Todd McFarlane wants his upcoming Spawn/Batman crossover to be this century’s biggest comic book
The Image Comics co-founder marks 30 years of Spawn, discusses the rise of women in geek culture, and reveals how he got schooled by Ozzy Osbourne
Aux Features Batman
Comic book icon Todd McFarlane has always been laser-focused, off the cuff, and unflappable. His drive and determination prompted him to leave Marvel Comics and start the creator-driven company Image Comics with the likes of Jim Lee and Mark Silvestri in 1992. There, he launched the famed character Spawn, and went on to create his McFarlane Toys empire, best known for producing highly detailed action figures of characters licensed from DC Comics, Mortal Kombat, and other major pop culture brands.
Thirty years later, McFarlane remains busier than ever. In addition to running his bustling empire, it’s not unusual to find him helming the occasional music video. In fact, he recently took on a multimedia project that bridges rock ’n’ roll with comics, directing Ozzy Osbourne’s new music video for “Patient Number 9.” McFarlane also wrote the comic that comes with the limited edition version of the upcoming album of the same name. But that’s not all he’s been up to. Spawn fans in particular will be excited to learn that there’s a lot more to come, both on page and on screen. McFarlane sat down with The A.V. Club to talk about Image Comics’ big anniversary, his “horrifying” writing process, the upcoming Spawn/Batman crossover that he hopes will shatter sales records, and the R-rated Spawn movie he’s had in development for the last five years.
The A.V. Club: You tapped into nostalgia with a lot of your original toys, like those Yellow Submarine figures in 1999. Now there’s a lot of crossover between music, comics, and collectible fans.
Todd McFarlane: I’ve always looked at it, especially on the toy front, that it’s a little bit like wearing a T-shirt or a hat. When people wear T-shirts and hats, let’s say a fan of a band or a movie, you’re basically showing the symbol of what you like. You can walk by people’s [work] cubicles now and they’ve got little remnants of things they like—there’s a little Game Of Thrones there, or there’s a little bit of Hobbits there. Even if you know nothing about them, you can at least walk by and go, “What? I didn’t know you were a fan of that.” Especially for the ladies, too, which is why female geekdom has grown.
I find that even with rockers and movie stars—having a plastic statue that’s 3D matters to them. When we were working on Black Adam this past Christmas, Dwayne Johnson asked if we could give him an advanced prototype of the statue we were making so he could give it to his mom for Christmas. Why? He thought it would be cool to say, “Mom, look at my next movie. Here’s your son. I look badass.” It’s just fun, geeky stuff, and it’s just another way of saying, “I support that team” or whatever that product/brand/person is. So it’s crossed way, way, way over from when I was younger. If you collected any of that stuff, you were a true geek, and that word didn’t necessarily come with a term of endearment. Today, being a geek is like a badge of honor. People are super proud of that, and they should be.
AVC: As I visit New York Comic Con every year, I see a lot more women into geek culture than when we were growing up. I sometimes wonder if it’s a cultural shift or if it was just more of a boy’s club back then?
TM: I think a couple of things happened. Number one, the internet came along. It’s just that pre-internet, everything you knew had to be within a 20-mile radius, even closer if you didn’t drive. So if you were collecting baseball cards, if your three local shops didn’t have it, then you’re never going to get it. Now you just go to eBay. Then the second part of it is now with the advent of superhero movies being the norm, and people going to them.
The [revelatory] moment for me was when I went away for a weekend [in 2008]. My eldest daughter [who was then 20], didn’t even give a shit about action movies. I came home and I go, “What did you do this weekend?” She says, “I went and saw the new Batman movie, twice.” She got caught up in the fact that Heath Ledger had died, this is his last performance, whatever. So I understand seeing it once. But then all of a sudden it was twice, which meant that it’s becoming a girls’ night out. I remember sitting there, thinking, “If they can get my daughter to go twice in one weekend, the marketing is working.” And it’s not only domestic, it’s gone international.
