AI transcript
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0:04:19 Can I ask you a personal question?
0:04:21 No, I just need an appropriate time.
0:04:25 I’m a cyber-nerdy organism living this year over a metal
0:04:26 endoskeleton.
0:04:37 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs.
0:04:38 This is Tim Ferriss.
0:04:41 Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show where it is
0:04:44 my job to sit down with world-class performers from
0:04:47 every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines,
0:04:50 favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in
0:04:51 your own lives.
0:04:55 This episode is a two-for-one and that’s because the podcast
0:04:58 recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane
0:05:01 to think about, and past one billion downloads.
0:05:05 To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best,
0:05:09 some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the
0:05:09 last decade.
0:05:13 I could not be more excited to give you these super combo
0:05:16 episodes and internally we’ve been calling these the super
0:05:19 combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to yes,
0:05:22 enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to
0:05:27 also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars.
0:05:30 These are people who have transformed my life and I
0:05:32 feel like they can do the same for many of you.
0:05:35 Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle.
0:05:36 Perhaps you missed an episode.
0:05:40 Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put
0:05:44 these pairings together and for the bios of all guests,
0:05:49 you can find that and more at tim.blog/combo and now
0:05:53 without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for
0:05:53 listening.
0:05:59 First up, Nassim Nikolas Taleb bestselling author of
0:06:04 Anti-Fragile, the Black Swan, fooled by randomness, the bed
0:06:07 of Procrustes and skin in the game.
0:06:11 Nassim is joined in this conversation by Scott Patterson
0:06:15 Wall Street Journal investigative reporter and author
0:06:19 of Chaos Kings, how Wall Street traders make billions
0:06:21 in the new age of crisis.
0:06:27 You can find Nassim on Twitter at NNTaleb and you can find
0:06:30 Scott on Twitter at Patterson Scott.
0:06:36 Is it true that you wrote a resignation letter your first
0:06:39 day at a trading job and put it in your desk drawer?
0:06:40 I read this on the internet.
0:06:41 I don’t know if it’s true.
0:06:43 You can’t believe everything you read, but it was from
0:06:44 the Guardian.
0:06:45 So I thought it might be credible.
0:06:49 One thing is actually, as I said, I recommend people do
0:06:49 that.
0:06:53 I wrote that but not on the day I started, but I recommended
0:06:57 that people, because you feel relief when you do it because
0:07:01 then you can continue on your job without feeling like
0:07:02 someone’s controlling you.
0:07:03 You’ve got the gun loaded.
0:07:06 The whole idea, Flanby, you thought about that problem.
0:07:10 So you write the resignation letter and you don’t date it.
0:07:18 I’m very fascinated by your ways of thinking, the way that
0:07:20 you’ve embraced different philosophies.
0:07:25 And you emailed me an aphorism in 2010 and you can correct
0:07:28 me if I get any of the wording wrong, but it stuck with me.
0:07:31 This is in 2010.
0:07:35 Here’s the aphorism of the quote, “Robustness is when you
0:07:38 care more about the few who like your work than the multitude
0:07:38 who hates it.”
0:07:41 And then in parentheses, artists fragility is when you care
0:07:44 more about the few who hate your work than the multitude
0:07:45 who loves it.
0:07:47 And then in quotation marks, politicians.
0:07:54 Have you always had that type of robustness or resilience
0:07:55 against criticism?
0:07:57 Is that something that is inborn?
0:08:02 Maybe because I was never really someone who took, you know,
0:08:04 established ideas at face value.
0:08:09 So you necessarily have, you know, it violates some norms,
0:08:10 some thinking norms.
0:08:15 And often people protect those norms by, you know, attacking
0:08:16 your reputation.
0:08:19 And I realized that while writing food by randomness, I say,
0:08:22 “Hey, you’re saying that what I’m doing is random or using
0:08:22 wrong models.
0:08:23 These don’t work.”
0:08:24 So they attack your reputation.
0:08:28 So I realized quickly, it was time that my reputation was
0:08:30 going to be under some kind of fire.
0:08:35 And I decided that, no, my reputation is how few important
0:08:40 people or people who know something about the subject view
0:08:40 me.
0:08:43 And it’s not like I don’t care about my reputation.
0:08:45 I only care about my reputation in some circles.
0:08:51 And it was people I can talk to to try to explain what it’s
0:08:53 about and has worked out.
0:08:57 So if you have to go defend your reputation and you’re doing
0:09:01 the right thing, it’s too much energy wasted and it’s not going
0:09:01 to help.
0:09:03 Haters are not going to hate.
0:09:06 This resembles another aphorism inspired by Charlie
0:09:12 Munger’s, that you want to be the most ethical person where
0:09:15 people think that you’re corrupt or you’re the most corrupt
0:09:18 person where people think that you’re ethical.
0:09:22 Make your choice and use that as guideline.
0:09:23 That’s the same thing.
0:09:26 So except there’s something in between is that there’s some
0:09:30 people I care about and I want to not lose respect for me.
0:09:34 Of course, you start with your mother, you have your children
0:09:36 or whatever your family members.
0:09:39 But there are also a lot of people on the planet and I care
0:09:43 about my reputation, but in these circles, not with the
0:09:43 general public.
0:09:46 So it allows you to take much, much more aggressive positions
0:09:50 which I’ve done over the long life and Mark, for example,
0:09:53 has a lot of enemies and they’re going to pick on something.
0:09:54 You don’t care.
0:09:55 You don’t do the right things.
0:09:57 And how do you know you’re doing the right thing?
0:10:03 If people, you respect, approve of your action, not if the
0:10:04 general public does.
0:10:08 What are some of the things that make the same different or
0:10:10 unique in those you’ve interacted with?
0:10:13 I have some of my own questions and thoughts on this, but I
0:10:14 wouldn’t love to hear yours.
0:10:16 He mentioned his contrarian nature.
0:10:18 It’s not a contrarian nature.
0:10:19 It’s independent.
0:10:21 So you gotta be in line with it.
0:10:22 I mean, people say I’m contrarian.
0:10:25 I’m with a conspiracy theorist on many of the things.
0:10:27 I’m against them on many other things.
0:10:30 Some are just contrarian because they have a father problem.
0:10:36 So to me, contrarian is an explicit rather than attribute.
