While I'm not a huge comic book fan, I have read a few of the classic graphic novels, Like Watchman, V for Vendetta, Sandman, and a series called Seekers into the Mystery, along with issues of several other 90's comics. I first checked out Spawn in the mid 90's a few times. As a writer and artist, Todd's story is far more fascinating to me. This 45 minute interview gives a great look at how Todd McFarlane went from a wannabe comic artist, to building an empire in comics and toys.
As I'll mention over and over in this blog, I came from the early days of BMX freestyle, when it was just turning into a actual sport in the mid-1980's. My first creative work was a zine. BMX, skateboarding, and other 1980's action sports, were entrenched with the DIY- Do It Yourself- mantra of hardcore punk rock. So I've always been a fan of self-publishing, when others aren't interested in publishing you.
Todd McFarlane is probably the best example of that spirit in the comic world. In his 20's, he worked his way into Marvel as an artist, and eventually drew issues of classic characters like Spiderman and Batman. But the time came to go out on his own, with a few other artists, they formed Image Comics. There Todd brought a teenage idea, a character named Spawn, to life. With his own company, and full creative control, Spawn went on to outsell the classic characters issues he had worked on earlier. He later took Spawn to Hollywood, for a couple of series. When he couldn't find the right partner to make toys for Spawn and other Image characters, he started his own toy company. Todd's continued work of breaking new ground usually started with a simple question, "Can we make this look cooler?"
Here's good video showing how you throw a cool shaped vase on a potter's wheel. When I was in high school, my friend Darrin and I always sat down at the wheel aiming to throw something like this. It didn't always work.
In my junior year at Boise High School, my best friend Darrin took pottery class. I didn't. Drafting was my "easy A" class that year. Darrin got really into pottery. By the second semester, the teacher would let him go into the pottery room at lunch and throw pots when no one else was there. Being his best friend, I started tagging along. We'd talk about whatever was on our minds as I watched him throw a pot.
After a few days, he showed me how to knead the air bubbles out of a lump of clay, and I started messing around, building things out of clay on a table, as he threw pots on a wheel. In another week or so, he showed me the basics of throwing a pot, starting with how to put the clay on the wheel, center it, and push the hole in the center. I got that down. Within a couple of weeks, I began throwing small pots myself, usually tearing them off the wheel, and tossing them in the pug mill. That's a machine where we threw extra clay, and things that didn't work. The machine recycled it into new clay.
By the end of our junior year, I was throwing pots at lunch that I could pass off as mediocre first year pottery student pots. Since I wasn't in the class, and hadn't paid the materials fee, technically I wasn't supposed to do that. But I took home a few small pots before I even took the class. I signed up for pottery my senior year, and Darrin and I often went in at lunch to throw extra pots. We both wound up making whiskey jugs that we sold to mountain men for $5 each. Those were the guys who dressed up as old time mountain men, and had big rendezvous up in the mountains, where they'd throw tomahawks, shoot muzzle loading rifles, drink whiskey from handmade jugs, and have a good ol' time for the weekend.
As Darrin and I talked about pottery, we thought up more ideas to try. We started sketching ideas for different shapes of vases in our school notebooks. Every day when we sat down at the wheel, we had some really cool vase in our head. That was our goal. But clay seems to have a mind of its own at times. Sometimes we'd pull the cylinder up too high, it would get wobbly, and fall over. Sometimes it would get too wet, and collapse. Other times we'd just make a movement that would send the pot off center, and screw it up.
No matter the outcome, it was always fun to sit down at the wheel to throw. Sometimes we ended with a cool pot, sitting on the wheel to dry, and later fire and glaze. Sometimes we'd completely screw up, and scrape all the clay off the wheel with a little piece of fishing line, cutting the lump remaining clear from the wheel. We came to the conclusion that there was no failure when throwing pots. If we screwed up, there was a next step, and a step after that. Here are our classifications of the results of a sitting at the potter's wheel.
One- A vase. Bottlenecks were the hardest for us to throw well, and one with a great looking profile was the goal.
Two- A spittoon. Not as cool as a vase, but something we could glaze and take home.
Three- A bowl. Much lamer than a spittoon, but if it was a decent size, it could still be something to fire, glaze, and take home.
Four- A ashtray. Lots of people still smoked in the 80's. Not hard to make, but still something to take home, and we could always find a smoker who wanted a free ashtray.
Five- A learning experience. Even if we wound up with nothing, and scraped all the clay off the wheel, it still didn't feel like a failure. It was just fun to sit down and throw, even when there was nothing to show for it.
In the years after, when I got really into BMX freestyle, along with my skater friends, it was the same thing. Even if we didn't invent or land a new trick, it was still fun to get out and ride or skate. I think the same idea applies to all creative work. Some days you wind up with something really cool, some days you wind up with a learning experience. Most days you wind up with something in between.
But it was still good to sit down and write, draw, paint, play music, freestyle, skate, snowboard, or just do something creative. As worst, it's always a learning experience. If you go at creative work with this attitude, you spend a lot less time beating yourself up when things don't work out exactly as you planned. You just call it a learning experience, and move on, to try and create again.