I know how many people buy the Aquaman book. If you take all of those people, they all bring a date, and they all go on the same day, and the ticket is 10 bucks, you’re gonna maybe get $100,000 or $120,000. It made a billion dollars, which means the people who are going now are not coming from the same way you and I came from. You started [with] the gateway drug which is the comic book, then you get into all the video games and all the other licensed apparatus. You and I know that the Aquaman movie is a licensed apparatus. You’ve got a world now that doesn’t know there’s another origin source—it’s just a movie to them. So that has opened up so wide that it’s going to swallow up male, female, and everything in between. It’s been a tsunami.
AVC: By the way, what did Ozzy think of your Patient Number 9 comic book?
TM: He enjoyed Comic-Con. He was like, “This is kinda cool.” He had the longest line that was allowed on the [SDCC] floor. The 70-year-old’s cool, right? But he saw the book, and he was just like, “Man, that was different than what I thought.” Because when you say comic book, especially to people who are a little bit older, comic book equals Archie and Superman because that’s all they know. That’s from their childhood. They haven’t paid attention to how the format has evolved. A comic book has word balloons, and there are no word balloons on this thing. I was like, “No, I didn’t think your fans would appreciate it. Given how cool I think your music is and even the imagery of your album covers. Look at what you have here. I needed something that I thought would attach itself a little bit seamlessly to what you guys were already doing, instead of making it like an insert.”
By the way, that dude is the fastest [autograph] signer I’ve seen in my life, and I’ve been around some fast signers who literally only put their initials and you can barely see it because it’s chicken scratch. He goes faster than those guys. He writes every letter. If he did “OO” and was going that fast, I still would have been impressed. Part of the reason I fell so far behind him was because I was watching him. It was a magic trick. He got 12 letters in that slick, and they’re legible. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. I got schooled by the 70-year-old dude. I’m competitive. I usually don’t like old men showing me up.
AVC: How much time did you have to create the Patient Number 9 comic?
TM: If people saw how I put my comic books together they would be horrified. Real writers would be horrified at my process. They would just go, “He’s not a real writer. That’s not how you do it!” So [for] the Ozzy book, if you want me to give you the recipe, I found my artist who was actually a guy who normally inks traditional superhero comic books. A guy named Jonathan Glapion, and he started doing these things on Instagram that I thought were super funky cool. I’ve known Jonathan forever. But when they said that they wanted to do a [Ozzy] comic book, then I said, “I want it to be a non-traditional comic book. I think I got the perfect guy, and this stuff is crazy cool and wacky.” I’m going to get a little geeky about when I saw Bill Sienkiewicz’s artwork for the very first time. It was just out of the ordinary, it was super cool. Bill Sienkiewicz was a polarizing artist at that time because there wasn’t a lot of people who did what he did. So you either loved or hated him. I was on the love side. Jonathan has that look.
I said, “Hey, Jonathan, I just need you to give me some pages. The book’s just going to all be about insanity.” He waited for a couple of days, and it was like, “Well, I’m waiting for the plot.” I told him, “Just give me some insanity. I’ll figure out the story around it. There are going to be some pages I’m going to need specific imagery. Here’s page one. Give me a shot of the institution late night.” Bam. Page one’s done. “Page two, make Patient 9’s hair a little bit long so it kinda looks like a young Ozzy, but the character isn’t Ozzy in the story. Give him long hair and make him huddled in a corner, and make it mostly black because it’s got cool lighting on it.” At some point I was busy, and he said, “What am I supposed to draw and paint today?” “Whatever you want.” [At some point] I needed the five, six, or seven pages that had specific images because I had a story in my head with a twist ending.
I got the last couple pages a few days before we went to print, and then here’s the horrifying part for everybody but me. I had to look at the 20 pages and go, “What order do I want these 20 pages to be in?” I just moved them around, like 20 puzzle pieces on a table, because I knew the beats in my head. “Okay, if I say that first and I say that second and that third, I need that image over here to make a bridge to that. Okay, I can write that.” Then I sat down and wrote it the day before it went to press. There’s a comic book.
