In this episode Todd McFarlane talks about “The Todd Sexy.”

Topics include Matt yelling to the NYCC audience in front of him which doesn’t translate well into podcast form but what are ya gonna do, Todd working with Erik Larson on Spawn, the young kids today, capturing the feeling of the image while inking, “The Todd Sexy,” making comics can be lonely, and building a toy empire.

Links:

Transcription:

Matt: Welcome back to NYCC live. We’re at New York Comic-Con. Kara and myself are here from ComiXology, your one-stop shop to get digital comic books. Speaking of comic books, we have a dear friend of ours, dear friend, Todd, creator of Spawn. Welcome to the stage.

Todd: Hey! I appreciate you guys having me out today.

Matt: What a day it is for you, honestly.

Todd: You know what, it’s day one of four, right? Everybody out here, I assume, is just getting warmed up, right? It’s Thursday. Everybody’s got the energy. It’s always fun to sort of go back and talk to everybody. I’ll come and see you guys in four days, see if you guys are stiff.

Kara: See if we’re still alive?

Todd: Your last interview on Sunday will be like, “So tell us what you’re doing.”

Kara: (laughs)

Todd: “Are you having fun.”

Matt: “How’s the con.”

Todd: Right, so we’re here. We’re at the front of it.

Matt: There’s a lot of things we want to talk about with you, but there’s breaking news that just happened today in the world of Spawn. You’re re-teaming with a dear old friend of yours.

Todd: Right. Look it, I’ve been doing Spawn comic books for a while, been trying to find the right team. This one guy I’ve been trying to work with for a year, on a steady basis. I mean, I’ve touched him before, Erik Larsen, my partner.

Matt: Huge.

Todd: I’ve hooked him to come on the Spawn comic book, starting with the big Satan Saga war, right, which is this big, giant, epic battle, where he goes into hell and just goes, “I’m taking it down, the whole establishment. I’m taking it down.”

I go, “Nobody could do it, other than Erik.”  

Oh, by the way, as I was talking to Erik, he said, “Why don’t I just stay on the book?”

I went, “Wow. What?” I thought you had to drag it, right?

But he said, “No, no, no.  I can do both because I’ll just help you plot, help you write, and then I’ll do some really rough layouts. Then, you ink it, and we’re going to just do this tandem high-bred look.” We’ve already started it, and it’s cool. I feel like I’m 20 years old again, just doing comic books that used to energize me when I was a kid, right?

Matt: Yeah. That’s what it’s all about.

Todd: Because that’s what it’s all about, just like big wow stuff, right?

Matt: You guys hadn’t worked together since maybe like Spawn 199?

Todd: Yeah.

Matt: Now, this is kind of like starting things over again, but just really hardcore.

Todd: Yeah. Well, Erik, like I said, is a guy who is really particular about Savage Dragon. Nobody can touch Savage Dragon. It has to be exactly the way that it is. He’s always been like that, but I’ve always nudged him, going, “I think I could do some cool inking over you. Just give me some loose pencils, and let me ink over you.”  I did a cover over him not long ago, where he did a little drawing on a napkin, and I go, “Hey, scan that. Just, that drawing, scan it and let me just ink it.” It became a cover, right? The drawing is super rough, but I don’t really need a lot, right?

It was why, when I worked with Greg Capullo, he was awesome because he just put enough on the paper that I could then go and do my job. He didn’t worry about- A lot of the young kids today, they almost etch their pages with their pencils. There’s no fun ink in them because it’s so tight, my mom can ink it, right? I don’t even know. They might as well Xerox it. They don’t even need an inker. I like the guys who just sort of go, and then in about a half an hour, the page is done. I go, “I’ll take it from here.” I get that little bit of fun.

Kara: It’s so interesting because we don’t normally hear about that relationship between the penciling versus the inking. It sounds like when you’re doing it, you’re trying to capture the feeling of it and the motion of it.

Todd: Yeah, well, look. If any of you guys ever do a drawing that I ink over, here’s what I will tell you: It will look like your artwork, but I’m going to put “The Todd Sexy” on it. Where I put the sexy on it is if you just put a couple of lines that are going to be the belt, I’m going to make about fifty lines in the belt. It’s going to look like a leather belt. It’s going to be the coolest belt you ever saw, right?

Matt: The oldest, worn leather belt. It’s been through hell.

Todd: Yeah. In your shoes, I’ll put the little- But I’m not going to really change the face. I’ll probably do some stuff to make the hair look a lot cooler, but when you step back, you will go, “It’s that artist.” As you get closer, then you get to go, “Oh, Todd was on there, too.” Right? I always say, when we’re doing a comic book, because you have a writer, penciler, inker, colorist, and letterer, you can’t take ownership of any page at any of those positions. Because the more you do, the more fun you’re taking away from the next person. If I fill it all from top to bottom with pencils, and I give it to you to ink, you’re just going, “I guess I’m going to trace it.” Then, there’s no room to color, and there’s no room. Nobody gets to have any fun down line.

The reason that I thought that, when I was doing Spawn with Greg, that he was fantastic was that he understood there was 5 people on the book. We’re going to all share in it. We’re going to all add our little ticks to it. At the end, the whole was better than the parts. Because I show people. People go, “Wow. You and Greg and Danny used to do some cool stuff.”

Then, I’ll show them Greg’s pencil. I go, “Look at this page. It sort of looks a little naked.”

They’ll go, “Yeah,” and they don’t want to say it because Greg Capullo, man.