0:10:39 So, but the other thing is I thought it’s gonna be about me.
0:10:41 It should be about the idea, the precaution.
0:10:46 He’s a lot more interested in literature and philosophy and
0:10:48 not financial.
0:10:50 I just think it drives him.
0:10:54 He doesn’t look at the stock market page, you know, every
0:10:56 day, like some people do.
0:10:56 He’s done it.
0:10:58 You have to figure out what people envious of.
0:11:04 So, you know, if you’re in a hedge fund business and you
0:11:07 have $500 million in a bank and someone else has $600 million
0:11:08 is gonna be envious of that person.
0:11:12 I was always envious of people had more erudition than me.
0:11:13 Okay.
0:11:14 So more erudites.
0:11:16 And you realize that that’s what makes me tick.
0:11:18 Being envious is not good.
0:11:22 You see, but at the same time, if you figure out who you
0:11:25 tend to envy, I don’t believe in this.
0:11:26 They say, oh, people having enough.
0:11:29 There’s someone here from East Hampton, the fellow who
0:11:30 wrote cash 22.
0:11:32 A lot of interesting folks out there.
0:11:35 Yeah, he met a financier at the time for hedge funds.
0:11:40 And the financier said, what is it that about you?
0:11:42 Because he was an author, a very successful one.
0:11:46 What is it that distinguishes you from me?
0:11:49 He told him, I know the meaning of enough.
0:11:53 So in other words, you know, you’re upper bound and effectively
0:11:58 I don’t play that game, meaning I may am literally and I say
0:11:59 envious of people who are erudites.
0:12:04 Like if someone knows Latin very well, I’m envious.
0:12:07 If someone knows Sanskrit, I’m envious.
0:12:07 All right.
0:12:09 And I discovered that early on.
0:12:12 So I made money on Wall Street because I wanted to make money
0:12:15 on Wall Street, but I didn’t think it was worth the effort.
0:12:17 And luckily he was a combination of the universe.
0:12:21 I had so much leverage, you know, was marketing all the stuff.
0:12:24 So the spillover on me was more than satisfactory.
0:12:26 So I have knock on the wood a lot more than I wished.
0:12:29 So part of the reason I’m asking, we’re talking about the ideas,
0:12:33 but the person who’s acting as the vessel or communicator of
0:12:36 these ideas, the developer of these ideas is integrally related
0:12:40 to, I think, the sort of totality that I want to explore.
0:12:44 So part of what interests me about your story and your thinking
0:12:48 is how various inputs have impacted your thinking around
0:12:50 not just markets, but other things.
0:12:56 For instance, like the Stoics and the Seneca the Younger and so
0:12:58 on or other philosophical inputs.
0:13:01 Did those come early and then aid you?
0:13:06 You think in your career when you were active in the markets
0:13:09 or did those come later and you sort of always had a deep
0:13:13 interest, but were able to explore them at a later point?
0:13:16 It’s actually, I was, I started liking the Stoics and all those
0:13:19 people I talk about, I like them much early on in my life.
0:13:23 But I went overboard for every idea I’ve had.
0:13:27 I did the exact opposite of what one should do is like if you
0:13:29 had an idea, say, oh, I had this idea, right?
0:13:32 Because I don’t consider myself so different from others.
0:13:36 And then particularly when you look at history is so many
0:13:38 10,000 scholars surviving works.
0:13:44 So I went back and figured out of these scholars who had similar
0:13:46 ideas or who preceded the ideas.
0:13:48 So and who start things like that.
0:13:53 So I went into the the empirics, the Eastern Mediterranean,
0:13:57 Greco, Levantine, Greco-Roman mostly using Greek language
0:13:58 thinkers.
0:14:02 And then of course, and to others, this fundamental skepticism
0:14:05 because I noticed a lot of people are skeptical, particularly
0:14:06 conspiracy theories.
0:14:08 They’re skeptical of small things.
0:14:10 But not about big ones.
0:14:11 All right.
0:14:12 They get taken for a ride.
0:14:15 It’s find me a conspiracy theorist or find me someone who’s
0:14:17 naturally skeptic of all things.
0:14:18 And I show you a turkey.
0:14:22 So I wanted to find people who are fundamentally skeptic,
0:14:24 being skeptic, and being skeptic about important things,
0:14:25 not about small things.
0:14:27 Because it would be an example of a big thing.
0:14:29 Let me give you an example.
0:14:30 I wrote a paper.
0:14:34 It never ended up in a book on the stock market and religion.
0:14:34 All right.
0:14:37 It’s called The Bishop and the Economist.
0:14:41 And I said that those who are skeptical about the existence
0:14:46 of God, skeptical about religious matters, typically tend
0:14:49 to be complete suckers when it comes to stocks.
0:14:52 They believe in a stock market or believe in some kind of pseudo
0:14:55 scientific theory on whatever it is.
0:14:55 Okay.
0:14:59 So, but they don’t believe in religion and the reverse.
0:14:59 All right.
0:15:03 And people who are religious typically, they’re harder and
0:15:05 there’s some research on that.
0:15:08 There’s a guy called Bar Lahmi, Bar Halahmi, I think,
0:15:11 who did some studies about skepticism of people who go to
0:15:13 religion about affairs, skepticism of where it matters.
0:15:15 And I wrote about it, I think, in the Black Swan.
0:15:17 So skepticism of where it matters.
0:15:21 And I noticed that a lot of these big skeptics were not
0:15:24 skeptical of God and things that we can’t do anything about.
0:15:27 They were skeptical of the charlatan, the skeptical of
0:15:29 someone trying to take advantage of you.
0:15:32 That’s where you exercise your skepticism.
0:15:35 Among the great skeptics, there is a bishop UAE.
0:15:39 He was probably one of the second most erudite person of his
0:15:39 time.
0:15:41 Second was there’s a guy called Scaliger.
0:15:42 He’s a guy’s phenomenal.
0:15:48 He could translate into Arabic, Roman authors, Latin authors,
0:15:48 and vice versa.
0:15:49 Okay.
0:15:51 Scaliger, Scaligeri.
0:15:53 There are a lot of the, Pierre Bale.
0:15:56 Pierre Bale has a lot of works.
0:15:58 He’s one of those skeptics.
0:16:01 Hume was one of the skeptics, but these people preceded Hume.
