Todd McFarlane Answers Comics Questions From Twitter

This is Todd McFarlane

and today I'll be answering your questions from Twitter.

This is Comic Support.

[upbeat music]

@ricas_minas, What is more important

in the comic: art or story?

Here's my complete and utter bias

and I'm going to my grave with this answer.

I can sell a book that is drawn by Michelangelo

and written by my dog, I can sell that book.

But what I can't do is sell a book

that is written by William Shakespeare

and drawn by my mom.

@JayNEspinoza, he asked,

What's your favorite, not necessarily most valuable,

comic book in your collection?

I actually have a copy of Action Comics #1.

This is a reprint.

Historically, this is when superheroes began.

It's also the first appearance of Superman.

Recent issues have sold for like close to $4 million.

There's a couple things that drive the price.

One is it have historical significance.

Two, way more important is the first issue.

Three, it happens to be the introduction of a new character.

So if you happen to have the Fantastic Four issue

that has the first appearance of the Black Panther,

that issue is gonna be way more expensive

than the issue before or after it.

@jedigavin asks Why are so many comic book illustrators

scared or unable to draw feet? [laughs]

Here's the first rule in comic books

that every comic book artist is taught.

If in doubt, black it out.

If you're not good at something, hide it.

If you can't draw feet,

make sure that they're always standing in thick grass.

Here's what our big goal is in comic books.

You have a 2D piece of paper that means it's flat.

And what happens if I now take webbings,

and I put webbings back behind him,

it goes through his leg, comes back up and around here,

I create this sense of volume.

The moment I put an arm in front, I've created a plane

and then if I turn my hand and I break it

down at an angle and I do something with my fingers

I've created seven or eight more planes.

Then what happens if I turn

and I put my hand back behind it?

So I've got foreground, mid-ground background.

But then what happens if I'm doing Spider-Man

and I put the foot up on top of it?

Take 2D and create as much depth as you can

and you're gonna be a hell of a comic book artist.

@NotSoRiley, Is Comic-Con even about comic books anymore?

When San Diego Comic-Con first began,

was it 95% about comic book creators,

comic book stores, comic book paraphernalia?

Yes, yes and yes, right?

It was held at a small little hotel in a basement.

Maybe a couple thousand people attend it.

That was in the '70s, early '80s.

Now, fast forward, what is Comic-Con?

Now it's literally every walk of life.

Do I think

that there's something in that building for everybody?

Of course there is.

It is literally pop culture.

@Mirkand asked What's the difference

between comic and graphic novel?

A comic book is what you see here, right?

It's sort of what you're used to.

It's pretty thin, pretty flimsy.

Usually 20 pages of interior artwork, costs maybe $4.

A graphic novel is more of something like this

that basically is four or five issues put together.

A true graphic novel though, somebody saying,

I don't wanna do five issues of 20 pages

which equal a hundred pages.

I wanna do all 100 pages in one book.

@SillyRabbet442 ask

Just got done watching 'Venom 2,' the movie,

and now I wanna learn how to draw Venom.

Venom to me is he's got a big eye, right?

Make sure you have a big eye

and his eyes a little bit sort of craggily,

because you don't want it to be smooth

'cause otherwise that's gonna be Spider-Man.

He's got his big head here.

And then the one thing that we like about Venom

is he's got the big mouth, right?

So we're even gonna make him smile just a little bit.

Then make sure when you drawing teeth

that they're all different size and shapes, right?

Take a look at the inside of your dog's mouth

or any animals, and don't make 'em perfect.

I hate perfect teeth on monsters,

they don't go to dentists.

And then the thing that makes him better than Spider-Man

is that he's big.

As long as you get the big eyes and you get the cool teeth

and the tongue in there and you make 'em big like the Hulk,

you can get there pretty quickly.

Venom is a complete and utter happy accident.

Why?

Because when I was taking over Amazing Spider-Man

Spider-Man was in the black costume and I didn't like it.

Put him back in the red and blue costume.

What if I take the costume off the dude,

put it on something else.

I'll give you some drawings.

Those drawings ended up being what we now know

as the look of Venom.

@ComicsSteve What is the Marvel method?

And the Marvel method, what he's talking about

was for years and years

the writers would only give an outline

of what they wanted the pages to look like to the artist.

I would then have to interpret a couple of pages of outline

and turn those into 20 pages.

Which is basically how Stan Lee did it

which is where the Marvel method came from.

You have five people working on a comic book.

You have the writer, obviously,

is the one that comes up with the storyline

and will eventually put the words

into the character's mouth.

The penciler is the person who, as you can imagine,

has a pencil takes blank paper

and is the one that is responsible for all the drawings.

The inker then is the one that applies black ink.