AVC: New York Comic-Con is coming up. Will we see some exciting stuff from you?
TM: We’ll talk about the Spawn/Batman comic book I am working on now. That’s low-hanging fruit. I keep telling DC people that this is going to be number one, by far. The question is, can we make it the number one book of the century? I think we can push a million copies of it. They’re like, “What?” Last year, the number one selling book was King Spawn. I sold half a million copies of it. Here’s what I didn’t have—the artist named Greg Capullo, who’s done both Spawn and Batman—he is the preeminent Batman artist. I didn’t have Batman, and I sold half a million. You give me Capullo and Batman, so why can’t I double the sales? That should be everybody’s goal. There hasn’t been a book with a million copies sold this century, so let’s do it. It’s a given we’re gonna have the biggest book of this year. Can we have the biggest of the century? Come on, everybody, let’s get geared up. Even if nobody makes an effort, we’re going to get close.
AVC: Since we’ve discussed your “horrifying” writing process, are you going to finish it close to the deadline?
TM: The Spawn/Batman crossover process is using the same unsophisticated method I always use that has gotten me to over 330 issues of the Spawn comic. In the end, the work always gets done. I’ll let the readers debate whether it is any good or not amongst themselves.
AVC: What has it been like reuniting with Greg on the title?
TM: Greg Capullo is the best penciller in comics. Full stop. I can give an hour sermon as to why I just said that.
AVC: Image Comics is 30 years old now. Even though the sales are not like the crazy figures of the ’90s, I think Image is more relevant today because you have so many interesting series and more diversity than we see in any other comics company right now.
TM: Although you’re right, the beginning of Image was crazy, the sales we’re having right now is a renaissance in terms of that. The four books I put out last year all set records. Not only was one a record for Image, the other three were industry records, and we’re getting lots and lots of those. A few years ago, maybe three [Image] books would sell over 35,000. Now we have 14 sometimes in a month. Premiere books debuting at over 100,000—you could count those on a finger maybe once every four years. We’re now having 15 to 20 of those in a year, easy. Our sales here in the pandemic are at the highest they’ve been in this century. We keep track of all of it.
AVC: I like recent Image series like Saga, Chew, Spread, and What’s The Furthest Place From Here? Some of them have been optioned for film and TV.
TM: I think 23 of our books have been optioned and/or are in development. Sweet Tooth came out—the only frustrating thing is if we don’t get our logo on it like DC and Marvel. Because I think people would go, “What, that’s an Image book?” So seven or eight shows that [are based on Image comics] are out there. It’s just that they don’t look like Iron Man, Spider-Man, and Batman, so people aren’t aware that they’re coming from the same corner. Right now Hollywood can’t get Marvel and DC because those are owned by the big boys. Warner Bros. and Disney have those two kids in lockdown, so you can’t license their products. So anybody trying to look for comic book stuff is going down the sales chart and saying, “Okay, can’t get anything from Marvel, can’t get anything from DC. What’s the next biggest company?” That’s us. And we have been for 30 years. We’re just now the de facto first phone call because they can’t get Marvel and DC. So we were elevated by default into the number one slot.
AVC: What has changed in writing Spawn in 2022 as opposed to 1992? What personal life lessons can you apply to the character today?
TM: The Spawn character has always been a metaphor of my own life. I’m not a big fan of others telling me how to live my life or why I should serve someone else’s agenda. And I go counter to a lot of “group think.” For the Spawn character, those same ideas apply, except they come in the form of fantastical ideas, but the motivations are still the same. The biggest change for the Spawn character is that he has now become a willing participant in the war he battles, and he is fully fluent on the rules. For decades he resisted both those positions. Now he is fully engaged in wanting to wipe out his enemies.
