Todd McFarlane’s Urgent Warning To The Comics Industry: ‘We Can’t Just Sit Here And Do Nothing!’

Todd McFarlane wears many hats: President of Image Comics, North America’s largest independent comics publisher (and #3 overall behind Marvel and DC), which he cofounded in 1992; CEO of McFarlane Toys, purveyors of quality-made collectible toys and action figures; creator of Spawn, the long-running supernatural series that recently set the record for most consecutive issues of a creator owned comic; and a charismatic ambassador of comics culture who’s not afraid to ruffle feathers with his strong views.

On April 8, McFarlane is launching his first crowdfunding campaign, a Kickstarter with a $100,000 target to produce a “Remastered” collectors’ item Spawn action figure and limited edition comic, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the first version from 1995, with an option to have it autographed by McFarlane himself. In the course of an interview to promote the new project and update the status of the Spawn reboot feature film, he offered opinions on a number of issues facing the comics industry in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, including hot buttons like whether publishers should turn to digital releases while physical product is unavailable. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Rob Salkowitz: Tell me about the original Spawn figure Kickstarter. Why go the crowdfunding route?

Todd McFarlane: Having been in business for over 30 years, I’ve done all the other channels. I’ve done dotcoms, small stores, collector boutiques, and obviously big retailers. What I’ve never done is crowdfunding. It’s an experiment. We’ve been talking about it for a while and now seemed like a good time to try it. Once we have it going, we’ll have some data to know what’s working and what isn’t.

The fact is, we have to do something. Things have changed in our industry, obviously, both on the toy side and the comics side. No new comics are coming out. That’s a really dangerous situation – not just for us but for any consumer industry that relies on established customer habits. If you give your customer a chance to break their habit, they might not come back.

I understand how we got here and why we’re at a standstill, but even if the distributor [Diamond] is down, we can’t just sit here and do nothing. So I’m trying to do something. Remember, even if we’re not going to stores or movies right now, geeks will always be geeks! So we need to find ways to keep what we do on the minds of customers however we can.

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Image Source:*forbes.com

Source:forbes.com