“To me it’s not about, ‘Todd, how did you do it?’ It’s why weren’t they doing it?” says McFarlane. “I always scratch my head; that boggles my mind more than anything else.” McFarlane might be modest in his admissions, but his route to success involved more than just doing something that others were not already doing. Rather, McFarlane took something ordinary and gave it a little something extra by taking away all the unnecessary extras.
Ever since he was a young child, McFarlane has been an avid comic book reader himself. His all-time favourite character growing up was Frankenstein. “To me, when I was a kid, the thing that made Frankenstein so interesting to me, in the original one, was that there was just Frankenstein,” says McFarlane. “He was the only thing out of the ordinary in his movie. Dr. Frankenstein was still human, and the villagers were human.”
Similarly, McFarlane believes that the success and longevity of Dracula as a character rested on the fact that Dracula was the only part of the story that was not quite normal. “He might have said, ‘Oh, there’s a million of me,’ but you never saw [the others],” says McFarlane. “It was just Bela Lugosi, and it was like, ‘Come in, let’s have some fun.’ Everybody else was normal.”
According to McFarlane, the secret to their success was in their simplicity and their distinctiveness “So to me, I wanted to get rid of everything, and the only thing out of the ordinary now is my guy,” says McFarlane. “It makes him unique.”
Much like how there was just the one shark in “Jaws” rather than several sharks, including some good and bad, McFarlane wanted his comic to focus solely on Spawn. “You just sort of focus on what it is that you want to talk about,” he says. “I think it has a little more effect…There’s no Wandas, no Terrys, no Jason, no Clown, no Hell. There’s nothing. It’s just about him now.”
It is with that same simplicity that McFarlane insists on running his businesses, maintaining a hands-on approach at all times. “If I’m planning on keeping and/or building the success, then the answer is I have to be involved in some capacity,” he says. “I’m there at the beginning as Todd the artist, and I’m there at the end as Todd the CEO, and a lot of it in between…I can’t just assume that everybody else who hangs around me and works for me is going to think like me, and/or has had the same experience as me.”
And, being hands-on is what ensures McFarlane that he can always stay on top of his business and keep it constantly moving forward, constantly producing unique content. “I'm now 15 years into my art career, and I'm hoping that my best days are still ahead of me,” he says. “So I think we can learn from everything. You should never go, ‘Oh, I think that's the best movie I'll ever make.’ You might as well stop and retire at that point, right?”
Lesson #5: Make It A Business Less Ordinary
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