AVC: You’ve said you want to make a scarier, R-rated Spawn movie. How will it compare to what we’re seeing from the likes of the MCU today?
TM: First, the name is Todd … only rhymes with God. If I could do it all then the film would be a dark, scary picture with a dose of psychological horror. But ultimately, the final product will be what a team of us decided, including the investors. [At New York Comic-Con] we’ll announce some of the creative talent that jumped on board for the Spawn movie. People will go, “Who else came up on board for it?” We were going to do it at San Diego Comic-Con, but all the PR people left it up to me and I went, “Why don’t we just push it off to New York?” And then by that point, who knows what we’ll have done with the studios? So we’ll have another big drumbeat on the minimum, and hopefully, best case scenario, two big drum beats.
AVC: What did you think of Venom: Let There Be Carnage?
TM: Didn’t see it. Haven’t seen most of the superhero films and the few I have hold no interest to my 60-year-old tastes.
97 Comments
I grew out of Spawn comics what seems like centuries ago, but I have to respect McFarlane’s vision and commitment. Image has produced a great many worthy titles that might have gone unpublished under the DC/Marvel hegemony.
And Image has exploited their fair share of creative people along the way.
“Comic book icon Todd McFarlane has always been laser-focused”
I mean, come on. Are you fucking kidding? He can’t hit a deadline and he’s been talking up his Spawn reboot since the f*cking day the film came out. He’s NOT laser-focused at ALL.
So… movies are for girls and comics are for boys, huh? This is some bullshit and it’s quite annoying that none of the women creators out there got any acknowledgement. Some pushback on that would have been nice.
If my local shops are anything to go by, comic books are apparently not for anybody.
Ouch.
Or at least not anybody in my income bracket.
Todd McFarlane is not aware of any women creators out there.
Ha! Yeah, this was me just screaming into the void.
That’s a big stretch from what he actually said.
This time, but he is that kind of stupid.
Oh I wouldn’t be surprised by that at all. And there’s certainly an argument that he could/should have acknowledged a rise in women creators in the industry as another reason for more women to be into comics. I just don’t quite see how you get to “movies are for girls and comics are for boys” out of what he said.
I’ll be honest, I mostly thought his movie anecdote and it being about Heath Ledger was very on brand for him and I extrapolated from there. I thought it was a weird thing to include in an answer to a question about more women taking an interest in the form and genre, especially since he said he himself says he doesn’t watch the movies. Nothing about appealing stories, or more women creators, just… Heath Ledger and now girls’ nights at the movies.
Obligatory:
My buddies and I spent YEARS imitating McFarlane’s Kermit voice from these intros. “We all wear masks…”
Maskths
Oh MAN I am SO glad someone put these on YouTube. I saw this shit when it was on HBO originally and it had me in stitches. Especially when his lisp hits when he says “Sthpawn”. You could practically hear the spittle hit the camera lense. “Now turn of your lighths!”Not making fun of speech impediments, but I am making fun of when it underscores how melodramatic and self serious he was about his pithy monologues. Who in their right mind thought this was a good idea?
Pissy monologues, you say?
I remember the extras he did for the Spawn movie VHS release. He claimed Spawn was better than Spiderman, Batman, and God
I don’t remember this episode of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace.
It’s so hard to take his “dark, foreboding Rod Serling narrator” persona seriously when his high-pitched Canadian twang starts coming through.
That’s a large part of why I love these introductions so: He absolutely does not have the voice, the appearance, or the demeanor needed to sell that sort of narration, but by gum he’s giving it his best shot anyway.
I agree, they’re absolutely perfect.They’re so pretentious and yet so silly, just like the cartoon (and the character).
Todd McFarlane wants his upcoming Spawn/Batman crossover to be this century’s biggest comic book.Only if it’s printed on a working time machine that sends the reader back to 1993.
…..and has Spider-Man on the cover.
With 6 separate color/foil variants.
