TODD McFARLANE Breaks Down His Art Style And How It Developed

Todd McFarlane is one of the busiest people in comic books – he’s writing (and sometimes drawing) Spawn, he’s president of Image Comics, he’s head of McFarlane Toys, and he’s still working to write and direct a live-action Spawn reboot. But in all that as a creator and just plain ‘idea machine,’ when does he have the time to do what broke him in – drawing?

In February, McFarlane drew a pin-up of Spawn and Spider-Man together, and after that he filmed a video teaching kids how to draw Batman. which was the first time he’s done so, and got longtime comic fans talking

Well, with the coronavirus pandemic in full effect, he’s trying to find more and more ways to draw for his fans – and in a way, for himself.

Newsarama spoke with McFarlane from his Arizona home – with him drawing as we spoke – to talk about his early days breaking in as an artist, the early development of Spawn in high school, his quirks that’s been added to the Spider-Man mythos, and yes, drawing.

Newsarama: So Todd, a couple weeks back we posted a pin-up you did of Spawn and Spider-Man – a unique thing, and something that got fans excited, so I want to talk to Todd the artist. I know you wear several hats, but it seems like art is something you have to make time for, do you see it that way at this time?

Todd McFarlane: I mean, I’ll have more downtime for sure to do it. That particular piece, as I was doing it, it struck me that I never had put those two characters together on the same piece of paper. We may in the future need some things like that to sort of help kickstart everything back up again. I was saying that if I ever did a Spawn/Spidey book, it would have to be 50 years from now when I’m on my deathbed, but maybe I need to think about it more seriously. Our industry is going to need interesting projects when this all finally dies down.

Nrama: You also recently showed some kids how to draw Batman in almost Mad Libs situations, what was that day like?

McFarlane: [Laughs] I don’t care if you’re 5 or 55 and aren’t skilled at drawing, it’s always fun to help somebody and go have you tried this or this. I think anyone can take their 3 out of 10 drawing to make it a 4 out of 10 with help. I mean we can only coach up so much, but you can also be surprised at little tips here and there really help.

I think that’s some of the insight that creative people have. I tell my wife when we’re doing Pictionary – if you’re going to do the giraffe, maybe give it a long neck. It may come across as easy for us, but maybe not so much for the layman.

I want to try and figure out more stuff like that for engagement. Maybe do a walkthrough of my house, look at my geek hoarding. Might do a video conference, take questions, just trying to find some fun some place.

Nrama: I’m guessing there was no Todd McFarlane to come along to help you draw, how did you get started? Was it something you did for fun or was it a realization or epiphany that this is what you’re going to do?

McFarlane: I’ve told this story before and my recollection is that it goes all the way to kindergarten. Last year, my mom showed me this box of stuff she kept and one of the things was this award for drawing. I remember it was a baseball player, so it got put up in Angel Stadium and my dad took me to my first game so we could see my drawing. That was it. I was bit by the sports and drawing bug at the same time. I wasn’t til 16 when I was bit by the comic bug, though. It was time then to focus it and put all that time I had spent doodling to use.

Nrama: When you were doing all this scribbling, do you remember when you were trying to nail down the initial Spawn costume? I mean you were a kid, so where did you draw inspirations from?

McFarlane: It was like an almost generic superhero guy, and if you look at his costume, he has the inspiration of superheroes from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. First of all, obviously, he has a cape. Superheroes wear capes and usually have a symbol on their chest. I didn’t go that blatant so that big “M” on his chest is for Malbolgia, not McFarlane. I didn’t want to put an “S” on his chest since that was taken by some other dude, so that couldn’t be for Satan.

He wore a mask like a lot of the characters, but I don’t even remember how the chains or pouches came about, the original drawing was fairly predictable though. Almost everything else had been around for a long long time.

Nrama: With all the stuff you hoard, do you still have that Spawn first issue that you made?

McFarlane: Oh yeah, but I didn’t make those, I started this 40-page Spawn comic book that I was determined to make if nobody was going to hire me. Some pages are finished, some are just in penciled stages, and someday I’ll finish it.

Nrama: Is that something you’d ever put on display or is that just for you?

McFarlane: It’s interesting because people will tell me “Oh I can’t believe you’ve got that!” but it’s not that surprising because what am I going to do with it. It’s a reminder how horrible of an artist I was when I was 17, so please somebody give me money for this and take it off my hands. I couldn’t give this away.

The only person that wanted this was my mom and even she was like “Todd, that’s not very good.” but at some point I’d like to do a full on display of the pages from the original, first Spawn #1 comic book since I have them all. So a display showcasing everything from the inception of the idea, as a giant retrospective or something like that, that might be interesting for some people.

Nrama: Almost like a yearbook.

McFarlane: Yeah! Yeah! I did this book, I think it was The Art of Todd McFarlane or something like that, and we did put a timeline on there and there was a part of the interview asking me if I was ever open to change that early work and it’s like no, “Hell no.” Even as good as I was back then the early stuff should be the inspiration to most people. If I showed those pages and that artwork it’s very crude and rough.

Somebody who is now 15, 18, 22 and trying to break in and if you show them those pages from then and the pages and style I do now, they’ll see there’s a learning curve as you go along. Because if I draw as crappy as I did when I was 16, good chance you could draw like a 30-year-old me. So don’t worry about drawing like me with 20 years experience, try to draw me when I was starting out. If you keep this up, you never know where you’ll be.

Nrama: Yeah, I remember looking at the Alex Ross art book and when he had done essentially his own Justice League analog when he was in high school, but they looked like Jose Garcia-Lopez pieces. It’s interesting though that you mention that nobody would have wanted that DIY issue, but you have so many outlets now that I think it would have fit at home with. You have several zinefests, you have SPX for example, you could have shown your work off with those now.