0:16:05 Hume is known because he wrote in a language of a country that
0:16:08 had a lot of ships and a lot of trade, you know, across the
0:16:08 world.
0:16:13 But a lot of these ideas came from groups of people in
0:16:15 France or among Protestants in France.
0:16:19 It was called the Anaphideists originates, of course, in
0:16:19 Levant.
0:16:22 And of course, you have the great Al-Ghazel, the Islamic
0:16:27 theologian, Iranian origin, who definitely was showing you
0:16:31 how all these arguments are weak, you know, could
0:16:34 dismantle arguments by showing you would be skeptical about
0:16:36 human arguments about God.
0:16:40 I think it’s Spinoza is coming out of that same tradition.
0:16:44 He was skeptical about the text that was these people say,
0:16:46 okay, trust Sandy’s text.
0:16:47 Okay.
0:16:48 Be skeptical about things that really matter.
0:16:50 And there was actually a skeptical school of medicine,
0:16:51 practicing medicine.
0:16:52 So what?
0:16:54 I went back through history.
0:16:57 Every time I’ve had an idea, I would go back and see in
0:16:59 history who preceded me.
0:17:04 And sure enough, I haven’t done enough because every year
0:17:06 or so I get letter from someone.
0:17:08 Hey, how come you missed so and so?
0:17:10 Okay.
0:17:12 And sure enough, I go back to the inserto and I add that
0:17:16 person and this is why it has survived the five books,
0:17:19 the inserto, but we’re not here to talk about these five
0:17:20 books with this book.
0:17:23 Well, we’re going to talk about whatever comes up,
0:17:28 but I do want to hop over to you, Scott and maybe discuss
0:17:32 something that you had shared with me as a possible bullet
0:17:36 in the prep stages for this conversation, which is related
0:17:40 to poly crisis and the new age of crisis.
0:17:42 What does this refer to?
0:17:45 It’s the subtitle of my book.
0:17:48 Most people have focused on the first part of the subtitle
0:17:50 is how Wall Street traders make billions.
0:17:53 Second part is in the new age of crisis.
0:17:56 I feel like that hasn’t gotten that much attention,
0:18:01 but part of what I’m trying to argue is that we are seeing
0:18:06 a magnification of extreme events accelerating and overlapping.
0:18:10 There’s an economist Adam twos whose coin of phrase called
0:18:14 the poly crisis, which he says these crises that are happening
0:18:19 on a global scale are interacting in ways that the whole
0:18:22 becomes greater and worse than the sum of the parts.
0:18:26 So you’ve got pandemics, you’ve got economic instability,
0:18:31 financial crises, climate change, which is a big focus of
0:18:34 mind in my daily job at the journal, which I think is sort
0:18:40 of the big one in terms of the ever magnification of crises
0:18:41 that we’re seeing.
0:18:42 We’re seeing it in the news every day.
0:18:48 And what I wanted to do in the book is look at several of
0:18:54 these crises and think about how we should be approaching them
0:18:59 in a sort of a risk mitigation standpoint using ideas from
0:19:00 people like Naseem.
0:19:03 I think that the central idea was as I was talking about the
0:19:09 germ of the idea of the book was can you take ideas that
0:19:14 were created on Wall Street for risk mitigation and borrow
0:19:18 those and apply those to other forms of risk management.
0:19:24 And what Naseem and Mark do is they think about the extreme
0:19:27 events and how to protect against them.
0:19:31 Naseem co-wrote a paper about this exact issue called the
0:19:32 precautionary principle.
0:19:37 It delineates specific categories of risk that you
0:19:39 should take the precautionary principle and apply it to.
0:19:43 He has some specific ideas and he can talk about it way better
0:19:46 than I can, but you know, these are things that can be global
0:19:49 that represent systemic risk to humanity.
0:19:51 Things that can be exponential.
0:19:55 Must be fat-tailed or exponential things that have these
0:20:00 properties that you need to take extreme precaution and not
0:20:00 take that risk.
0:20:03 Basically don’t play Russian roulette with these risks.
0:20:07 And that’s kind of how the book was structured was first
0:20:11 looking at the growth of the strategy with Mark and Naseem
0:20:15 and then moving on to these other things that the world is
0:20:19 facing and seeing if we could think about ways to protect
0:20:20 against these risks.
0:20:22 Something like climate change.
0:20:24 You don’t really want to mess with that.
0:20:27 You know, it’s a bit too late, but there’s still lots of
0:20:28 things that we can do.
0:20:31 And that’s I think the book in a nutshell.
0:20:34 It was going to mention earlier when you asked me about
0:20:35 the birth of the idea of the book.
0:20:39 When I first suggested it to Naseem and Mark, Naseem said,
0:20:43 “No way, I have no interest in doing that with you.”
0:20:44 It took a while.
0:20:47 And then you were like, “I have these black in my photos.
0:20:48 You might want to tickle again.”
0:20:49 So Ad, you can do it.
0:20:53 It was, it warmed down.
0:20:57 I think it was more Mark put the screws on.
0:20:58 No, no, no.
0:20:59 Let me tell you what happened.
0:21:00 I actually don’t know.
0:21:02 I know that eventually he said.
0:21:05 I extracted the promise from him to not be portrayed to
0:21:10 mention that I don’t self-identify as a finance person.
0:21:15 And once he made that promise, said, “Okay, now we can talk
0:21:18 because finance represents a significant part of my life.”
0:21:19 But I don’t want.
0:21:21 This isn’t a theme with Naseem ever since I’ve known him.
0:21:23 So to me, it was like.
0:21:24 The identity piece.
0:21:26 Yeah, that he’s not a trader.
0:21:29 And I thought, I agreed because it’s true.
0:21:34 It’s, he’s not been a trader for a long, long time.
0:21:37 And it’s obvious where his interests are.
0:21:40 What would it mean or feel like for you to be broadly
0:21:45 identified as a finance person, but to think of yourself more
0:21:46 as a scholar?
0:21:48 I wrote about it in “Foodbar Randomness.”
0:21:51 George Soros and I met George Soros and one of the persons
0:21:53 on the planet will press me the most, one of those.
0:21:58 And I realized that George Soros missed his career.
0:22:01 He wanted to be a philosopher and a thinker.
0:22:03 Okay.
