The Tease of Things I Don't Need

Tony Twists Todd's -- well, you finish it.

$15 million dollars was awarded Friday to a former hockey player because his name was used for a Mafia boss in issues of McFarlane's Spawn comic. As this is just the latest pass of this case through the courts, and appeals are promised, it's anything but the final word on the affair.

Now, the comics digression...

Probably the only thing irritating to me in the piece (the rest of which, I must confess, interests me little) is the line "McFarlane, formerly the principal artist and writer of Spiderman comics," which is both a matter of narrow fact and otherwise nothing more than a handy point of reference. I've had this discussion, mercifully briefly, with a couple people over the years, but McFarlane's been credited by some with completely reviving a moribund Spider-man (in terms of sales) circa 1990. My counterpoints are that a) he did it largely as an artist with an intricate, fluid, innovative and ultimately eye-catching style, and b) he did this during the peak of the "hot artist" period in comics, when speculators and those who prey on the same had moved into comics in a big way and made buying multiple copies of some comics for investment purposes a standard practice for a stretch of years. Much of which boils down to a fame and a status (the simply-titles Spider-Man series they allowed Todd to launch as a spin-off title sold several million copies, as did his early issues of Spawn) built, yes, on talent as a graphic artist, but also at least as largely on superficial manipulations that warped the entire comics industry from the late 1980's through the early 1990's, when the bottom began to fall out. To be fair, part of the fuss about Todd's take on Spider-man was based on his creation of Venom, a homicidal mainstay villain for Spider-man to face off against, which helped give the series a sense of mold-breaking violence that helped interest a new wave of fans.

I don't mean to disparage McFarlane in the above - he's a talented artist, something of a creator, and certainly had the most professional approach and greatest degree of business acumen of any of his partners in the creation of Image in 1992. I merely mean to point out that there were factors that heavily favored his success that were far more a matter of timing than quality of work. To put it another way, just because his issues of Amazing Spider-man and Spider-man sold better than any others in its over 30 year run had little to do with the actual quality of the issues. When an industry was benefiting from a profit-driven buying impulse, where single individuals were ordering cases of 300 copies of a comic at a time as an item for economic speculation often with no interest in reading any of the copies, it came to pass that the actual content of the issues in terms of story and storytelling became largely unimportant. To put it another way, in terms of quality storytelling - the synthesis of plot, artwork and scripting - I'd take the teams of Lee & Ditko, Lee & Romita, and even DeFalco & Frenz (to name three of the teams that have worked on the character over the years) over McFarlane's solo work. In a fairer world, where that level of quality was the true determinant, those other people would have had much greater financial success than Todd did. That's IMHO, of course. Your mileage may vary.

Even if you might take some exception to the above, there's no denying the twisted economic power of those times to turn anointed "creators" into stars. How else does one seriously explain the success of Rob Liefeld? Here's a brief, very favorable interview with him that simultaneously, at least for me, undercuts the positive text by, well, displaying so much of his best-selling artwork. What you see there is typical of his work, and reinforces my belief that had he not come into the business at the time that he did, he'd likely never have gotten farther than footnote status. Still, he has to get a gold star for managing to get so far with so very little.