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Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.90: Todd McFarlane

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5 years ago

August 6, 2021

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No.90: Todd McFarlane

At 90 in our list of the 101 Greatest Artists of all time, it’s enfant terrible and generally controversial artist / writer Todd McFarlane, he of Spawn, Spider-Man and Bowen busts fame. Words: Andrew Colman…

For the handful of people who are reading this: you may be wondering what the Toddster is doing on this list. McFarlane was the architect (along with two other artists) of everything that was annoying or bad in comics in the 1990s. Superficial, cluttered, over-egged art with cartoony bug-eyed characters, endless panels of Spider-Man swinging manically, legs flailing akimbo like a rag doll, entangled in a sea of intricately weaved webbing. The opportunist who saw the medium as a stepping stone to corporate status, endless merchandising and branding. And who couldn’t write comics but did anyway.

All this may be true, but bear with me. His work on Batman: Year Two, the Hulk and the early issues of Amazing Spider-Man was genuinely very good – granted, he may have veered into gimmickry and nightmarish baroque, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. McFarlane could tell a story with flair and panache, even if the characters occasionally got swamped by detail – his Batman and Spectre were lucid and dynamic, while his work with Peter David on the Hulk, sketchy and undisciplined as it might have been, certainly didn’t detract from the master storyteller’s err, story.

If that sounds like damning with faint praise, it has to be pointed out that regardless of his legacy (1 million copies of Spider-Man 1, 1.75 million copies of Spawn 1, ten billion copies of X-Force 1 by that other bloke, fuelling the speculator market, the first decade of Image, all those boxes of unsold mid-90s tripe in my basement) the man was the shot in the arm that the industry needed at that time. Possibly. He of course wasn’t the only factor, and there was an inordinate amount of cynicism in everything he did, but he was, at his best, an innovative, eye-catching and bombastically amusing penciller who created a considerable buzz which dragged comics’ focus back to mainstream lightweight fun, which is something that has been lost to history and the acres of generic fluff that followed in his wake. Plus some of his covers, riffing as they were on Steranko, were inspired, while his pencils, reminiscent as they were of Michael Golden, were stylish and well-composed. He has esprit de comics, so he’s on our list.