What it means to me, first and foremost, is longevity. You can argue that just because you’ve been around a long time doesn’t mean you’re good. But as someone who has lived in this world and had to swim among the sharks, I congratulate anyone who can pick any genre in any medium and survive for decades at a time.
The sense of pride is just being able to survive in a pool of thousands of other comic books for as long as I have, and to do all that in the same place – Image Comics.
If you’re not successful, people won’t give you the chance to deliver that product. The very nature of it is you MUST be successful. Then people go, “Why should I put your comic book in my bookstore?” “Why should I put your toys on my shelf?” You have to show them the success of it.
The success isn’t about, “Cool, I can just count money.” The success is a necessity to getting the art out to it. If you go, “I did these last five products with Spawn and they all failed miserably,” the next person you talk to is not going to give me an opportunity. Especially when you’re talking to business people – all they care about is, will this thing make them money? They’re less concerned about the art. So, I must deliver a good artistic product and put it into the right channels and make it successful so that they make money, so that then I can get it into the next channel, and the next channel.
The business side of it is far less sexy or fun than doing the art – coming up with the characters, doing doodles and all that other stuff. But if you are going to be the one at the forefront of driving your own art, and no one in the world is going to be doing you any favors, you have to then start creating your own favors. Those favors become finding ways to get your art to the consumer.
It was sunny outside, so we got to play a lot of baseball.
I was the proverbial best artist in the class kid, you know? ’Yes, Mrs. Crabtree.’ ‘Todd, could you come here and draw an elephant for us? We're going to talk about elephants.’ ‘Yes, Mrs. Crabtree.’
Through all of that ‘I’m going to be a sports guy [stuff], I was a doodler.
I broke into Marvel Comics and climbed the ladder of the corporate characters. I ended up doing ‘Spider Man,’ which put me on the map.
I got sort of disinterested in working for the system.
I guess we’re all just wired different. I just got to the point where I got tired of people telling me what I can and can’t do in my life.
I’m sort of that guy, like the Silkwood that they hate. But I couldn’t rally the troops. It’s amazing how much fear there is in the community.
I convinced some buddies of mines that we needed to leave as a tandem.
So the seven of us left, but we were some of the top guys. We started our own comic book company, Image, and within the confines of that, we each had to come up with a character.
I came out of the woodwork with Spawn, which is something I had created in high school that I had never shared with anybody.
So the years go by, and I’ve got all these companies that I actually own. They [don’t exist] because as a kid I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to be an entrepreneur?’ No, I want to play centerfield.
Not thinking about being diverse in the business and artistic areas I was involved in. My early mistake was not putting myself in a position where one or more mistakes wouldn’t determine the outcome of the rest of my future.
It made me more successful because it forced me to look at more than one option to any plan. The more options and opportunities one can present to themselves, the better chance of survival.
For instance, if you were in a burning building with a hundred people and there was only one door to the outside, do you think your survival rate would be better if that same building had multiple doors leading out? Of course it would. Life and business are no different in the planning stages. Always assume there will be a fire.
I’ve always said that Mickey Mouse is still alive, but Disney isn’t. His creative children have surpassed his longevity…I am hoping that Spawn, sort of like Superman and Batman, will outlive the creator.
Do I have a master plan? Yes. Do I know the end of the story? Yes. Do I hope that I never have to tell it? Yes. I have conceived of the ending of the character, but the only way I would tell it is if nobody cared about the character anymore.
You know, I’m lucky enough that I’m just sort of stubborn and sort of immature. That thought of, ‘Todd, how come you’re successful?’ never occurred to me. I don’t listen to anybody. I’m like a five year old kid. I’ll hold my breath if I don’t get my way, and it served me.
Once I decide what I want to do, I either go, [or] well before I come, I like to decide if I’m not going to do it. If I’m going to do it, well, if I have to, I’ll start the company for myself.
We’re not built as artists to think about the other stuff. But I found that if you don’t learn business, you’re not going to have opportunities to drive the art.
As an artist, one of the things I want to do is show my art, to the most people possible, and [have it be] actually art that I want to show. And if they don’t want to give me the vehicles to do it, then I’ll create my own vehicles.
Bob and Doug McKenzie comes first off from me being Canadian, and second, from me being the owner, right? I get to pull rank every now and then. I own this company. I'm making this; I don't want anyone else to give me an opinion.
