I thought this interview with Todd McFarlane by Team XBox would focus mostly on the Halo figures McFarlane Toys designed, but they spend a good deal of it talking about comics:
Do you feel that the recent decline of sales in the comic book industry had something to do with how “collector-centric” it became?
Todd McFarlane: Yes. I think we [the comic book industry] took advantage of the consumers. If you take advantage of your core group of collectors with short-term thinking, then you are going to turn them off of your product. You are literally financially taking advantage of them. I was never for the multiple covers of Spider-Man #1 – I was always against it. As a matter of fact, on Spawn we did our first variant cover on issue #100 and we’ve only done one other since. People in the comic book industry got greedy. The same thing happened in trading cards with overproduction. Some say the industry is cyclical and that the consumer will come back, but I don’t believe it. If you push the consumer out the door and you don’t have a system to re-grow that customer back, you’re in trouble. Since the kids aren’t jumping into comic books, so we don’t have a mechanism for creating the young version of the older, alienated collectors.
McFarlane also talks about a new Spawn animated project, his early career and eventually Halo.
September 7th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
At first glance I thought this headline read “I think it’s time we took advantage of the consumers.”
September 7th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Anyone find it ironic that Todd McMerchandise is the one they interviewed about taking advantage of the consumer? Don’t get me wrong, what he’s built is an incredible little empire for himself but its all based on what exactly now? Taking advantage of the consumer! How many different Spawn figures are out there? Sure he didn’t do any variant covers of Spawn back in the day but he sure put out a helluva lot of action figures. And T-shirts. And … you get my point.
September 7th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
I don’t really see the problem with variant covers, multiple action figures & t-shirts for the same character, etc. I never buy what I don’t want to buy, and no one else has to, either.
It may be taking advantage of obsessive/compulsives, but it’s not taking advantage of the consumer.
Don’t want it? Don’t buy it! Feel the need to own every single image or likeness of a particular character? Get some therapy!
September 7th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
Mysterious Stranger: I’m not seeing the connection. Not unless those Spawn toys came in gold or silver variants. Sure, he was repackaging the same characters over and over, but in the form of different products. How many f***ing Batman toys have there been over the years?
Selling different toys based on the same character doesn’t alienate people. Selling the same toy and claiming that it is different is what alienates people. That, and calling them names. People don’t like being called names.
September 7th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
Not unless those Spawn toys came in gold or silver variants.
Um, actually, they did.
September 7th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
I think some of you missed the point Todd was trying to make. What the collectoritis did to the sports card industry, is what’s plaguing the comic book industry. Look at the Golden, Silver and Bronze Age books and the numbers they sold. They didn’t need these gimmicks to sell their books. Those gimmicks are incredibly short-term sighted and don’t grow the market at all.
September 7th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
And yeah, we can point fingers at Todd in producing some variant action figures, but perhaps he felt pressured by the mindset of the current market to do that.
Really, it’s ok to rage against the machine, people.
September 8th, 2007 at 9:48 am
It’s funny how instead of responding to what he said, people take issue with the man himself. Comic books have a problem. You see it at Cons. I see it at my LCS. Whenever I meet kids and teenagers, I ask them what they’re into and all of the information points to the same thing:
The audience for mainstream comic books is dwindling.
When I ask kids what they’re into, the answer is invariably anime/manga. I’ve never heard anyone tell me they’re wrapped up in the twenty-year old Spidey-MJ storyline. Also for girls of any age, none that I’ve ever talked to read mainstream comics. Though I can’t blame them for choosing manga. Personally, I collected comics all my life until I reached a point where the industry crap: variant covers, gimmicky storylines, deaths, rebirths, hey spiderman is fighting doc ock AGAIN!, almost six bucks for a 5 minute-read. Simply put, comic books weren’t working hard enough for my entertainment dollar, so like in all free markets when the customer is unsatisfied, my money moved elsewhere.
At my LCS, they moved the DC/marvel type books to the very back, because kids were coming in looking for manga, so they had to expand that section.
Look at Saturday morning television and if you can find a non-anime cartoon, what style are the comic book cartoons going in? How many are Bruce Timm/non-anime, and how many look like they’re straight from Japan? I mention this because that is what the next generation’s childhood will be based on. How will that affect their buying habits? How is it?
Does anyone remember why Disney stopped doing 2D films at a time when Japan was lighting the 2D world on fire?
Does anyone know why GM is no longer the largest automaker in NA?
Is it possible the industry will shift away from books to the much more lucrative film industry?
How hard is the industry really working to bring new readers into the fold? How hard is it working to keep older ones on board? Are they really trying to compete with the innovation of manga, or are they still trying to milk coins out of 60 year old stories and characters?
I don’t know what will happen in twenty years, but it doesn’t take much to get a sense for what Todd is getting at.
AE
September 8th, 2007 at 11:47 am
What comics did in the 90s was all about milking every last dollar THIS WEEK and creating collectors instead of readers. When the collectors realized The Death of Superman and Spawn #1 sold millions of copies and would therefore never be worth much the bottom fell out, people felt burned and they quit buying comics. Also, the few people actually reading comics (and especially the retailers) got stuck with late books or books that never came out, shitty stories and bad hack imitations of a few hot artists who eventually became last week’s fad.
It kind of burns me that millionaire McFarlane can now turn around and say “oops, ha ha” while there’s a couple hundred bankrupt comic shop owners who got left holding the bag(ged comic). How many comics fans quit reading when their local shop went out of business because they got stuck with tons of unsold Image books or books that shipped late that no one wanted but the retailers were then obligated to still pay for? But Todd’s made his money and can now spend his time making toys and buying baseballs so he could care less.
It’s surprising given the distributor wars and the foil variant gimmicks and late books that the industry survived the 90s at all.
September 8th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
In the 1990s, when Bret Blevins worked for Marvel (he quit when Marvel refused to sign a document stating that they were his employer when he was getting a loan to buy a house, which was the last straw for him), he’d complain that whenever he called a Marvel editor to ask a question they’d push that question aside and pump him for ideas for gimmick covers because the editors were under pressure from the top to come up with ideas. I still remember the day the bottom fell out of all that. It was the week that Valiant’s TUROK #1 was published with a foil cover and I walked into a Los Angeles comic convention and saw table after table with stacks of this brand new (two days old) $3.00 comic being blown out at 99 cents each, and they weren’t selling. The speculators had finally gotten wise and were jumping ship.