As Spawn nears its 30th anniversary, creator and Image Comics co-founder Todd McFarlane is continuing to take the hellish superhero to new heights. Following the Spawn's Universe special, which brought a host of Spawns in the spotlight, King Spawn, a new ongoing comic series, launched in early-2021 to record-breaking success. After King Spawn's launch, McFarlane teamed up with Brett Booth to create a new Spawn series titled Gunslinger Spawn, featuring Wild West hero Jeremy Winston's spin on the cursed legacy.
In an exclusive interview with CBR, McFarlane teased what readers can expect with the launch of Gunslinger Spawn this October and reflected on the new title's Western influences.
The last time we spoke, we were talking about King Spawn. Now we're talking Gunslinger Spawn. What was about this character that you wanted to lead for the next book?
Todd McFarlane: The plan was, in so far as building what I hoped, Spawn's Universe set the table and checked that box and that one came out of the gate strong. I knew of the three monthlies that it would be the safest bet to come out with a known entity so that people weren't having to speculate about an unknown. They're already buying Spawn so they can buy a second Spawn [series] if they want. King Spawn comes out and does way better than I had projected, at least for the first issue, and I'm hoping that both books pave the way for Gunslinger Spawn for retailers and fans that picked up Spawn's Universe and King Spawn continue to pick up the momentum.
Brett Booth is doing the artwork in it, along with Adelso Corona doing the inking. It worked with those five-page [back-up story] vignettes to warm you up to what this book is going to look like. If you like what you read in those backup stories of Gunslinger, you'll take an initial look at this book and see if it's to your liking. That was it, intentionally rolling it out, and if I can get Gunslinger going, then it makes it easier for the team book to expand on all of that.
What does Brett Booth bring to the proceedings for this book visually?
Brett Booth draws a way cooler Gunslinger than I do. That's just a fact -- just like Greg Capullo drew a better Spawn than I did.
I'm always looking for people that can add something that I put on paper or have in my idea. He's a bit of a maniac, drawing all the villains with spikes and all the cool stuff that's on their costumes. He has a tremendous flair for action because I've seen the first three issues, they're completed. When I say something like, "Somebody gets shot," that can get interpreted a lot of different ways and in some of the panels that I've seen, some of the action sequences are pretty dynamic. We'll leave it to people whether that's to their liking or not but I think comic books, especially superhero comics, should have a lot of melodrama in them. He's putting that on paper right now as well as just a ton of detail. I'd hate to be Adelso when he goes in to ink these pages.
I hear tell that Robert Kirkman is doing a cover for Gunslinger Spawn #1. How was it getting him to pick up his artist's pencil to do a cover?
It's interesting, I don't think most people realize that if you look at Spawn #200, the first five pages were drawn by Robert.
I inked them and tried to coach him up and I remember looking at his pages and thinking that he draws pretty decently and had a good storytelling sense. People should look at those pages and remind themselves because I think that it's a forgotten piece of trivia in the Spawn mythology. I decided to go back to the well, asking Donny Cates for King Spawn and with Robert [for Gunslinger Spawn] to throw a little bit of a surprise at the readers. They're going to think they're going to write a little story but why don't they do artwork? And I'll ink them up.
You're doing the main story, with Ales Kot doing the back-ups and he's always had noticeably cerebral, self-aware storytelling sensibilities with his Image Comics work. What was it about bringing him onto the book?
The thing I'm in search of with writers isn't if they can write the best action scenes.
The first thing I ask is, "Can I read the dialogue? Can I grab an arbitrary book, flip to page twelve not knowing what the story is, and just read the word balloons and ask myself if it sounds like real people and go from there?" Sadly, I would say to my personal tastes, 70% of comics don't sound like real people. It sounds like comic book writing which has its own sort of tonality to it. I'm looking for people who can write this [character] as a real person who got endowed with powers and what would their reaction be? Would their speech change to become simplistic and overly dramatic? Or would they act like human beings that are now stronger? When I look at Ales' stuff, I was looking at his dialogue.
After adding a Samurai Spawn and Medieval Spawn, do you remember what inspired you to add a Gunslinger Spawn to the mix?