0:22:06 He ended up making money and spending too much time in it
0:22:08 and wrote drunk articles and books.
0:22:09 Or I think one book.
0:22:13 So yeah, it was not, it was not what he wanted out of life.
0:22:13 Okay.
0:22:17 He’s a middle European intellectual who would have liked to
0:22:21 be remembered as someone for ideas.
0:22:25 And he, of course, Carl Popper, who he claims was a professor,
0:22:26 but it was beyond.
0:22:29 So I wrote about “Foodbar Randomness.”
0:22:33 I said, here’s his fellow who was, say, okay, but he also
0:22:35 does to distinguish himself from other financiers.
0:22:39 He’s also, or has intellectual aims.
0:22:40 I said, I don’t want to be that.
0:22:46 I want to be someone who produces intellectual work and who
0:22:50 happens to have had contact with reality thanks to trading.
0:22:54 And thanks to Mark, guys, I’m still have some contact with reality.
0:22:56 But I’m not cut for that.
0:22:59 When I was writing “Foodbar Randomness,” it was 2019 that
0:23:04 I realized I was not, I don’t want to be like Soros because
0:23:07 unlike Buffett and the other people, Soros had an identity
0:23:08 crisis.
0:23:10 He wants to be known as a philosopher.
0:23:10 Okay.
0:23:12 It’s a life to control of him.
0:23:13 He didn’t.
0:23:15 Buffett told me he wanted to write a book.
0:23:19 I used to cover him and I was leaving the journal at the time
0:23:20 to write my second book.
0:23:24 And he was like, oh, I really always wanted to write a book.
0:23:25 I never got around to it.
0:23:28 So there you go with, you know, the Oracle of Omaha.
0:23:29 Yeah.
0:23:31 He wants to be thought of as an intellectual too.
0:23:32 What?
0:23:33 I mean, this is not the same.
0:23:34 Not the same.
0:23:35 The same Soros.
0:23:39 Omaha has something that I didn’t put in a precautionary principle,
0:23:42 but that’s probably very inspiring because he understood the asymmetry.
0:23:47 If you say no a thousand times, he says no, if you doubt.
0:23:49 And that’s the precautionary principle.
0:23:54 Could you give people the precautionary principle one-on-one just to back
0:23:54 up?
0:23:55 Okay.
0:23:55 Let me ask you.
0:24:00 You’re the first flying to go to Mexico.
0:24:03 You go to JFK and they tell you they have uncertainty.
0:24:06 About the skills of the pilot.
0:24:08 But we think he’s good, but there’s uncertainty.
0:24:09 What do you do?
0:24:13 You’re not going to get on that plane and say, okay, life is too important for me.
0:24:18 You’ll take a train, you walk, maybe you’ll ride a bicycle, you know,
0:24:20 take a few months, but you’re not going to get on that plane.
0:24:21 Okay.
0:24:24 You change your plans and say, okay, there are other plans or other countries too
0:24:25 and other planes.
0:24:28 So that’s Warren Buffett with his investments.
0:24:30 And that’s my precaution principle.
0:24:34 The idea that there’s an asymmetry is that uncertainty about certain things is
0:24:35 not good.
0:24:40 So the climate, for example, if you have uncertainty about the climate, stop these
0:24:41 models.
0:24:41 All right.
0:24:42 Just don’t pollute.
0:24:44 You’ve got to use something else.
0:24:45 Try to mitigate.
0:24:47 So that’s the first part of it.
0:24:50 People get it right away when I give them a story of plane or I take water.
0:24:52 So this is the last one on the table.
0:24:54 There’s no evidence that it’s poisonous.
0:24:56 Would you drink it?
0:24:59 No, there’s no evidence.
0:25:03 Yeah, there’s no evidence that so, but when you tell them, Hey, you know,
0:25:04 you should worry about GMOs.
0:25:05 This is, there’s no evidence they’re harmful.
0:25:08 Yeah, but there’s no evidence that they’re not harmful.
0:25:09 Okay.
0:25:13 So the asymmetry where you put the burden of the asymmetry on, that’s a precaution
0:25:14 principle.
0:25:17 But then what we did is we’ve noticed a lot of people.
0:25:20 In fact, it was a counter precaution principle because a lot of people were
0:25:23 invoking it for nothing to say we’re going to have a non-native precaution
0:25:30 principle by delineating the areas where you should exercise such precaution
0:25:34 systematically as a planet or as a communal group.
0:25:35 And what are they?
0:25:38 Number one, you need fat tails.
0:25:40 Now, what does fat tail mean?
0:25:41 Let me explain to you.
0:25:43 Let’s say you go to planet Mars.
0:25:44 Okay.
0:25:46 Elon would help you get in there.
0:25:50 You have connection and you have no news from Earth.
0:25:54 And then on the way back, you hear that a billion people died.
0:25:55 Okay.
0:26:03 Which one is more likely to be the cause Ebola or car accidents?
0:26:04 Ebola.
0:26:10 Now, on a given day, if you hear Joe Smith died today, what’s more like
0:26:11 the Ebola or a car accident?
0:26:12 Car accident.
0:26:13 Car accident.
0:26:14 That’s fat tails.
0:26:14 Fat tails.
0:26:18 You had to identify things backwards.
0:26:20 If you hear the big thing, where’d it come from?
0:26:21 And you had to get these.
0:26:22 Okay.
0:26:25 So they have different dynamics because of scale differently.
0:26:30 So in the black swan, I showed the difference with the following metaphor.
0:26:35 There are environments where you may have a large deviation.
0:26:38 It’s not going to be consequential because it can’t be very big.
0:26:42 So if I take a thousand people and put them on a scale and add to
0:26:46 that sample, the largest human being confined on the planet, how
0:26:48 much of the total will he or she represent?
0:26:50 It’s 30 basis point.
0:26:50 Nothing.
0:26:51 Okay.
0:26:54 And then if you go from a thousand to 10,000, that lose completely.
0:26:55 So you can have a tail event.
0:26:58 That’s not going to be consequential.
0:27:00 Extremistan is different.
0:27:04 Extremistan, if you gather a thousand people and add to that sample, the
0:27:09 wealthiest person on the planet, how much of the total will he or she represent?
0:27:10 All of it.
0:27:11 There’d be a running error.
0:27:12 There’d be running error.
