According to Spawn creator Todd McFarlane, Marvel Comics has approached him about crossing his character over with Spider-Man. However, McFarlane -- who worked with Marvel on Spider-Man for years -- isn't interested in that story right now, even though he wouldn't rule out revisiting the idea someday down the line.
"The one advantage a comic book artist will have over a comic book writer is that as long as I have sight in one eye and I can hold a pencil in my hand, somebody is going to give me money to draw," McFarlane explained to Traveling Stories. "I could be in Bermuda on a beach, I can be 92 years old, and as long as I can still do a decent Venom drawing (I co-created Venom) somebody will say, 'Todd, I’ll give you money to draw a Venom head or a Spider-Man head or a Spawn head or whatever,' I’ll be able to basically make money till the day I die. So that also takes pressure off where I don’t have to make a bunch of money for retirement because I go 'What are you talking about?'"
"If I even need more money, I’ll just sell some of my original artwork. Or reprint some of my artwork. I’m in the odd position where I can almost create money at the flip of a switch if I want to," he continued. "Now I haven’t done that because there may actually come a time in my life when I’ll need to do it and I don’t want to do some of the things that happened to some of my partners early on in the formation of Image Comics. I thought that they were basically turning on the money spigot, going to the money well, when they weren’t thirsty. There was no need to make the money other than because they could."
"To me, I’m always thinking what’s the reasoning and the rationale in doing that? So, from time to time I have conversations with someone from Marvel where they suggest, 'Hey Todd, let’s do a Spawn-Spidey crossover!' Which would sell gangbusters and I'm not saying that someday I might not just do it, but it will be for the creative itch of doing it," he said.
"My answer is always, 'Okay, so we do it and it sends a jolt through the comic book industry in January, so what's propping it up in February?' It’s just it's a momentary hit, there’s no long-term impact to it," he concluded.
McFarlane is the creator of the long-running Spawn series, which has bred several spinoff miniseries, such as the three-issue Violator series, Angela and Sam & Twitch. He is also currently developing a new animated Spawn series -- unrelated to the HBO series that ran from 1997 to 1999 -- as well as a live-action film adaptation.