Some choice quotes:
This first question makes me feel old:
The younger generation that reads TeamXbox.com may not realize that you didn’t start your popular art career as a toy man. Shed some light on your start in the biz for these n00bs…
What were some of the bigger properties you worked on in the comic book industry?
Todd McFarlane: I started out with the Incredible Hulk, and did Hulk for awhile. I did a little bit of Batman for DC, and then the big break came with Spider-Man. I jumped onto Amazing Spider-Man and ended boosting the sales on that. This led to Marvel creating another book called just Spider-Man; it didn’t have any sort of adjective in front of it. That one [Spider-Man] ended up setting sales records in the industry, so I stayed with it for awhile.
This next question/answer makes me think old Todd has learned to relax in his old age:
How did Image Comics and the Spawn character come about?
Todd McFarlane: I became a bit disenchanted with the comic book companies so I left and started my own company called Image Comics.
Just disenchanted? Thats putting it lightly. He goes on to say a few things about the Spawn animated series, but then what really caught my ear was this:
Do you feel that the recent decline of sales in the comic book industry had something to do with how “collector-centric” it became?
Todd McFarlane: Yes. I think we [the comic book industry] took advantage of the consumers. If you take advantage of your core group of collectors with short-term thinking, then you are going to turn them off of your product. You are literally financially taking advantage of them. I was never for the multiple covers of Spider-Man #1 – I was always against it. As a matter of fact, on Spawn we did our first variant cover on issue #100 and we’ve only done one other since. People in the comic book industry got greedy. The same thing happened in trading cards with overproduction. Some say the industry is cyclical and that the consumer will come back, but I don’t believe it. If you push the consumer out the door and you don’t have a system to re-grow that customer back, you’re in trouble. Since the kids aren’t jumping into comic books, so we don’t have a mechanism for creating the young version of the older, alienated collectors.
Wow!! That is the first time I have heard a creator admit this. Its a start, once the industry acknowledges the problem, maybe we can fix it.
http://hardware.teamxbox.com/articles/xbox/2047/Todd-McFarlane-Interview/p1/