0:27:15 I mean, there’d be on average on the planet Earth, right?
0:27:19 There’d be in total, maybe they have two or three million in total.
0:27:21 And then you have a hundred and some billion right next to it.
0:27:24 So this is where you have to focus on environment that produces fat tails.
0:27:26 And this is what market is, is universal.
0:27:31 Inversa is named after the universal mechanism that generates fat tails.
0:27:32 That was the name.
0:27:36 So everything, we’re in it basically intellectually, everything in all details.
0:27:40 So you have to identify what produces fat tails in the financial
0:27:43 markets and why it’s getting thicker.
0:27:46 Fat tails means that you have the greatest contribution comes
0:27:47 from smallest number of events.
0:27:51 So concentration, like, for example, you have a lot of people.
0:27:52 All the wealths come from one person.
0:27:58 It’s so happened that under fat tails, the models that we use for risk
0:28:02 management on Wall Street, RBS, this is why I have a lot of enemies.
0:28:05 This is why I have to protect myself against reputational damage.
0:28:06 All right.
0:28:10 So because all the economy saved me, all their models are based on that.
0:28:11 So what is fat tails?
0:28:14 Practically everything in socioeconomic life is fat tailed.
0:28:16 What is not fat tailed?
0:28:18 Number of calories we’re going to eat tonight.
0:28:21 How many calories can we have in one day tonight?
0:28:22 We can only go for the gold.
0:28:26 I’d say, I’d say we could each down a few thousand calories a piece.
0:28:27 Two thousand, two thousand.
0:28:28 Say I go three thousand for me.
0:28:29 All right.
0:28:31 I can play with fat and stuff.
0:28:31 Three thousand.
0:28:32 That’s nothing.
0:28:34 How many calories do I consume a year?
0:28:36 Yeah, it’s not a single day is going to make a difference.
0:28:38 Can you lose all your money in a single day?
0:28:39 Yes.
0:28:40 There we go.
0:28:42 So you have two environment and they’re separable.
0:28:46 So this is why the universal approach, it makes things separable.
0:28:49 The fact that you can identify what is fat tailed.
0:28:51 You identify where models don’t work.
0:28:54 You can identify where you have to understand and we have to use more refined
0:28:57 tools to figure out stuff.
0:29:01 And then also in fatness of tails, number one, pandemics.
0:29:06 Number two wars are close, close second wars and pandemics.
0:29:06 Okay.
0:29:11 And so you can use that to prioritize application of the precautionary principle
0:29:12 or bingo.
0:29:18 And let me tell you how, for example, if cancer is thin tails, nuclear,
0:29:21 thin tail, if you can diversify it, it’s thin tails.
0:29:24 If you can have a thousand nuclear reactors, all right.
0:29:28 If you can ensure it, or rather than one, it is thin tailed.
0:29:30 If you can ensure it, it’s thin tailed.
0:29:33 If you can ensure it, not insurable fat tails.
0:29:37 So a lot of things that are believed to be very risky, but they’re
0:29:39 not like nuclear for me.
0:29:43 I mean, not for one of my co-authors, but I’ll settle it with a beer or
0:29:44 what’s in English.
0:29:50 Rupert Reed is a co-author of and also a major character in the book.
0:29:52 He’s a very environmentally focused person.
0:29:55 He’s a leader in climate these days.
0:30:00 And yeah, he told me that’s one thing that he disputed the precautionary
0:30:04 principle paper, which was written with him first, drinking, you know,
0:30:11 in English pub in somewhere in Northern England, where the portions
0:30:15 are like smaller than what they give you for espresso in Italy.
0:30:17 You know, the espresso that you sip up.
0:30:21 So we had to have like, again, it’s like you and the eggs, all right.
0:30:25 So to go back to the insurable, we don’t have to worry about it.
0:30:29 And a very simple example I give that when Ebola started or later on
0:30:32 when COVID started, people using the arguments, yeah, you know,
0:30:36 3,000 Americans die every year drowning in a swimming pool.
0:30:38 That was something by the guy called Dr. Phil.
0:30:41 Should we shut down pools at a time less than a thousand Americans
0:30:43 had died of COVID?
0:30:45 And then I followed this, presented the following argument.
0:30:51 I said, if I die drowning in a swimming pool, my neighbor drowning
0:30:54 in her or his swimming pool has not changed.
0:30:59 If I die of COVID, the odds of my neighbor dying of COVID has increased.
0:31:01 So we had that transmission that makes it fat tail.
0:31:03 That mechanism of transmission.
0:31:08 So this is why you cannot compare as basically the press in the beginning,
0:31:12 the so-called established press was against our ideas.
0:31:14 Because it was racist against China.
0:31:19 They could not distinguish between risks of car accidents and heart
0:31:22 attacks and risks of things spreading.
0:31:25 This is why, for example, I am in favor of vaccines.
0:31:29 The risk is sin tailed and I’m against GMOs because they spread
0:31:30 in the environment.
0:31:36 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be
0:31:37 right back to the show.
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0:32:46 Tim for 20% off.
0:32:56 And now, Todd McFarlane, Emmy and Grammy winning director and
0:33:02 producer, co-creator of Marvel’s top villain Venom, co-founder of
0:33:06 Image Comics and creator of Spawn, one of the world’s best
0:33:10 selling comic books and one that earned Todd the Guinness
0:33:14 World Record for longest running creator owned superhero comic
0:33:15 book series.
0:33:20 You can find Todd on Instagram at Todd McFarlane.
0:33:23 Todd, welcome to the show.
0:33:24 Nice to see you.
0:33:25 Tim, thanks for having me this morning.
0:33:26 Appreciate it.
0:33:29 And I thought we could start with a confession on my side
0:33:33 which is ever since I was a kid and to this day, I still have
0:33:37 a poster of the Incredible Hulk number 340 Gray Hulk versus
0:33:43 Wolverine that features your artwork and I am a long time
0:33:45 collector and fan of your work.
0:33:48 So it’s exciting to have you here and I’m excited to to
0:33:50 dig into all sorts of things.
0:33:53 And I thought we would begin and this might be a dead end.
0:33:54 We’ll see where it goes.
0:34:03 But asking about how baseball informed your approach to art
0:34:06 and comics, if at all, if those two things tie together for
0:34:06 you.
