm going to give it away and I'm going to let somebody do it and I don't have any input and then everything in between can I put myself in the position ie let's say the HBO animation the deal as I'm in charge you know but I've never done any animation but that's the deal right and so they basically let a newbie animator be in charge of the animation of it okay if you let me do it I'll surround myself with good people and we'll just figure this thing out because I'm going to have 400 years of experience around me and they're just going to teach me and I'm a quick study right I just I'll pick it up on the fly but at the end of the day I get to make some of the creative decisions not just everybody up in the executive suite so how are you splitting your time at this point between all of these different endeavors even though I limit myself on being distracted by the number of books I was doing I still was getting distracted by trying to put those foundations and I was trying as good as I could to put out image but I wasn't doing it on quite a steady of monthly processes I should have relative to what I was doing at that point on spider-man and in the toy business just trying to figure out that you can't mess around with deadlines because when you promise toys to big companies like Walmart and Toys R Us and Kmart back then and and target these types of stores you get punished if if you don't deliver product why because they've cleared space and a shelf for you and if there's no product they're losing money so you can't you can't not do what you sort of set out to do so I got punished in a couple of these things and and one two ow and once once you get once you once you feel pain or you you get close to seeing some of these businesses maybe start to wobble it Sobers you up for quickly in hindsight time time should teach you something and what time should teach you is where they're where the mistakes and the potholes are over time I found out I'm a five ball juggler and what that means is every juggler has a max number and I don't care if you've seen these guys onstage in Vegas they can juggle 20 balls even then they have a max number and if you throw one more ball than they can handle guess what happens every ball falls to the ground so overtime I thought I could juggle more than I could and they started falling and I paid the price on everything any new opportunity comes I must put one of the balls down and then bring in the new opportunity some I never go beyond five the animated series with HBO was very well received and you know in many circles seen as ahead of its time the live-action film less so um it was critically sort of panned and I know it made some money yeah you know when you look back on that where do you feel like it went wrong though I call the live action a double right obviously was far from a homerun it wasn't a failure I mean it made money it did whatever we had a first-time producer first-time director first-time special effects guy I was first movie I was Rachel you had a bunch of first-time people on a movie trying to do the best that we could I thought that we try to do too much and put too much in it and we ran out of time on it and so there's still parts in there that make me queasy because they look unfinished to me from a story point of view I didn't have that much impact on the story I wouldn't put a boy and a dog in it I did I think that makes it juvenile I think the reason that the HBO worked a lot better was we just went straight into art and we just want even though it's animation I don't know if you remember but it had every single disclaimer that there was right there I think there was only five or something we had all five we're the first show to have all five as an animated show I was quite proud because we just say I just go we're gonna and I had way more impact on that show with a trio that we were going to go into this mature sophisticated dark area and I think spawn lives better in that place I don't think spawn especially now that he's 25 years old I don't think spawn lives in pg-13 land and I've said over and over and over when the next movie comes out which it's coming it's going to be a dark are going to be a dark r-rated movie because it just it's not a superhero you know spandex type story that I'm trying to tell you took on spider-man at - 298 at that point he was the most blue-chip legacy brand in the Marvel Empire spawn is about to reach issue 300 which would tie the longest-running independent comic in history right and there's a young artist who's probably helping you on pencils now for whom spawn means to them what spider-man meant to you right yeah if you do you contemplate that ever it's it's at times and it's a weird thing I remember by my first spider-man issue as issue 167 and then I was like one I thought it would been around forever since ponds 25 years old now you know he's been published for 25 years that there's somebody is 24 who's never lived in this country and in a world that doesn't have spawn and it's odd when you think about it intellectually but given that you're still in the middle of the race every day is just nobody does me any favor that I just have to sort of work hard you don't really think about it you know maybe someday I'll write my memoirs and I'll go hey I guess we made a mark but I you know what I still think I got 30 more years to make them work but you still write every issue yes lon do this day sure I'm still one of the better artists of my company yep I'm sure that their points where you're like running around going to Hollywood checking on it here's I know your content yearly should I hear someone to do that dude here's what drives me my goal in life is to outlast every one of my enemies that will be the sweet revenge that I get at this point in my career after 30 years I'm okay I don't need to chase the money so now I can just be fearless what gives you sort of more personal satisfaction at this point here's the nerve wanna write I'm 56 years old I'll give you my 56 year old Nirvana right here it's finding the space doing it your way and it works and you go wow I actually got to have fun and they're gonna pay me for it good day I've been able to play that trick now for decades good day I'm going to tell you to have fun and do whatever it is that you come up with I don't get to have a bad day because whenever I have a bad day I always have to ask the same question who started it duh that's that guy I shave with every day that's me so if it doesn't work I don't get the bellyache to anybody I'm gone cool I'm long to go into these marketplaces because if it doesn't work I don't care I don't have shareholders I don't have to maximize profits every 90 days I can just do crazy stuff and sometimes the crazy works every day that I don't have to work for a corporation is a moral victory for me and I've been doing it now for thirty years and now I'll quit I'll retire before I go back so I'll never come never go back and I'll quit at free man so what started as me in a room by myself for twelve hours a day is now expanded to me employing anywhere between 100 and 200 people at any time and I'm smart enough to find brilliant people that have skills that I don't have that make me look good every single day and even though I'm 56 years old I feel like I'm 10 I feel like I'm 12 I'm young again I've got the enthusiasm I'd like today is a good day I'm not what adults get to me when I've met people like Steven Spielberg or or James Cameron or these types that when you get them away they turn into twelve-year-old boys I think it's the reason for their success that they still have a boyish wonder buried inside that they have never ever ever lost and we try as adults to basically lose that childishness out of it something be said about immaturity [Music] [Laughter]

Channel: Complex

Views: 1,223,981

Keywords: complex, complex originals, sneakers, magazine, news, entertainment, current affairs, men, man, young man, culture, cool, edgy, funny, complex tv, complex media, Todd McFarlane, Noah Callahan-Bever, Blueprint, Spawn, The Amazing Spider-Man, Batman, The Hulk, Juggernaut, Marvel Comics, Image Comics, McFarlane Toys, Toys, Artist, Art, Comics, Comic Books, Illustrator, Motivation, interview

Id: pvKbRIuWFio

Length: 41min 10sec (2470 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 24 2017