Todd McFarlane, the President and co-founder of Image Comics, CEO of McFarlane Toys, and the creator of Spawn, spoke at the ICv2 Insider Talks about “the creator as brand,” holding forth on his career and the demands of entrepreneurship in a panel moderated by ICv2 columnist Rob Salkowitz (see “Tod McFarlane on the Creator as Brand“).
McFarlane began on a modest note by admitting that he was not a strong artist at the beginning of his career, particularly in the early days when he was working on Marvel’s Coyote and DC’s Infinity, Inc., but he didn’t let that stop him. “I had a degree in graphics, and I treated all those pages as graphic design,” he said. “That’s all I had. So at that point, I go, if I can get them to pay attention to the graphic while I’m learning to draw over here, I’ll be okay. And eventually, luckily, they started paying me to draw eight, ten hours a day, and the drawing got better. I don’t care what you do, if somebody pays you to do something for 12 hours a day, you’re going to get better.”
In response to Salkowitz’s question about pivoting from being a comics artist to getting into the comics business, McFarlane was emphatic about the risks of working for hire. “When you work at Marvel or DC, you don’t own anything,” he said. “I don’t know how it works today, but how it worked in my day that you go in, you go, ‘Hey, I’d like more money,’ and they go, ‘You know what? We hear you like Captain America. We might give you Captain America someday. You keep your head down, and you could do Captain America. Maybe a Captain America Annual.’ I saw it happen many times, people walking out, and I go, ‘Hey, did you get your raise?’ And they go, ‘No, but they said that possibly, maybe sometime, someday, I might do Captain America.‘”
That didn’t work on McFarlane. “I just went, ‘I need a fucking raise,’ and that was it. They said ‘OK, we’ll give you a little bit more, but we’ll put you on the big books.’ I’d been in the business probably four years, and when I told my parents I did the Hulk, that’s when they thought I got in, because it was a character they all knew.”
Meanwhile, McFarlane was reading creator interviews in The Comics Journal, and he saw them as cautionary tales. “What I discovered in reading all those interviews was that almost every one of them had a story where they felt like they had been taken advantages of,” he said. “I went into the beginning of my career with my eyes wide open, with this saying in the back of my head: If they can take advantage of Jack ‘King’ Kirby, then who am I? You’d better watch out for yourself, Todd!”
With that in mind, he kept the characters that he created in high school, including Spawn. “I created Spawn when I was 16,” he said. “I could have given it to Marvel and DC dozens of times over. I chose not to, not only that character, but others. Why? There wasn’t a system, I thought, that was equitable and fair for me to pull it out and give it to them. If I had a story that said, ‘Create a character,’ I would do it. I did my job the best I could, but I always sort of kept stuff off to the side.”
He did that, he said, because he saw other artists who were dropped by publishers as they got older. “They gave 20, 30 years of their life, and then they got the phone call one day, ‘Your services are no longer needed,’ and they were retired involuntarily,” he said. “It horrified me. You gave 30, 35 years to that company, and that’s it. They just found somebody that’s a little bit sexier, and now you’re retired. No place to go. Whoo, Todd, you better start planning now as a young man, because you may get that phone call.”
In fact, McFarlane said, before he co-founded Image, he tried to start a creators’ union. “I couldn’t get people to sign up,” he said, “and what shocked me was that the most afraid of my peers were the people who had the least to lose, from my perspective. They had no job at Marvel or DC, they had no money, they had no relationship. They had no place hardly they could live. And when I would come to them and go, ‘Come on, we should band together,’ their answer to me was, ‘Well, what if they blackball me?'”
McFarlane had no such compunctions, and eventually, with his first child on the way, he decided to break away from the Big Two and go it alone.
That obviously turned out to be very successful for him, but McFarlane admits it’s not for everyone. Entrepreneurship, he said, is a matter of personality. “You cannot teach it,” he said. “You are either a glass-eating, fire-eating, I’m-going-to-go warrior, or you’re not. I’m not saying one’s better than the other, but I’m saying you will either have it in you or you don’t, and to go out and be an entrepreneur, you have to have a certain spirit.”
When young people ask him about going into business for themselves, McFarlane asks one question: “Have you ever been the first person on the dance floor?”
“And if the answer is no,” he said, “you might not be cut out for it. Why? Because you give a shit what other people think about you and what they’re going to say. I don’t give that power to anybody in my life.”