0:34:10 So here’s what I would say about that and I’ll give you a
0:34:11 little bit of back history.
0:34:16 I would say it informed me more on the eventual business side,
0:34:19 the competitiveness on the business side.
0:34:24 So it’s always interesting when you do certain interviews or
0:34:28 with people, I always just sort of think that sometimes interviews
0:34:31 are like laying on a psychologist couch and they’re like,
0:34:33 Todd, why are you like that?
0:34:34 What drives you?
0:34:36 Here’s the answer to that question so we can get that
0:34:37 out of the way.
0:34:40 I think it was the day I came out of the womb and it was in
0:34:41 my DNA.
0:34:45 There’s not a single day I don’t recall not being Todd.
0:34:49 So what is natural for me, I guess for other people because
0:34:53 I now understand as I get older, their personalities that my
0:34:57 personality has been baked every day of my life and it’s not
0:34:59 an effort to do what I’ve done in life, right?
0:35:03 So people go, oh my God, you’re so tenacious and you go up
0:35:06 against people and you’re such a rebel and you fight for what
0:35:07 you believe in.
0:35:10 Of course, there’s no other option in my brain.
0:35:12 So it’s not, I’m not fighting.
0:35:13 I just, there’s no other option.
0:35:17 So it’s just a natural progression on where I want to go.
0:35:21 But I would argue that whatever that DNA is got enhanced
0:35:22 with two things.
0:35:26 One, I had a brother that was a year older and one a year
0:35:29 younger and then you get three boys together.
0:35:30 What are you talking about?
0:35:31 Every day was a competition.
0:35:33 Who could eat the cereal the fastest?
0:35:35 Who could jump the most steps down?
0:35:37 Who could run to school the fast?
0:35:38 What are you talking about?
0:35:39 Everything is a competition.
0:35:43 And then you take that and eventually I was never going to
0:35:45 go to university.
0:35:47 I remember being in class when they brought in high school,
0:35:51 they brought the recruit in the college and they sort of talk
0:35:52 and I go, well, I’m not going.
0:35:54 So I’ll just put my head down and continue drawing because
0:35:56 I was always doodling.
0:35:58 And then somebody tapped me on the shoulder.
0:36:02 I remember and they went, son, why is your arm not raised?
0:36:03 And I’m like, what?
0:36:05 I wasn’t even paying attention, sadly.
0:36:08 And I go, well, what was the question?
0:36:09 They’re going, well, who wants to go to college?
0:36:14 And I looked up and every single person in my class had their
0:36:15 arm up.
0:36:19 Now that’s okay, but I looked at the two sort of druggies that
0:36:22 I know because I’m friends with all of them and I’m looking
0:36:25 at them going, what are you talking about?
0:36:26 You’re not going to college.
0:36:28 You got F’s like across the board.
0:36:30 You might even drop out in grade 12.
0:36:36 So anyways, I gave them my reason, which is I don’t enjoy education.
0:36:39 And so let’s just convert it to broccoli and let’s say I don’t
0:36:40 like broccoli.
0:36:45 Why would I then go and pay people money to eat more broccoli?
0:36:47 Does it make much sense?
0:36:47 Does it?
0:36:49 So I go, I’m not going.
0:36:50 Now, did I go to college?
0:36:51 Of course I did.
0:36:52 Why?
0:36:53 Because I’m an athlete.
0:36:55 And so I played baseball, getting back to your question.
0:37:02 And somebody offered me a scholarship to go to play baseball.
0:37:05 So my last three years, I was on a Pac-Tan baseball scholarship.
0:37:09 And at some point now you have to get sort of simplistic.
0:37:13 If somebody’s going to give you free education, I’m going to grab it.
0:37:14 Did I want it?
0:37:15 Not really.
0:37:17 But if it’s free, I’m going to grab it.
0:37:23 And oddly, Tim, of the 25 guys on our team, only two of us graduated
0:37:25 with a degree in four years.
0:37:27 And the other guy was, I’m Canadian, the other guy was Canadian.
0:37:30 I remember the coach going, because Canadians don’t want to hustle
0:37:32 as much in sports, right?
0:37:33 Because we got a degree.
0:37:34 Like what he’s talking about was free.
0:37:38 And the reason I took it and I got it done for free, because
0:37:42 the dumb athlete was alive and well, but they’re not really dumb.
0:37:43 They just don’t go to class.
0:37:46 And if you don’t go to class, you don’t get your marks.
0:37:49 And if you don’t get your marks, then eventually you don’t get your degree.
0:37:51 Here’s the funny thing about that.
0:37:56 Somebody has offered you a free degree and 23 of my teammates
0:37:58 decided they wouldn’t get it in four years.
0:38:02 So either they would never get a degree or gun to my head.
0:38:03 This is weird.
0:38:07 They’re going to come back and pay to finish it.
0:38:09 I go finish it.
0:38:11 The buffet was open the whole time you were there
0:38:13 and you chose not to eat.
0:38:14 Like, oh my gosh.
0:38:17 So if nothing else, given that I’m sort of a cheapskate,
0:38:19 I’m going to, they’re going to give it to me for free.
0:38:21 I’m not paying another penny to come back here.
0:38:22 I’ll take that degree.
0:38:25 So I got my degree and I was off to the races.
0:38:29 Now between the baseball, which is competitive and my brothers,
0:38:32 then all of a sudden three weeks before I graduate, I end up getting
0:38:39 my first job in comic books and all of that sort of made me a freelancer
0:38:42 and I had to begin taking care of myself.
0:38:45 And it’s like, OK, it’s just another game, another game of competition.
0:38:47 First job in comic books.
0:38:53 You’ve posted, I want to say photographs of 350 or so rejection letters.
0:38:56 When did you first start sending those out?
0:39:01 And did you get any particularly helpful feedback that allowed
0:39:04 you to modify things so that you were able to get that first job?
0:39:05 Yes.
0:39:08 So let’s go through it real quick.
0:39:11 Did I get over 300 rejections?
0:39:12 Yes.
0:39:15 Is that tenacious?
0:39:18 Is that determination or is that delusion?
0:39:21 Like how many, like at what point do you say, I’m going to be an opera singer
0:39:25 and the people keep giving you nose and you go, man, look at how determined
0:39:28 is at what point do you say, maybe I just can’t sing opera.
