Todd McFarlane Leaves Bankruptcy, Miracleman Fighting Valiently To Remain Dead

Hide your baseballs, kids: Todd McFarlane’s out of bankruptcy.

Todd’s company, Todd McFarlane Productions, voluntarily declared bankruptcy back in 2004, and only an irresponsible fool would imply that it had anything to do with Neil Gaiman’s lawsuit against Todd over the rights to Medieval Spawn, Angela, and Cogliostro. That suit was reportedly settled back in January, so all that was left to put the company back into the Black Ink was to pay some assorted costs to cover odds and ends totalling $975.

Oh, and an afterthought check to Gaiman for an even million-one.

Back Into Hell: Spawn #218 Review

Let’s start by me coming clean: I don’t read Spawn. I’ve never read Spawn. I might be the only comics enthusiast who was actively reading back in 1992 who doesn’t have a dusty polybagged copy of Spawn #1 tucked in the back of some yellowing longbox somewhere. This is because, while Spawn #1 had the four words most likely to Pavlovianly excite any early 90s comics fan – “Art by Todd McFarlane” – it also contained one of the worst four-word curses in late 80s / early 90s comics: “Written by Todd McFarlane.”

However, I am familiar with Spawn thanks to the movie and the HBO animated series: Al Simmons, former special forces soldier, is murdered and returns to life imbued with the power of the Hellspawn. Spawn lives as a homeless person, defending the local winos and pining for his former wife, while forces of good and evil war over his soul. I think; Spawn aired on HBO on Friday nights, and it was the rare Friday in the 1990s that were conducive to my ability to form long term memories.

So, armed with that common knowledge, I returned to Spawn with issue 218 for the first time… well, ever, really. So I cracked the book, dove in and…

I have absolutely no fucking idea what’s going on. This, however, is not necessarily a terrible thing.

Kimota! (Don’t Sue Me!): Gaiman / McFarlane Lawsuit Reportedly Settled

It is (almost) official: the long-running lawsuit between Neil Gaiman and Todd McFarlane over the rights to Spawn characters Angela, Medieval Spawn, and Cogliostro that Gaiman wrote into Spawn back in the early 90s is over. I don’t know what’s harder to believe: that this mess has been going on for just about ten years… or that there was once a time when someone thought that Spawn characters had value.

The long, twisted and complete tale is available elsewhere at more reputable Web sites, but in a very incomplete, semi-biased and opinion-laden nutshell written mostly from booze-addled memory: in the early 90s, McFarlane was probably the hottest artist in comics, so he decided that he would take a shot at doing the stories as well. But there was a problem: at the time, he shouldn’t have been allowed to write anything longer than his own name. Seriously: have you read Spider-Man #1? Constant drum sound effects of DOOM, DOOM, DOOM; it reads like it’s being told from the point of view of a twitching boner.