To be fair, that is pretty much the requirement for the Spawn fan demographic. It also aligns with the annoyingly vocal part of the Mortal Kombat fanbase.
Anyhow, off to the 2000s with the rest of my fellow The Darkness and Witchblade fans. TOP COW!
MK11 sold 12 million copies and was the 5th best selling game of 2019.So no there are still MK Fans en masse.
I specified the ‘annoyingly vocal’ portion of the fanbase.
The same ones who made numerous threads and videos complaining about MK10 and 11’s female characters wearing more clothes and having anatomy that doesn’t defy physics. Who spent all their time talking about the good old days like when Mileena could have a spread in Playboy (it was actually a thing!) and how PC culture is running their gaming. Not to mention the hilarious amounts of complaints when Kitana used an Asian actress as her model in MKX.
The Spawn/Batman published by Image written by Frank Miller and McFarlane and the Batman/Spawn published by DC didn’t particularly set the world on fire back in 94.
I remember liking the Miller/McFarlane one (which led into McFarlane’s final run of issues as writer/penciller before turning it over to Capullo). Plus it also led to the short Grant Morrison run.
I’ve not read it since it’s release, but I found it merely adequate. Perhaps it deserves a re-reading.
If I remember correctly, there was a Klaus Janson illustrated Batman/Spawn book that year as well. Despite admiring Janson’s work immensely (for my money, he was one of the best damned inkers in the business), I didn’t feel it worth my time.
I haven’t read it sinceI was about 20 and that was decades ago, so it may just be my rose-coloured memories of it. I don’t remember the story strongly but I do remember digging the hell out of McFarlane’s art, which was the major selling point for younger me.I remember the Janson one you’re talking about and I wasn’t a fan either (and I say this as someone who loves Klaus Janson’s work.
Going back to his Amazing Spider-Man days, I too appreciated McFarlane’s style. Even after moving on from Marvel, DC, and Image books to Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly ones, I stayed pretty faithful to him.
I remember buying the Miller one back in the day (cuz Miller), but he phoned it in and cashed the check on that one.
I don’t even remember which story was which. All I remember is that at the end of one of them Spawn caught a batarang to the face.
The Miller version sold over 200,000 copies just after the speculator boom started to die. Today, a popular comic sells about 20,000 copies.
Throw in an embossed foil cover and I’ll buy 50 copies of issue #1!
Don’t forget the hard to decipher hologram!
If it’s not a cutout with polybagged cards, fuck it.
I was going to make the comment that knowing McFarlane, this is the most self-obvious headline that could have been made.
and has at least 4 cover variants
I came here to say something similar. Has Spawn gained a dingle new fan in the last twenty years? Does anyone under the age of thirty know Spawn, and would find anything about him palatable or interesting if they did?
I’m glad Dwayne The Rock Johnson finally has a figurine of himself that he can give to family
Should have asked him about how he is all for creators rights except when it gets in the way of him making toys to sell. Or how he never owned any rights to Marvelman. Or how his toys companies quality control is the worst in the industry. Image becoming a place for creators to put out comics the big two wouldn’t touch and let them maintain control of the IP is a great thing but most of the Image founders turned out to be total douche bags more concerned about them getting their own then helping the industry at large.
Pedantic correction: Miracleman.
Pedantic correction to your correction: Marvelman is the original UK name
Pedantic pedantic to your correction: This is true, but Todd didn’t know that.
Miracleman was the crappy name change forced on Marvelman by Marvel Comics, thus alienating Alan Moore from the other of the Big 2 as he swore he’d never work for them for being such dicks.
Image being founded by seven artists who couldn’t write kinda gives away the game. It wasn’t really about respect for the creative process or comic books as a medium so much as it was about enriching their one part of it. None of the earliest stuff is readable until they started courting Alan Moore and other big names. You can only go so far on variant covers.
Yep and its telling the writers they did try to court over did not stay long
Erik Larsen is capable of writing fun comics. But, yeah, out of the founders, just him.