About 85 percent of what you see is just because I get on the phone and [say], ‘Let’s go do this’. I don't do any market research or test groups or focus [groups]. I just go, ‘It's my company; would I buy it, personally?’
I’m not really that concerned overall to let any sort of licensing tail wag any dog. My mindset is that…if I’m going to do any sort of animation…I do the best animation. I don’t really care if it makes sense if I can’t sell a t-shirt, or if I can’t sell a movie.
To give you an example, some of the other projects we're working on in Hollywood wouldn't necessarily translate into comic books or toys. Why? They're just not those kinds of stories. The sequel to the Spawn movie, between me and you, my toy guy is going to have a heart attack if we push that one through because there's no toys in it. But I think it's a better movie.
So, you [ask yourself], ‘Ok, what would actually work?’ Play to the strengths of that medium; tell the story that you need to tell, and then go off and tell some other one.
Do you worry about selling toys and owning a toy company, or do you say, ‘No, when you make a movie, you’re supposed to make good movies, and forget the rest of it?’
So they’re going to be a little bit disappointed. ‘Todd, what are you talking about? What happened to the bazooka?’ No, I got rid of all that, because I just want to sell tickets. A movie is about the movie; it’s not about licensing.
You know what? I make toys, and like I said, even with my own character Spawn, I'm willing to make a Spawn sequel that has no toys in it, but I think it'll be a better movie.
I think Batman has been out now four times, but I think they’ve lost sight of the fact that the first movie came up over ten years ago. And the one thing that they’ve lost sight of is that we are all ten years older. So the audience that brought you in $300 million dollars in that first movie, even if we were 12, we’re now 22. We’re now out of high school, we now have jobs, we now go to college, we’ve now been through three different relationships, we pay taxes, we know what the words cancer and death mean, so the world is a different place.
To give a 22 year old the exact same movie, and as a matter of fact, on some level, a little bit softer version of what they liked at 12, doesn’t compute to a 22 year old. A 12 year old kid, the TV shows he watches, the music he listens to, the way he combs his hair, and the clothes he wears at 12, is not the same at 22. And somehow, to me, with that franchise, they’ve lost sight of that.
Acknowledge that those 12 year olds are now over the age of 20, and so something that appeals to 20 year olds.
You just have to acknowledge that you’re not going to sell a bunch of pajamas, and you’re not going to sell happy meals, and then you can just make the movie that you want. You’re free. You’re liberated by actually making the movie.
Well, add three or four years to them, and now you’re saying $17 million dollars on opening weekend was attributed to people who today will be 17 years old, or older. So now it doesn’t matter, in my mind it doesn’t matter, if we have an R-rating. The core audience isn’t less than 15.
So we can go to R and I don’t think we’ll skip a beat with it, as long as R means we get a little more sophisticated with it, as long as the product is growing up, as the audience is growing up with it.
To me it’s not about, ‘Todd, how did you do it?’ It’s, why weren’t they doing it? I always scratch my head; that boggles my mind more than anything else.
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. He was the only thing out of the ordinary in his move. Dr. Frankenstein was still human, and the villages were human.
He might have said, ‘Oh, there’s a million of me,’ but you never saw [the others]. It was just Bela Lugosi, and it was like, ‘Come in, let’s have some fun.’ Everybody else was normal.
So to me, I wanted to get rid of everything, and the only thing out of the ordinary now is my guy. It makes him unique.
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.
If I’m planning on keeping and/or building the success, then the answer is I have to be involved in some capacity. 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.
I'm now 15 years into my art career, and I'm hoping that my best days are still ahead of me. 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?
In all honesty, I wouldn’t say that the business end of it came with any kind of ease. It was more Darwinian. You have to learn business if you’re going to be self-employed and survive. If you’re a bad businessperson and you’re an entrepreneur, you’re going to be out of business.
I didn’t become a successful businessman because I wanted to be rich and famous. I wanted to become successful enough to deliver the art to the consumer.
At the end of all that, I’ve got a company and an empire, and we make money. But I will tell you that there has never been one day along that process when I’ve thought, ‘I just want to build up a company, go public and have stocks!’ No. There’s a reason why, after all these years, my company is still private. I want to be big enough to have the freedom creatively, and small enough to retain it. That’s the niche that I want.
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