The colorist then, as you can imagine, comes in

adds some cool colors 'cause that in black and white

might not be quite as sexy.

Then the letterer then takes the script

and then comes in and puts all those word balloons

and all those captions,

and when all five of those people touch the page

you end up with a complete comic book.

@SystemsEmenos asks, How do people write for comics?

Is it full on novel, just keywords and descriptions

or straight up improvisation?

Most writers write full scripts.

They give you basically how many panels they want

and that's basically how many different drawings

they want on a page.

They give you the dialogue, they give you the captions

and then they give you descriptions of what they want

inside each one of those drawings.

They're essentially writing and directing.

I think you should give way more freedom to the artist.

So when I'm writing, I just give descriptive stuff.

I'll give you an example.

I got three pages.

You have two cops they're in their office

they're talking about a case.

At the end of that three page

I need one of the cops to be mad at his partner.

Do I care, personally, whether in those three pages,

the two cops get mad at each other in the first page

at the beginning,

and then they're mad with each other at the very end.

Or if they're actually doing a good thing

for two and a half pages and then near the end

one of the guys says something

about the other guy's mama and he goes, Screw you.

And then he walks out and he slams the door, do I care?

I do not.

@MajinIsy asks, How the [beep] do comic book writers

keep up with their continuity?

Let's define what comic book continuity is.

Basically, every time you come out with an issue

you're laying another sort of stone on a pathway, right?

And so you can't contradict something

that has previously been written,

unless you give a reason for it.

I'll let you in on a little bit, little secret.

Spawn, he's got a costume and the costume it's alive

and it moves and it morphs.

It wasn't actually alive on issue number one

at least in my head, it wasn't alive.

I was drawing my first issue of Spawn

and I was putting like leg packs on him

and putting some spikes on him.

And then somebody wrote a letter saying,

Todd, how come on page four,

the leg pack is on the left leg

and on page nine the pack is on the right leg.

And he used to have three spikes, now he has four spikes.

Confronted with this criticism, you have two choices.

You either say, Sorry, [beep] up.

or you take the other one, which what I did,

which is that's because the costume is alive.

And if anybody ever asks I go costume's alive,

it's always morphing, it's never the same.

Where when you're doing Thor and Spider-Man and Batman

you have to actually nail it from panel to panel.

Not old Spawny here.

@dukealoops asks On a scale of 1-10

how much would I regret reading 'Spider-Man: Torment'?

If you go and read Spider-Man: Torment.

Spider-Man #1 was the biggest selling comic book,

still is to this day for a single creator.

Is it my best writing?

No.

Is it a cool read?

I don't know, I think so.

Spider-Man: Torment, just to give some context

is the first story I ever wrote

when I became a writer on Spider-Man.

Todd, the the artist who was the penciler and the inker

had been doing this for about five or six, seven years.

I wasn't a writer in those first six years.

I was starting to do some innovations on Spider-Man.

It's literally what sort of made my career

over at Marvel Comic Books.

When he put the costume on, he was a bug to me.

And so I made big eyes.

I gave him way more webs on his costume.

I reinvented his webbings.

I put 'em in these freakish positions.

He was a rubbery guy.

When they tried to do the first Spider-Man movie,

Sam Raimi, who directed it,

they couldn't emulate those poses.

They had all my artwork, they couldn't emulate it

because I wasn't paying attention to anatomy.

I just was going for the cool factor.

@Comixcentral asks In comics, historically

characters are often binary.

Evil or angelic, on or off, good or bad.

How does the anti-hero archetype change the game?

I'm gonna tell you a character I think is boring to me.

Superman, and here's why, he's perfect.

He says everything right.

Oh, and by the way,

he has the power to spin planets on his finger

and he's a boy scout.

The characters I always liked

were the ones that were flawed.

We think that being a hero automatically makes you good.

I don't, I think it's the decisions along the journey

that are way, way more interesting.

I have a character called Spawn.

He is a completely flawed man.

He lets his emotions get the better of him at times.

He does things that he regrets afterwards.

Will he ever figure it out?

I don't know.

I hope I never have to write the last issue of my character.

@DylanJa77545989.

His question is actually shorter than his name.

What gave you the inspiration for 'Spawn'?

I was just starting to date my girlfriend,

who's now my wife, and I just thought

that having a hero come back for love instead of revenge

would be a cool idea.

I created him when I was 16, put him in my portfolio,

went to school, ended up getting a job at Marvel.

And years later in 1992 when I was almost 30,

pulled him out of my portfolio

and the first issue of Spawn came out.

I never gave Spawn idea away

to either Marvel or DC when I was working for 'em.

I saved him till the proper time.

@Slade_left asks Not a big comic guy,

why is Batman a fascist?

And how did Frank Miller contribute to this?

