4min chapter

#639: Todd McFarlane, Legendary Comic Book Artist — How to Make Iconic Art, Reinvent Spider-Man, Live Life on Your Own Terms, and Meet Every Deadline

The Tim Ferriss Show

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CHAPTER

First Job in Comic Books - How Did You Get That First Job?

Todd McFarlane: "I think a normal sane person with sort of less enthusiasm" than me would have probably at 200 rejections found another option to make money. He sent 700 samples over the course of those four years and just on one level, I think I just wore them out because I send it to every editor at every company. The people who thought he was not very good actually gave him some insight that helped him get his first job in comic books.

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Todd McFarlane (@Todd_McFarlane) is an Emmy- and Grammy-winning director/producer and creator of one of the world’s best-selling comic books, Spawn. He is best known to many comic book fans for his work as the artist on The Amazing Spider-Man, for which he co-created Marvel’s top villain, Venom.

Todd is the CEO of Todd McFarlane Productions, McFarlane Toys (one of the US’s top action-figure manufacturers), and McFarlane Films. He is also a co-founder of Image Comics, which debuted Spawn in 1992, selling 1.7 million copies of the first issue. In 1997, Spawn was made into an Emmy Award-winning animated series on HBO and a live-action feature film that grossed over $100 million. In 2019, Todd made history with Spawn #301, earning the Guinness World Record for longest-running creator-owned superhero comic book series.

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[06:40] Baseball.

[12:04] Rejection letters.

[15:57] Compelling storytelling and meeting deadlines.

[19:04] Deadlines pre-Internet vs. deadlines today.

[23:25] How industry status quo led to the founding of Image Comic Books.

[35:51] The Comics Code and the last straw.

[42:14] The Marvel Dream Team exodus.

[1:00:35] How is Todd’s camel bladder a competitive advantage?

[1:06:23] Career bouncing and double-shifting as a penciler and inker.

[1:24:36] The happy accident of Venom.

[1:35:28] De-Rockwelling the company icon and inventing “spaghetti webbing.”

[1:38:53] Bucking the status quo to become the status quo.