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Todd McFarlane is obsessed with ‘the back door’ — which is what he calls the key to finding your way into your ideal situation, even if it’s not the most obvious way people would think of. Speaking at San Diego Comic-Con 2025, he explained what he believes is the back door for comic creators to find long-lasting success outside of working on established Marvel or DC characters... although it’s certainly not a short cut.

“The back door is you go and do your book,” McFarlane explained. “You do 40 [or] 50 issues of it. You sell it outside of the bubble, in Hollywood [and]  cross your fingers and hope it goes, and then you get to basically reap the benefits of your own library, right?”

His example of doing this right? It’s not himself, despite more than three decades (and a movie, and an animated series) of Spawn; it’s actually his Image Comics partner Robert Kirkman.

“Kirkman had about 120 [issues] when The Walking Dead blew up, but he got to exploit his work, right? Doing two or three issues of your book, and then being big in Hollywood — you're not gonna be able to exploit two issues,” he reasoned. “That's why I keep telling my peers, you gotta do you gotta do 20, 30, 40 — my number is 50 — you gotta do 50 books, so that if it ever takes off, you've got 50 books you get to exploit, because you're gonna have to give your rights away. What you get to keep is saying, ‘I keep all my publishing [rights],’ and they hopefully spend tens of millions of dollars to get the whole world to know your brand. Then you reprint your stuff all day long. That's the trick. That's the trick today. It's doable, but you gotta have a library.”

The moral of this story is, admittedly, that comic creators need to work on their comics for years and also manage to sell the adaptation rights to television or movie studios… but, as Todd McFarlane points out: it’s worked before, so why shouldn’t it work again?

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