He's not a fascist, that dude's a badass, go Bruce.

I actually get Bruce Wayne.

He knows that there are bad people out there

and that they basically pick on innocent people

that are basically less powerful than them.

I'm gonna come up with this black costume.

I'm gonna go scare the shit of those bad guys.

If you like the Batman movies today,

you can thank Frank Miller.

He did a twist on a character

that I thought had gotten stale, and so did he.

And he just basically messed with the icon.

And sometimes that's what you need to do.

Every now and then you just need to shake the cage

and let people see something a little bit different.

@NickWetmore Which comic covers

will always catch your eye and you can't help yourself

to comment about on social media.

I tried to basically just make it

so that, what I call the three second rule,

I can just do a drawing.

Get my mom, go Mom, one, two, three, what did you see?

She should be able to say It looked like a person

was jumping or flying over a city.

And if she gets that basic information

then the clarity of the image is what I basically need.

One of the covers I did that a lot of people seem to like

is Hulk 340.

Wolverine was in it and he's screaming

the camera's on Wolverine's face and he's got his blades up,

and I made his blades instead of spikes I made them fat

almost like butcher knives.

And then reflected in the knives was a screaming Hulk.

I thought it was okay cover, I didn't think it was my best.

Years later they did a voting on Marvel's website

for the all time best comic book covers

ever in the history of Marvel, it was voted number one.

@ScottENoble asks I was thinking about

Martin Scorsese's comment where he said

'Marvel films are not cinema.'

And I must beg the question

can comic books be considered a form of literature?

Of course, of course.

What are we talking about?

Here's what comic books are.

The combination of words and pictures.

If you don't think the comic books are literature or art,

don't consume them, go and find something else.

But please step to the side

'cause somebody behind you might think they are

and we need them to come to the party.

So here's the easy answer,

Martin, you don't like 'em, don't go,

and people who do like it will go.

@flyfoxpro asks Who are some of your biggest

comic book inspirations,

specifically as they are reflected in your art?

Jack Kirby, just because again, I don't draw like him

but his storytelling was big and bombastic.

John Byrne for the way

that he basically did some of his action.

Gil Kane was a guy who when he hit somebody,

bam it felt like you were getting shot out of a cannon.

George Perez, he would draw machinery

that still to this day, stuns me.

Marshall Rogers did some of the coolest capes I ever saw.

All these people you put them,

a little bit of those influences in a blender

pour it out and that becomes Todd McFarlane's style.

But it really is using ingredients that have preexisted,

I think, from all the people that I grew up on.

@Hunt50501 How was it like working with Stan Lee?

Stan Lee, for hopefully only two of you out there

that don't know, is the one that basically co-created

almost every single Marvel character

that you've ever heard of.

The Stan Lee that you saw in person

that big gregarious guy, excelsior

he's the exact same dude.

He would hand it over to the artists

and the other people on the team and he would say,

Go, I'm gonna give you a germ of an idea.

You go and do your thing.

He was a good man, we all miss him.

@Figureoftheday asks What is the most important feature

on an action figure?

Detail, articulation, arms at stretch into next week?

For lots of people who collect action figures,

movement matters.

Can my figure move?

Here's what most toys looked like when my company began,

McFarlane Toys, they had five movements.

One was a head, one was an arm right here,

nothing else moved just the shoulder.

This character right now not only has way more detail,

is bigger than those toys were when I started,

but it has 32 moving parts.

The other ones had five.

After I broke into the toy business.

I understand why toys are made a certain way.

They're maximizing their margins of profit.

@Harold_Magnus Back in February 1st, 1992

three friends called Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee,

and Rob Liefeld founded

a little independent comic book company called Image Comics.

Have you ever heard about it?

Yes, I have, I'm one of the co-founders of it.

We all were working at Marvel Comic Books

and we were sort of the elite artist at that time.

We left started Image Comic Books.

What we were just trying to do

was come up with a way of doing business

in the comic book industry that would make more sense to us.

And so the biggest piece of it

was all of us got to own our own ideas.

When you're doing Batman, when you're doing Superman,

when you're doing Spider-Man,

although you can have as much fun as you want,

you don't have any rights into those stories.

@Jellyfish_GS So if I wanna get into comic books

or graphic novels, where do I start?

On the superhero front?

It depends, if you like Big Fantasy,

I would go with maybe some of the team books.

If you like, sort of urban grittier stuff,

I'd go with Batman, Daredevil,

even something like Spawn.

The Walking Dead, it's basically a zombie book.

It's really about the human condition.

Go into a comic book store,

tell the person working at the front

what your personal tastes are,

and I promise you there's a book

that is in that store that's for you.

So those are all the questions today.

Thanks for watching Comic Support.