When I told Todd McFarlane that he was one of my heroes, he started to look a little uncomfortable. Up to that point in our conversation, the 57-year-old comic book mogul had been his characteristically loquacious self—he was shit-talking and pontificating so much that I had been having trouble squeezing in questions or even guiding the conversation. But when I brought up the notion that there are many people out there who might look up to the famed artist for the way he has pushed his work and his business forward, he halted for a moment and shifted in his seat.
“I make the decisions that are fit for me. And I don’t necessarily want anyone to repeat that,” he said after a pregnant pause. “The path I’ve gone down is a battle. I go to war everyday. Everyone is not built for that.”
Whether you love him or hate him (and there are certainly a lot of people who do hate him), the personal battles McFarlane has waged have helped transform the comics and toy industries. In the late-80s, he challenged the pearl-clutching regulations of the Comics Code and reimagined Spider-Man for a new generation. A few years later, he gave us Spawn, the “quintessential 90s superhero” from hell and co-founded Image Comics, the “revolutionary” independent publisher that has rivaled DC and Marvel with blockbuster books like The Walking Dead. Following that, McFarlane’s independent toy company brought subversive icons like Freddy Krueger and Pinhead to the action figure aisle of America’s big-box stores, right next to franchises like Legos and Hotwheels.
These days, McFarlane has his sights set on Hollywood. He went there before, in the late 90s, to make a big-budget, PG-13 Spawn film that made money at the box office but failed to live up to his cryptic comic vision. This time around, McFarlane is doing what he does best—taking full creative control. He wrote the script, and plans to sit in the director’s chair when filming begins in June. Jamie Foxx will be playing the titular undead hero and McFarlane promises the film will earn a “hard R” rating, staying true to the horror his fans are used to. To do that, he’s enlisted The Walking Dead’s special effects specialist, Greg Nicotero, to work on the movie. But while nerds like myself have hope that this new Spawn movie might break the malaise of overwrought cinematic universes, McFarlane made it clear to me that he never focuses on changing the game, even if that is often the outcome of his effort.
“Everyday is just a fight for my own personal sanity,” the artist told me with a laugh. “When I find something that just doesn’t work for me, I leave that situation and start a new situation. I don’t complain about it. I just do.”
McFarlane attributes his “just do it” attitude to his upbringing. His dad, Bob, was “a hard working, blue collar guy” in the printing industry. Like his son, Bob would constantly start “new situations” for better career prospects. Because of that, the McFarlane family moved more than 30 times during the Canadian-born artist’s youth, living everywhere from Alberta, Canada to California.
McFarlane’s dad’s example also went beyond his no-nonsense work ethic. “He taught me a lot of things without knowing it—especially to be as fair minded as you can be.”
Clearly, Bob’s lack of tolerance for prejudice wasn’t lost on his son; McFarlane, who is white, has dedicated most of his life to enshrining Spawn, a black superhero, into the American consciousness. While Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Black Panther character rules the box office today, when McFarlane brought Spawn to comic book stores in the 90s, T’Challah was not a top-tier hero, even within his own Marvel Universe. But from the very beginning, McFarlane chose to focus solely on Spawn, building a world and a mythology around him with action figures, an HBO animated series, a live action film, and video games. The work he put in led to Spawn being the best-selling black superhero in comic book history, despite the comic hitting the shelves decades after characters like Luke Cage and Storm made their debuts.
But for McFarlane, the open-mindedness that led him to make the focal point of his life’s work a black man is actually deeper than his art—it’s something he told me he strives for when people aren’t looking. “The problem is often not the blatant racism, it‘s the ‘I’m just kidding’ stuff, too… You’ve got to work at it 24 fucking hours a day. You don’t get an hour or ten minutes off.”
McFarlane’s dad didn’t just give him an ethical foundation that impacted the choices he made in his career: he also introduced him to the game of baseball. “He just came home one day and told me he’d signed us up,” McFarlane recalled in the 2001 documentary made about his life, The Devil You Know.
The game left a profound impact on McFarlane’s tenacity and the way he views the world. (And it probably influenced his historic decision to drop millions on the record-setting asterisk balls of Barry Bonds and Mark Mcgwire, which are worth much less now that both athletes admitted to using performance enhancing drugs.) In our conversation, he could boil everything down to stark baseball analogies, from the fierce competition in the media business, to the dysfunctional way Brett Kavanaugh made it to the Supreme Court despite serious allegations of sexual assault.
“Assume the other team will never do you any favors and you’ll never be disappointed. Assume it’s the Yankees and the Red Sox,” he said, as if he were coaching politicians in Congress. “It’s just about winning now and it is a fool’s game to think that someone on the opposite team is going to do you any favors.”