I think I’ve read his Nova and Aquaman runs, but I was underwhelmed by the former and have no memory at all of the latter. The initial Image books I recall as an ocean of shit, but I’ve heard and am willing to buy that there are some decent arcs later in the Savage Dragon run. With 250+ issues, there would almost have to be by chance alone.
Well, I was going to say that Rai and the Future Force and Magnus: Robot Hunter both had some pretty decent writing, but then I double checked and they were both Valiant, not Image.
Whenever I see that picture of the Image founders back when they started, it looks like a bunch of kids at various stages of a sugar high/coma, and their adult chaperone, Erik Larsen.
I think The Maxx was the only Image comic I had any interest in reading and that contributed mostly by an interesting core concept and art style.
The Maxx is also a little different since, while it was spearheaded by an artist, Sam Kieth wasn’t one of the Image founders and, more importantly, was cowriting from issue #1 with Bill Messner-Loebs, who at that point had a decade-long proven track record as a writer and has since won a Bill Finger award for it. Going in with a respect for the other major part of the job and a clear-eyed understanding of their own shortcomings would’ve done wonders for the founders, but the mid-90’s were a weird time when books were selling into the seven-digits on the backs of superstar artists and no one giving a shit who wrote them. It’s also remembered as a creative low point for the industry, but I’m sure that’s a coincidence.
Pretty much that. I remember when it happened, and I agreed with the sentiment, in so far as work-for-hire sucks and these popular artists didn’t feel like they were getting their fair share. Then they released their first titles and, holy shit, they were awful. Not shockingly their writing abilities were non-existent and everything had this laughably childish, “this shit is cool because it’s like dark and violent and stuff,” tone to it with no substance. It was the Hot Topics of comics. I have no idea how Spawn perseveres to this day. It’s also funny that Lee got out to become the CCO of DC. Way to stick to your principles. Image ended up solidifying itself through writers working with artists and it’s ended up with some amazing books now. Not at all related to to the starting seven.
Or about how he’s against making toys of female characters for incredibly dumb and sexist reasons, like a boy might be disappointed by receiving a female action figure as a gift and turn into a serial killer.
You suck Todd.
“…and Todd don’t like to be sucked by anybody except Missus Todd.”
“Todd only rhymes with God.” Careful, he might here you, President Zod.
So he wants what every creator wants for their creations?Novel idea.
“Haven’t seen most of the superhero films and the few I have hold no interest to my 60-year-old tastes.”
Give us a fucking break, man.Anyway, I’m 100% certain they already did a Batman/Spawn crossover back in the 90s, and it seems weird to never mention it at all. What’s up with that?
he’s not promoting that. why bother?
Two actually, one published by DC and one published by Image.Frank Miller wrote the Image one, and him returning to write a Batman story was a big deal at the time.
Oh, right right right. Pretty sure I have both in my boxes deep in the crawlspace, and that Miller thing rings a bell.
I’m guessing I also own these, and they are somewhere in my house lol. Wow! What happened to my memory?
Those books aren’t worth taking up any space in your memory.
This must have been the Frank Miller:
There were *two* (an Image-produced one and a DC-produced one), and they were both kind of bad.
Similarly I haven’t read most Spawn comics and the few I have hold no interest to my 35-year-old tastes
I see his face and I just start doing a bad impression that mostly involves saying “hey bud” a lot.
When did Todd McFarlane morph into Nestor Carbonell?
You take that back!Bat Manuel is a SAINT!
Bat Manuel still has our panties.
I want to give McFarlane shit about being a dick, but I dig his work. I just can’t.Like check this out:All three cover issues, I got em. Loved the work. Kept going to:Shit was nutz. And yall wanna see some shit:Amazing Spider-Man 314. Bonus:Stan Lee signed that shit. Good shit, right?
I like how they draw the eye to Spidey’s penis.