“I just do what works for Todd, and then I cross my fingers, and luckily you guys have supported me enough,” he said. “But that’s the personality. Where did it come from? The moment I dropped out of the womb, it was there. There’s never been a day that I haven’t been this way. I can’t teach it. I can give you the book of the ten steps of how to succeed in business, but if you don’t have the personality to go with it, it doesn’t work.”
Salkowitz asked McFarlane to reflect on the structures, such as social media and crowdfunding, that didn’t exist when he started in the business but that he takes advantage of now. “Pre-internet, you had to just hustle and get the word out,” McFarlane said. “The disadvantage is that you can’t speak to a million people with a picture and a couple of sentences and just hit click. You can do that now. I don’t go to a lot of conventions, because if I sit at home, I can talk to way more people than are in this building.”
“The upside was that the world didn’t know how much talent it had on this globe. They didn’t know how to find people in basements. They didn’t know how to find people that were hiding in Ohio. They didn’t know there was talent in Poland and Korea and in China and in Spain and in Mexico and in Brazil. There was talent, and I did not have to compete with it. So the upside was I got in before the internet. The downside is the level of skill you have to have to get noticed now is way higher.”
Then Salkowitz asked McFarlane why so many more writers than artists have managed to become recognizable brands. “What is it in the structure of the business that makes it harder for people on the visual side?” he asked.
“Well, let’s just look at the physicality of it right here,” McFarlane responded. “If you’re a writer in our industry and you’re a wanted writer, you could write anywhere between three to five books in a month. Let’s say you can do five books. You only have to devote 20% of your energy to do something that’s for yourself, that’s creator owned. Most artists can do one book, so you’re either on that side of the fence or that side of the fence. So the writers have more options.
McFarlane likened the world of comics to a bubble, and while artists can be successful inside it, there is a ceiling. “Get outside the bubble,” he said. “That’s where the golden opportunities are. There wasn’t one single person who bought Spawn #1 (record-setting sales still stands today for independent comic books), because of the Spawn character. How could they? They didn’t even know who the character was! They bought it because it was the Spider-Man guy, and he moved from there to there, and I gave them no option but to follow me to there.” His advice to creators was to put their energy into their own work and their branding. “If it doesn’t work, you can always go back,” he said. “You don’t think Marvel and DC wouldn’t hire me back tomorrow? Of course they would.”
He also emphasized the importance of longevity and of staying relevant. “Here’s why the value is there,” he said. “The brand grows the whole time, and they will excuse you if you have an off day. Sometimes Shohei Ohtani, or Aaron Judge, goes 0 for 4 with two strikeouts. Do you dislike him on that day? Of course you don’t. Why? Because they’ve given you years of good, and you go, ‘Not today, but man, tomorrow, Aaron’s going to come out big and strong.'”
“I thought when I was younger, it was a sprint, but I’ve learned now that it’s a marathon,” he said. “I am building a library behind me, and I can now take hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of issues and repurpose hundreds of issues, and I don’t have to do it myself anymore. I can create what I call mailbox money, which basically means just reprint those 10 issues, put it in, send me the check, because at some time, I’m going to be 78, 88, 98, and I might not want to sit at a desk and draw all day long. Figure out another way to basically get passive income. That’s the home run.”
He concluded with some thoughts on McFarlane Toys, which has succeeded despite being in an industry dominated by giant corporations. “The blessing and the curse of my companies is my size,” he said. “We’re small. Big, giant corporations, the blessing and the curse of them is their size. They’re slow and they’re big and they will never kill me. They tried at the beginning. Marvel and DC tried to pick off all of our artists at the toy company. They tried to basically grab all the space. They couldn’t do it.” As he spoke, McFarlane mimed a lumbering giant trying to swat a mosquito. “I’m the mosquito, and I bite them all the time because I exist, and I take away space, and they go, oh yeah, we’re gonna kill you,” he said. “But by the time they even get close to that, I have left, spun around their head three times, and I’m now biting their ass. So I survive against the big boys. Why can’t they kill us? Because we’re quick.”
“You guys can do it too,” he told the audience as his parting words. “Be smart, be quick, and give good, fair price, good competition. I am telling you, people will come. And keep your integrity. It’s the only damn thing you get to take to your grave.”
Source: ICv2