Baseball was such a significant part of his youth, it didn’t leave much time for comics. Though McFarlane always doodled, he didn’t really get into superhero books until he was around the age of 16, when he discovered a few issues on a spinner rack at a mom-and-pop grocery store. After being struck by the medium, he spent all the time that he wasn’t practicing or playing ball trying to draw superheroes. He read How to Draw the Marvel Way and he studied the pencils of Gene Colan and tried to mimic the melodrama of Jack Kirby. McFarlane’s devotion to both his crafts culminated in meeting the legendary late writer and publisher Stan Lee serendipitously at a Holiday Inn in Florida when he was 16. McFarlane was staying at the hotel because he was attending a baseball camp, which was happening at the same time as a comic convention. “He let me ask questions for seven hours in between signings,” McFarlane recently told The Hollywood Reporter.
After a career-ending injury in college killed his dreams of playing in the major leagues, he took all of the obsessive, competitive, take-no-prisoners energy honed on the field, paired it with the knowledge he gleaned from studying guys like Lee, and used it all to claw his way into comics.
In the mid 80s, from a trailer park in Canada, he sent out more than 750 submissions and got back more than 300 rejection letters from top editors at DC and Marvel. Eventually, he won the war of attrition. By 1985, he’d broken into books like DC’s Infinity Inc. and Epic Comics’ Coyote, where he developed a style that compensated for some of his anatomical shortcomings with flashy flourishes like dynamic layouts. When he took on more consistent work with Marvel in the late 80s through books like The Incredible Hulk and The Amazing Spider-Man, he focused on audacious poses and extreme action, exploding heroes out of their panels to make them pop off the page. He faced those heroes off against huge, super-sized villains—like Venom, a hulking symbiote he co-created with David Michelinie. Spider-Man’s brain-eating antagonist has become so popular in his own right, he just had his own Hollywood film starring Tom Hardy.
“When I’m doing comic books, I want the hero’s journey to be as difficult as it possible,” McFarlane explained to me, when discussing how storytelling influenced the way he drew an antagonist like Venom. “It has to come at a cost.”
Despite the insane success of the early days of Image comics, there were a lot of issues. As the company faced intense pressure from Marvel and DC, the founders also fought among themselves. And although the comics were wildly popular, they suffered constant publishing delays, which hurt the business. On his own, McFarlane faced his fair share of lawsuits and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars due to poor choices he made early on. Neil Gaiman, one of comics greatest writers, initiated an epic copyright suit with McFarlane over characters Gaiman introduced to the Spawn universe when he wrote the book’s ninth issue, and NHL player Tony Twist sued McFarlane for naming a mob boss character after him without his consent. Not to mention, many of the initial Image books received criticism for wallowing in the the male gaze with its hyper violence and scantily clad heroines.
Against all odds, the company has managed to survive—even weathering the comics bust of the late 90s. Today, it’s become a beacon for diversity and creativity. Image releases awesome feminist books like Bitch Planet, queer-friendly series like Wicked + Divine, along with books that have nothing to do with superpowers at all, like Warren Ellis’s sci-fi thriller Injection.
And while Spawn is rapidly approaching its 300th issue (the first Image comic to do so), it’s also experiencing a bit of a resurgence thanks to the character’s new story arc.
“If you go down the list, God and Satan all want the exact same thing. It’s just that one guy has a better PR firm,” McFarlane told me with excitement. “So Spawn’s big thing is that he has locked heaven and hell out of Earth. But whoever was here before is still here. So now he’s going to go after them, one by one. It might take 1,000 issues, but he’s going to rid the Earth of these influences so we can have our own destiny.”
In a lot of ways, Spawn’s arc sounds similar to McFarlane’s. The artist who told me that his creative and professional life has been defined by battles is now intent on creating more of his own space where he’s free from those influences. Like the creation of Image comics and McFarlane Toys in the past, his latest fight to make a new Spawn film is a great example of him opting to bring his vision to life by going his own way. As a fan, I can’t wait to see what he comes up with and how it could impact superhero movies. But for McFarlane, it’s just a natural outgrowth of his life-long war to express himself.
“Everything I’ve ever done has been about me advocating for myself because no one else on the planet will,” he said to me in that typically defiant tone he’s become famous for. “Even though Todd rhymes with God, I’ve only got control over one individual on this planet and that’s me.”
Follow Wilbert L. Cooper on Instagram
from VICE https://ift.tt/2RYMHPG
via cheap web hosting
No comments:
Post a Comment