0:39:28 Right.
0:39:31 But again, so there’s a fine line.
0:39:34 People give me way too much credit for those 300.
0:39:39 I think a normal sane person with sort of less enthusiasm will leave it at
0:39:44 that work than me would have probably at 200 rejections found another option
0:39:44 to make money.
0:39:49 But the reason I was able to assimilate that many rejections was
0:39:51 because I was going to college.
0:39:57 So I was sending off samples almost continuously while I was in school.
0:39:58 So I didn’t have a job.
0:39:59 I was going to school.
0:40:00 So I didn’t care.
0:40:02 I had four years to basically try and get a job.
0:40:05 And then it probably at the end of those four years, I was going to
0:40:08 look at that pile and say, maybe I need to find something else.
0:40:14 My degree is, I thought is in graphic designing and I thought I was going
0:40:16 to be the guy who’s going to do Michelin tire ads.
0:40:17 I go, that’s okay.
0:40:20 It’s an admirable job, but you know, it’s a graphic designer.
0:40:23 That was sort of where I thought the reality of it was going to be.
0:40:28 But three weeks before I graduate, I get my first job and how did I
0:40:33 get it by sending literally 700 samples over the course of those four
0:40:38 years and just on one level, I think I just wore them out because I sent
0:40:43 it to every editor at every company.
0:40:46 They used to have, let’s say at Marvel because my first job was at Marvel.
0:40:48 They have like one submission editor.
0:40:49 No, no, no, no, no.
0:40:53 The people who give you the work are the editors and they have 16 editors.
0:40:56 So I would send it to all 16 editors.
0:40:58 Ultimately, I went around the submission guy.
0:40:59 I just went, what?
0:41:01 You got to give it to the editors anyways.
0:41:02 Might as well send it directly to the editors.
0:41:07 So I would keep sending it to the editors over and over and over to every
0:41:08 company, every editor.
0:41:13 And I think Tim and hindsight, I think that they probably had a board
0:41:16 meeting or whatever, one of those Monday morning meetings and they just said
0:41:20 something like, and I’m making this up, but said, oh, for the love of God,
0:41:25 that Todd kid, that punk that keeps sending us, we keep getting like a box
0:41:30 of mail from this guy every two weeks, would somebody in this room give him
0:41:34 a couple pages just so we don’t have to open up his mail every two weeks?
0:41:39 I think I just, I think I just wore them out and I got the job literally
0:41:41 three weeks before I graduated.
0:41:42 So I never even had to use my degree.
0:41:45 What informed me in those?
0:41:45 Yeah.
0:41:47 It was all constructive criticism.
0:41:50 Let me tell you, because people say, oh, Todd, you got the last laugh.
0:41:51 No, no, no.
0:41:56 Everything they put in those letters was constructive criticism because
0:41:59 the people who just thought that I was not very good through my portfolio,
0:42:01 my samples and the garbage.
0:42:06 So everybody who took the time to write back actually gave a little
0:42:08 bit of insight.
0:42:12 And so what I would do, they didn’t know it was actually going to keep
0:42:17 me fueled is that I would take that insight and then redo another batch
0:42:19 and send it to everybody again.
0:42:23 So, you know, where I was making 20 mistakes, eventually got down to 18
0:42:25 and then 16 and then 15.
0:42:30 And I think probably when I was at six mistakes, I think they finally
0:42:32 said, hey, he’s getting better.
0:42:35 He’s not perfect and he seems to be enthusiastic.
0:42:37 So somebody give him a chance.
0:42:38 See what he can do.
0:42:42 So for people who don’t have any familiarity with comic books,
0:42:46 penciling anything along these lines, what were some of the things
0:42:48 you were getting feedback on and getting better at?
0:42:51 And I suppose this leads into the question, like, what does it look
0:42:54 like as a comic book artist to get better?
0:42:55 What are you getting better at?
0:42:58 Maybe that sounds like a silly question, but I’ll give it a shot.
0:43:03 There’s two things that I think make a good artist in the comic book industry.
0:43:06 One is just pure drawing skills.
0:43:06 Right.
0:43:12 So there are hundreds and not thousands of people who can draw circles around
0:43:12 me.
0:43:16 If you can just draw pretty pictures, you can go a long way.
0:43:19 The second piece is storytelling.
0:43:24 And if you can do great storytelling and be average drawer, you’re still
0:43:30 going to have a pretty good career because people then will be entertained
0:43:31 by everything you do.
0:43:35 So I’ll use an example and I hope because I’m friends with him.
0:43:36 I hope he doesn’t take it.
0:43:39 Frank Miller is a great, great storyteller.
0:43:42 He’s the one that wrote The Dark Knight for Batman.
0:43:46 He’s the one that, you know, created 300 that ended up getting turned into a movie
0:43:48 in Sin City and all these things.
0:43:52 He rejuvenated dead characters like Daredevil.
0:43:58 I wouldn’t say, and I think Frank would agree, that he’s not the best anatomically
0:44:03 correct artist and his drawings don’t get every muscle right.
0:44:10 What he does is he tells stories better than anybody else in our industry period.
0:44:15 So he could do it with stickmen and you would still be engaged because of his
0:44:18 writing, the way he does it and what’s happening in it.
0:44:23 So Frank has been able to take that storytelling, which to me, as I’ve
0:44:26 gotten older, is way more important than whether you’ve got flashy lines.
0:44:30 I came in as a kid who wanted to do flashy lines because it would, people
0:44:32 go, oh my God, look at all the detail he’s doing.
0:44:38 But then I found out that really what they wanted was less flash and more clarity
0:44:40 on the pages, right?
0:44:45 You should be able to give a comic book to a non-comic book writer, go
0:44:47 next door to your neighbor, give it to your mom.
0:44:51 And at the end, they should be able to say, hmm, you know, not my cup of tea.
0:44:54 I don’t collect comic books, but that was kind of interesting because
0:44:57 they understood what they were supposed to be reading in the sequence.
0:44:59 They were supposed to be reading it.
0:45:02 And if you don’t do that, you’re no good in our industry.
0:45:07 One more thing, if you can’t keep a deadline, then you’re for sure not good
0:45:12 at anything. As a matter of fact, people who can keep a deadline in an industry
0:45:18 that is driven by monthly deadlines can have long careers and not be very good
0:45:23 at drawing because you have to get product out every 30 days.
