The famous creator of Spawn and writer/artist on Spider-Man, and so much more is now a regular contributor to comics site Broken Frontier. The Image co-founder speaks about his gig on the Image series Haunt, the absence of long-term creative runs these days, and more in his first column right here. Here’s a snippet that’s sure to cause a stir in fanboy circles:

But for me, I don’t think and never believed you needed to define everything about a character within the first 10 issues or so.  I actually think it’s a detriment at times.  If you give the complete origin and background and motivation to a character in the first three issues, then What are you doing with the next 60 or 70 issues?

This is why Superman was never really that interesting to me.  He came out of the womb perfect, he was perfect, and he kept acting perfect.  Now keep that going for 500 issues.  It’s entertaining to a certain extent, but I would never name him in my top 10 heroes.  There were no flaws, no inconsistencies, and it never seemed like his character ever grew much.  He was prebuilt right from the get go, there was no mystery to him.

That argument is also one of the reasons why Wolverine was so popular in my heyday of collecting: we were screaming for more answers.  “What’s his origin?  Who does he belong to?  Why won’t you ever talk about him instead of Phoenix and Cyclops?!!”  And Marvel kept with that and after a while he became the most popular member of the X-Men because, in part because they were able to make his story engaging for a long time before they actually spilled the beans on him.

I’m hoping that Haunt has that same mystery about him where people don’t get to issue #15 and think they know all the answers. Because then it would devolve into superheroes punching each other for 60 more issues.

February 13, 2010
Categories: Interviews, News . Tags: Haunt, Image, Todd McFarlane . Author: Kris Bather . Comments: Leave a comment