McFarlane: I would have ultimately just done ashcans, yeah. My dad was in the printing business, so that was going to be the easy part. I was just so determined to make my own if nobody was going to hire me, but I got distracted because I went away to college, worked a few part-time jobs and played baseball since I was on a baseball scholarship. So instead of making a comic then, I did the practice of doing pages eight hours a day. After a few years of that, I finally got a professional job as an artist.

Nrama: We’ve established you’re kinda down on your earlier stuff so when you were working for Marvel, when did you feel like your style was evolving?

McFarlane: So when you send in your amateur work and they give you your first job, technically then you make that jump to professional. But here’s the one big advantage of being a pro: they pay me to draw eight hours a day. I didn’t have that luxury at that point. I sent samples here and there but it wasn’t until I got my first bite I realized I had to stay home and do this skill that I’m not too terribly good at right now and now I have to do it for eight hours a day.

So much like any skill, language you want to learn, pretty much anything, doing it for that amount of time, eventually you get better at it.

At the beginning, when I started on DC’s Infinity, Inc. I knew those pages were lacking in a lot of areas. It’s not an accident that there are a lot of designs on them because I always thought I was going to be a graphic designer, but also because it hid a lot of my weaknesses.

I was trying to make sure people saw the design of the page rather than whether or not the anatomy was any good. I think that if I had just a standard six-panel page with the super vanilla style I had at the time, I would have just gotten lost in the pool of creators at the time. I was able to sort of dazzle with my BS a little bit while I was trying to learn a little bit better. So by the time I had gone back to Marvel told me I couldn’t do that and “just had to draw.”

By that point though I was slightly more comfortable with being okay and not rely on gimmicks and give them good storytelling. Ultimately I think I hit my stride when I was able to do a little bit of design work and was allowed to ink my own pages. When I was able to do that combo, to me, that was when Todd McFarlane was sort of born, if you will.

Nrama: You get to Marvel, you get put on Incredible Hulk and eventually Amazing Spider-Man, what was the goal to set yourself apart from what had been done before you?

McFarlane: You just said it, trying to set myself apart. Anybody who goes into any industry like this you’re competing with hundreds if not thousands of other people doing the same skill, so you better come up with a good reason on why people should pay attention to you. If you’re going to be a singer, then you better be the best singer but if you’re not, then you better come up with something. This is where bands like KISS come in. We don’t have to be the best musicians now but if we wear makeup and look cool on stage, we can actually entertain. There’s no longevity.

But when I took on these assignments, it was me thinking “How can I as a young man get people to know I even exist?”, so I knew I had to go and do something different. Now, the doing it differently part mostly was to entertain me while I was locked up in my room for 12 hours a day by myself.

What would be cool to draw?

Why wouldn’t I want to make Spider-Man flamboyant, why wouldn’t I want to make the Hulk super big?

I just looked at the characters and wanted to play more into what I think they are.

I remember having a conversation with my editor at one point saying Peter David’s plot outline is way too dense and have to make so many panels on each page that’s it’s forcing me to draw small Hulks.

I convinced the editor, Bob Harras at the time, that why don’t we take this one plot and make it a two-parter instead of one issue, it would let me breathe. He agreed, and I think it was my best issue of Incredible Hulk at that point. I was able to show that the Hulk looks like an elephant next to Betty Ross. That’s the Hulk. Finally I got to draw that.

So by the time I got to Spider-Man, it was the same way of me concentrating on the “spider” part of the title, not the “man”. So once he put the costume on, I pretty much ignored the physics of anatomy; I didn’t want that to be a burden to me. I just wanted what would look cool on the page. I didn’t care if it was doable.

I think a lot of artists now draw a little too realistic and it holds them back. Sometimes the coolest stuff you see in comic books, are the stuff you can’t replicate in real life.

Nrama: Speaking of you concentrating more on the “spider” part, let’s talk about your web design, and how it pretty much became the default design for decades to come. How did you come up with it?

McFarlane: So there’s two things I was thinking of at that time: one, “How do I shoot the webs toward the camera?” Two: I also wanted to give a sense of volume to the characters. It’s easy to give volume to characters with a cape or giant wings or whatever. Spider-Man didn’t have any of that so if I made the webs longer than normal, can that give him more volume. Especially if he uses the web like Tarzan, that’s how I saw it. At the end of the day, I just wanted it to look cool.

Years and years ago when I was going to school, Michael Golden had this portfolio – one of the pages had five characters on it, one of those was Spider-Man and he was shooting something out of his shooter, but it was slightly different. I don’t exactly remember what it was, but it felt like something new. It felt like it was something.

All of us as artists when we see stuff, we always remember things like that. Years later I was trying to solve the problem of how to shoot it towards it and I remember that one image and I used that as my inspiration and put it on steroids and go crazy with it. It solved the problems I was looking for.

Nrama: Another thing that was coming around when you were breaking out with Image was the advent of digital coloring and that was becoming more commonplace. We had seen few instances here and there but books like Spawn really pushed the limit on visuals, so when designing the palette for Spawn, what was that transition like?

McFarlane: I feel like I was pretty lucky because some of the first computer coloring was done on Akira that Marvel was redoing with their reprint. So they were colorizing it and I just thought that was cool even with the black and white originals were staggering to look at and it’s where I learned to do speed lines.

Steve Oliff and his crew were coloring Akira and so when we started Image and wanted to upgrade the paper and coloring, I wanted to go to Steve Oliff and he jumped on. Again, going back to your earlier question though, how do we get people to pay attention we had to artistically push ourselves and those upgrades with the paper and coloring set us apart.

Look for more from McFarlane later this month on Newsarama.