I think the first visual look at him was Issue #119 -- if I'm correct. It was a story that expanded on some of the ideas that had already been there, which is that there have been Spawns throughout time in our history and will continue to be in our future while pulling back and showing some of the visuals and stories of the some of the characters that there was more than one of these. When I started Spawn, there was one Spider-Man and one Batman. I thought I had lots of Spawns but I've got nothing compared to those two dudes.
You were a little ahead of the curve on Into the Spider-Verse but what was it about making Spawn something of a legacy character?
Spawn is the catalyst for all of this.
He's been the only book that I've been doing so he was an obvious choice to use as the starting point. I keep saying that further and further down the line, that impact will be lessened because new characters, who are not Spawn, who are heroes and come in having nothing to do with the mythology of Spawn other than that they just share the same world map, will be introduced and go on their own way and rarely interact with some of the other Spawns. I didn't want to expand the universe to fill it with more Spawns. I wanted to expand the universe to fill it with more characters, some of which may be Spawn-related but I'm hoping the vast majority aren't, in the long run.
What are some of your favorite Western stories that may have inspired Gunslinger Spawn? When I see him, I'm thinking High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider.
To me, he's like a twenty-something Clint Eastwood but we've seen those types of characters before in a handful of movies with different actors -- that rugged, super-serious cowboy Western character that goes about their business and rarely, if ever, smiles. Their business is doing what they do which is, at times, exacting justice and/or revenge. They don't necessarily take any pleasure in it, it's just what they do. In this case, being a Spawn, you get a lot of opportunities because people have a tendency to come knocking on your door for the wrong reasons and he just has to react to it.
What the readers are also going to find is that not all Spawns are created, they each have their own personalities and/or powers. The Gunslinger Spawn is way less powerful than the Al Simmons Spawn. He's going to be in way more jeopardy in his story because he can be taken down easier than Al Simmons.
I'm sure you've told this story before but Spawn came out at a time when there weren't a lot of Black superheroes in mainstream comics. What was it that made you want to make this flagship character Black?
It came out in 1992 so I was thirty years old at this point and I've just observed the world for thirty years. Through those observations, I decided to go in a direction that wouldn't be the easy, obvious way of putting a character out there. I've told this story before but I never got to tell this story in Spider-Man when I was writing it... Using all the easy tropes of this good-looking Wall Street in a $900 suit getting mugged by a minority character. Spider-Man comes swinging down and saves the day and when he gets ready to swing away after webbing up the bad guy, the Wall Street guy says, "Thanks, Spider-Man for taking care of that," and then he curses out [a racial] epithet. At that moment, Spider-Man stops and comes back and pins the Wall Street guy against the wall by the throat and asks him the simple question, "What color do you think I am underneath this mask?"
We've made an assumption that, although Spider-Man is cloaked from head to toe, we present him as and think that there's a white guy underneath there. Why? Why would the public and everybody make that assumption given that we can't see him? I get Superman and Batman, since you can see a bit of his face, but not Spider-Man. It was just an extension of some of those thoughts going through my head at thirty years old saying that I'm going to do something that is not an expectation for the next hero.
Gunslinger Spawn #1 is getting a limited run, hand-number set of variant covers and you've done similar approaches before. As someone that's been in the toy industry for a long time, what is it about these opportunities to incentivize fans?
I think collectors, in general, would like to think that a portion, if not everything, that they buy will rise in value.
On my end, I have some control over that and, in this case, whatever the number of incentive variants has been ordered, I'll sign that many, and I will never sign anymore to the point that I'm going to show a video of all the extras that I have leftover -- after everyone has sent in their replacement books and I've given them another back with the same number -- here are all the books that I have leftover, now I'm going to set fire to everything. I'm going to show you the proof that there's not going to be a warehouse find or someone coming up with one that's not signed. These are the retailers that supported me and bought a lot just to get one and there are things I can do to help keep that value up for each one of the books.
Written by Todd McFarlane, penciled by Brett Booth and inked by Adelso Corona, Gunslinger Spawn #1 goes on sale Oct. 2o from Image Comics.