[…] went on to create his McFarlane Toys empire, best known for producing highly detailed action figures of characters licensed from DC Comics, Mortal Kombat, and other major pop culture brands.I feel like I want to blame him for all the glut of plastic pop-culture tchotchkes out there, but I suppose it’d still be out there, just shittier versions. If we somehow survive climate change, future generations will have to figure out a way to make housing out of Funkopops.
First, the name is Todd … only rhymes with God.Clod, odd, flawed, fraud, slack-jawed, slipshod, nimrod, orange.
.
.
I’ve read Spawn on and off for more-or-less the entire time it’s been published and have a lot of love for it and for McFarlane’s art.I was lucky enough to meet him at a rare con appearance here in Australia more than a decade ago now and he was ultimately really polite to talk to and signed my copy of Spawn 1.Plenty of Con appearances can be less than awesome and barely look at you or converse but McFarlane was one of the better ones.
Oh wow! Me and Todd McFarlane are a lot alike! I also want things that I know are never ever going to happen!
The original 90’s Batman/Spawn crossover was absolutely bonkers. DC and Image each published their own titles, which had no story connection to each other and were radically different interpretations of the characters.In DC’s Batman/Spawn:* Our heroes must team up to stop an ancient demon who wants to destroy Gotham City
* Spawn ends up being kind of useless while Batman single-handedly stops the demon using little grenades he calls “percussion caps.”
* Spawn and Batman get along great.* In the final page, Spawn ruminates on his admiration for Batman and hopes he can be like him one day.In Image’s Spawn/Batman:* Our heroes must team up to stop a rich lady who wants to nuke New York City.* Spawn ends up being kind of useless while Batman single-handedly disarms the nuke using his expansive knowledge of everything.* Spawn and Batman hate each other.* In the final page, Spawn tells Batman he’s crazy, and Batman responds by literally burying a Batarang in Spawn’s face.
And yes, Frank Miller wrote the latter story. In fact this Batman is explicitly the same one from Dark Knight Returns. The story almost reads like a parody of that comic, which was not intentional on Miller’s part. Probably a warning of things to come.
Frank Miller wrote the latter story. In fact this Batman is explicitly the same one from Dark Knight Returns. The story almost reads like a parody of that comic, which was not intentional on Miller’s part. Probably a warning of things to come.Frank Miller became a parody of himself somewhere in the middle of the first issue of The Dark Knight Returns.
The idea that anyone takes The Dark Knight Returns seriously, or treats it with any reverence when it’s this lurchingly mean-spirited, often creepy, and poorly written mess (with some of the worst art in the business), baffles me.
When the golfer Arnold Palmer died, I watched an instant documentary about him and one thing I learned was that when he first became famous, he practiced signing autographs. He was annoyed by celebrities whose autograph was an unreadable scrawl and thought it was respectful to the fans to give them a readable autograph.
In my experience, this is a particular American thing, a readable signature. Every other country I’ve lived in (12 or so) it’s a personalized illegible thing more like your own mark than a name. Not making a judgement but it’s just interesting.
Honest question: is Spawn still popular? In comic book accounts that I follow, I never see Spawn mentioned, Maybe I’m in a bubble, but I don’t know anyone who reads Spawn and I never even see fan cosplay of any version of the character. He’s just a character that represents the 90’s to me like Gambit or Aeon Flux.
A Spawn /Batman cross over is going to be 80% of them just perched on buildings with thier cloaks billowing in the wind.
I’m not sure I can think of any comic book that interests me less than a Batman/Spawn crossover from Todd McFarlane.
They still print comic books?
Maybe I’ll be wrong, but it seems like such a ‘90s idea. And Spawn hasn’t caught on with the general pop culture public in the way other properties have, so it’s still rather unknown. Again, maybe I’m wrong and it will be a huge hit.
Is Spawn even still going? Cannot remember the last time i saw any Spawn related comics.
Who gives a shit about Spawn anymore? How the fuck is that comic still going?
And how the fuck did a spawn book sell 500,000 copies?!????