Todd McFarlane, a legendary comic book artist, was born on March 16th, 1961, in Calgary, Canada.
The talented McFarlane is most known for Spawn, a fantasy-horror comic book series that he writes and illustrates. Although, his initial rise to notoriety was for his work on the Marvel comic series The Amazing Spider-Man. His career began in the 80s, and he has garnered over 50 writing and art credits in the years since! With that in mind, we should jump right into discussing his stellar career!
In college, McFarlane worked tirelessly to launch his comic book artist career by sending 30 to 40 submissions packets per month! Finally, one of these submissions paid off; Sal Amendola from DC Comics sent McFarlane a dummy script to further gauge his abilities.
This “dummy script” would later lead to McFarlane’s first published work, a backup story in the comic series, Coyote. Shortly after this, he would begin his two-year stint with DC, illustrating the Infinity, Inc. series. He also did the art for a few issues of the Detective Comics series and Batman: Year Two.
Following his stint with DC, he worked for Marvel Comics, drawing the Incredible Hulk series from 1987 to 1988. During his time there, he also worked on The Amazing Spider-Man. He even depicted popular characters, including Ghost Rider and Wolverine!
In 1992, McFarlane released the first issue of Spawn under Image Comics. It went on to become his most popular comic book series. He has published 27 issues since; the last was published in 2008. The hit comic also turned into an animated series in 1997. The show ran for three seasons and ended on May 28th, 1999.
McFarlane has worked on a multitude of hit comics; some of his most sought after issues include,
- Amazing Spider-Man #313
- Spawn #1
- Batman #423
- Amazing Spider-Man #316
- Spider-Man #1 Variant
There are so many to gush over! It was so hard to choose just five!
Some other random projects McFarlane has lent his artistic abilities to include producing the album art for Korn’s 1998 album, Follow the Leader. He also designed action figures for the hit video game, Halo 3!
Todd Mcfarlane is a talented man with many creative abilities! He has brought to life countless characters we all know and love today. His most recent project was designing action figures of the characters from Dune and beloved superheroes! We cannot wait to see what this creative genius does next!