And… um… well, that’s all, really.
Comic Book Resources splashed the news that McFarlane, whose energies have been mostly focused on toy-making and multi-medafyin’ his empire, is returning to actual comic book illustrating. Considering he was The Biggest Artist of the ’90s, that’s theoretically big news… but it’s been greeted by a collective shrug. Why? Well, if McFarlane had a fresh idea, it would probably die of loneliness. The design of the new character suspiciously resembles a fusion of Spider-Man (the character that buoyed Todd’s career), Venom (the villain that solidified Todd’s Marvel superstardom) and Spawn (the solo character that launched Todd’s indpendent empire).
The good news is, at least McFarlane isn’t writing it. He’s roped in respected writer (and new Image Comics chief) Robert Kirkman to do the duties. Kirkman has earned deserved praise for his zombie-verite series The Walking Dead, his superhero-coming-of-age saga Invincible and the just-plain-whacky Astounding Wolf-Man. But McFarlane’s characters have a tendency to bring the worst out of good writers… or maybe you haven’t encountered Alan Moore’s unfortunate Spawn / WildC.A.T.s mini-series which may have the dubious distinction of being the single worst story with the Watchmen scribe’s name on it.
-Steve D-
I loved Todd McFarlane’s work on Spider-Man, but then he got his own Spider-Man series, which he drew some cool stuff, but the stories were written by him and weren’t good.
Erik Larsen, who was criticized for being a McFarlane clone, actually could write and actually did a cool Sinister Six storyline for the Spider-Man series, right before they both left to create Image Comics with the other top artists of the time.
At the time I thought that was great, until later, when I realized the stories were poor. They should have taken some good writers with them.
Even good writers couldn’t do a whole hell of a lot with some of those concepts… I just read Alan Moore’s WILD WORLDS, which is a bunch of stories he did with Jim Lee’s WildStorm characters — and it’s mostly atrocious.
Between the derivative concepts of the characters and the over-cooked artwork in these books, even Alan Moore couldn’t do much to make them un-suck.
(His well-received SUPREME books for Liefeld were much better, partly because he received carte blanche to disregard everything that came before and completely hit the reset button.)
Well I do remember reading that one-off that Frank Miller did with Batman and Spawn, drawn by McFarlane. I think Miller phoned it in, and cashed his paycheck. So, I think he could have tried a little harder. Also they should have brought the writers over to Image and worked together to make cool concepts, instead of the crap that eventually made it out. The only character/storyline that I liked was Savage Dragon. Spawn looked cool, but his story was lame.