But I go, “Okay. Now, you saw it. Now, let me show you the printed page, with Danny Miki, with colors, with word balloons, and with a little bit of texture, and it’s all filled in.” I go, “But Greg didn’t feel the need to have to do it all himself. He understood that part of it.”

Matt: Who here can we talk to to trademark “The Todd Sexy”? Can we get t-shirts made? Because I would wear that constantly.

Todd: “Oh, I got sexy by Todd,” right?  Because I inked you, right? We could do it. I would hook you up. Look it, issue 200, Robert Kirkman, creator of Walking Dead, he actually drew- And he’s not the best artist on the planet. He’s a pretty good writer, but he’s not the best artist. He drew the first five or six pages, and I inked them. Go look at those pages. He looks good!

Kara: (laughs)

Todd: He looks good in those pages because he’s actually knows what he’s doing with the pencil. Again, he was like, “All right, Todd. Now, you finish it.”

I go, “It looks like two guys that know how to do comic books, right?” He’s good.

Kara: Yeah. It sounds like this new project is just such a good fit for you because you seem really into that whole collaborative spirit, when it comes to comic books.

Todd: Here’s something I don’t think people understand that much: Doing a monthly comic book is a lonely occupation, right? It’s like being a novelist. For the most part, you lock yourself into a room by yourself for hours and hours and hours. Maybe you listen to music or listen to some ambient noise, but it’s just you and the work in front of you, right? You can’t talk and do stuff, especially if you’re writing, right? If you’re a novelist, the same thing. You have to go and sequester yourself. I don’t think that people understand that just it’s a lonely occupation. The joy that you have to have has to come out on the page. When I was doing things like Spiderman and stuff like that, I was really drawing for myself. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to draw like John Romita Sr., who was brilliant. I just go, “I’m in this room, and I just want to do some fun stuff for myself because it’s the only way I’m going to get through the deadlines.”

With Erik and what he brought to the paper, we’re now going to back in the room. We’ve both done it for twenty, thirty years now, and all of a sudden, when you can get that jolt, that little jolt of energy, that Red Bull kick, if you will, we’re back. Hopefully, Erik and I will just feed off each other, and we’ll just rock and roll. We’ll do it. Even if nobody likes it but Erik and I, it’d still be worth doing, right? Because two of us would be happy, at least, and it’ll look okay.

Matt: Now, I want to change gears real quick. People know your Spawn empire, but you have a whole other empire. It’s like the toy empire, the Walking Dead, the Game of Thrones, Halo. It started out with, I think, Spawn, but how long ago did that start? What made you want to get into that, and now it’s become so huge?

Todd: I’ll give the quick history of the toy company. We started Image. Spawn went to the top of the charts. People would then, around they do licensing stuff, would look at the chart, and they’d go, “Hey, Spawn sells better than Batman and Superman. Must be more popular,” right? It was a little bit of a jump. Then, they’d come, and they’d go, “Hey, we’re from Pajama Company A, and we’d like to do Spawn,” or, “We’re from color forms,” or, “We’re from the toothbrush, or coloring books.”

I go, “Why you want to do a license?”

“Well, we see you’re at the top, and you’re more popular than Spiderman.”

I go, “You haven’t read this book, have you? Here’s a copy. You should go and read the book, other than looking at the charts. It’s a guy from the pit of hell, right? So you may-”

They all left to go read it, and they never came back. The pillars that I wanted to start with when I left was I wanted to do TV, movies, video games, and toys. Those were the four. I figured if I could put those four pillars down and a body of work on top of it, I could stack it pretty high. We quickly made the deal with HBO for the animation. We made the deal for the movie with New Line. The video game stuff came out. Then, the toy guys came. Every one of them came. Mattel came. Jack’s, I think, came. I forget. There’s like five or six. Whoever the big players were at that point, they all came. They made their offer, and I could just see that what they wanted to do was to just take Spawn, this sort of, I thought, sophisticated sort of hero, and they wanted to just put it in their formula. I go, “They’re just going to do the same stuff and put it next to their Teletubbie toys.”  It wasn’t going to sell, and then they were going to hand me back my damaged brand, saying, “It doesn’t sell, Todd.”

My conversation with all of them was, “I think you need to make non-traditional toys and sell them in non-traditional places.” They couldn’t understand that. They’re big, public companies. They couldn’t figure that piece out. Eventually, I just went, “I’ll do it myself,” right? Let me just tell you, making toys is plastic. It’s plastic in a shape. It’s not rocket science, ladies and gentleman. It’s plastic, right? They call it cheap plastic goods for a reason. You can do it fairly easily. It’s not that complicated. You make molds. You carve stuff in a shape. You make a mold, and then you get to do tens of thousands of them. All of a sudden, you’re in the toy company, and we’re off to the races.

That started at Spawn. Then, I knew I could just rely on Spawn. I had to do other brands. Now, we’re fast-forwarding. I just got the deal on Game of Thrones. We’re doing the Walking Dead. We’ve been doing the sports. We’ve been doing it for twenty years now, the toys, right, and we continue to do it.

Matt: You must be doing something right.

Kara: Yeah.

Matt: Todd, I appreciate you taking the time out. Get Spawn on ComiXology.com. You can get the Walking Dead, Game of Thrones. I don’t even think that Game of Thrones stuff is out yet?

Todd: No, the Game of Thrones comes out next month. Toys ‘R Us, Amazon, and Game Stop.

Matt: Boom. Well, I appreciate you taking time out.

SoundCloudmusiccomiXologycomicsgraphic novelsspawnthe todd sexytoddconversations