0:45:25 So go ahead.
0:45:28 If you want to be the kid that’s flashy and do a bunch of lines and take
0:45:31 twice as long, but they’re never going to give you a regular gig because
0:45:35 you have to get books out on time, period, out.
0:45:39 And I’m embarrassed that I don’t know this, but I never made it far enough.
0:45:41 You can still lead a productive lifetime.
0:45:42 Don’t worry about it.
0:45:43 I’m working on it.
0:45:44 We’re going on the productive side.
0:45:48 But what are the deliverables on a monthly basis?
0:45:51 Are you shipping out a few pages at a time?
0:45:55 Are they waiting until you have the entire book done, so to speak?
0:46:01 What do the actual deadlines and deliverables look like for a full-time comic book artist?
0:46:04 So it is shifted, as you can imagine, with technology.
0:46:05 Yeah.
0:46:08 So the way that it used to work, and I’ll age myself because I got into the
0:46:15 business sort of pre-internet, I’d have to do my pages, take them to the either
0:46:18 phone FedEx and they were called Federal Express at that point.
0:46:23 And so I would have to phone Federal Express when I use FedEx.
0:46:25 My wife go, “Oh, you’re so hip calling them FedEx.”
0:46:26 And eventually they caught on.
0:46:30 So your phone FedEx, they’d either come and pick it up or sometimes you
0:46:32 would miss the call on their deadline.
0:46:33 They were, the drivers were past.
0:46:37 I was living in a remote area up in Canada on an island in Canada.
0:46:41 And so if I missed a driver, which is why I hired an assistant to help
0:46:44 sort of package stuff up, he would drive to the airport, which was about
0:46:48 an hour and 15 away while I was finishing up pages.
0:46:49 So I go, “Oh, I’ve got another hour.”
0:46:51 And then we drive to the airport.
0:46:55 Do you know how many times I ran down the tarmac because it was a little
0:46:58 sort of prop plane that flew to Vancouver, British Columbia.
0:47:01 And they were, I think it was always looking over his shoulder going
0:47:02 to be here in about two minutes.
0:47:07 And I’d be running down the tarmac and I basically throw my package to him
0:47:08 and he’d get it done.
0:47:13 Today, all of that’s taken away because now you can scan your pages
0:47:15 and hit a literally a download.
0:47:16 Boom, it’s gone.
0:47:18 It doesn’t solve anything, Tim.
0:47:23 All it means is you just get to push your lock with deadlines later and later.
0:47:26 So let’s give you an example currently happening.
0:47:30 The biggest comic book that’s going to come out this year in our industry
0:47:32 is a book called Batman Spawn.
0:47:34 So that goes to print.
0:47:39 Could I just talk to the people at DC Comics yesterday?
0:47:41 It goes to print on Monday.
0:47:43 You and I are talking on Friday.
0:47:45 I still have to write.
0:47:46 It’s a 48 page book.
0:47:47 I’ve only written eight pages.
0:47:49 I’ve got to finish writing the 40 pages.
0:47:52 There’s 10 pages that haven’t been colored.
0:47:57 I literally talk to the person who does the word balloons after I give
0:48:01 them the script to say, hey, sorry, dude, we’ve got to both work pretty
0:48:02 hard over the weekend.
0:48:06 They’re going to probably get the last pages at midnight on Sunday.
0:48:09 They’re going to look at it and make sure nobody, no pages are upside down
0:48:12 or backwards and then they’re going to hit send and it’s going to go to the
0:48:16 printer and the printer is waiting because when you’ve got a big print run
0:48:18 because this can, like I said, it’s going to be the biggest of this year.
0:48:22 You can’t swap out books and say, I will just swap out another book.
0:48:23 Can you just substitute?
0:48:24 Not of that magnitude.
0:48:29 They’ve got lots of printer presses waiting for this one book and we’ve
0:48:30 got to deliver.
0:48:32 So how does it work by our chinny chin chin?
0:48:35 Like a lot of other things in the world, you just get it done.
0:48:39 So let me back up for a second because I think I heard you correctly.
0:48:42 Now you have delivered so many deadlines.
0:48:46 Even if you have chased down the plan on the tarmac, you’ve, you know,
0:48:47 how to train obviously.
0:48:48 I’ve missed the plan a couple times.
0:48:49 You’ve missed the plan a couple times.
0:48:54 So this is a huge book, biggest in the industry of this year.
0:48:58 Did I hear you correctly that you said you have eight pages done out of 48?
0:49:01 I guess I’m just wondering if you, what does that mean?
0:49:02 Yeah, writing was.
0:49:03 Okay.
0:49:04 Wow.
0:49:07 Tim, I’ll tell you what that means.
0:49:11 That means before I talk to you this morning, I talked to my, what they
0:49:15 call the letterer, the guy who actually converts your script into the word balloon.
0:49:19 I talked to my letterer and go, dude, we’re going all night tonight.
0:49:22 I’m just every three pages I’m going to send to you.
0:49:23 So it’s going to be, I do three.
0:49:24 I send it to him.
0:49:25 He works on it.
0:49:28 By the time he’s done with those three, I feed him another three and we’re just
0:49:32 going to see how it works and we’ll get it done.
0:49:33 Tim, we’ll get it done.
0:49:34 Right.
0:49:37 Like you said earlier, a couple of years ago, I set a record.
0:49:40 I mean, spawn is the longest running crater on book.
0:49:42 We’re up to issue three 35.
0:49:45 That’s over 30 years of doing books.
0:49:47 And now I do a monthly book every week.
0:49:48 You just get it done.
0:49:50 Yeah, it’s just like going to the gym.
0:49:53 Every workout isn’t awesome, but did you get your workout in?
0:49:54 Yeah, sure.
0:49:55 Wow.
0:49:57 By the hair of your chinny chin chin.
0:49:58 Nobody knows on the other side.
0:49:59 Nobody knows.
0:50:02 That’s what everybody’s going to look at that book and go, man, it is.
0:50:04 Look how professionally done it was.
0:50:11 So let’s then come back to a word you used, which is important.
0:50:16 And that is the longest running creator owned superhero comic series.
0:50:18 The creator owned piece.
0:50:22 When and how did you decide to start Image Comics?
0:50:27 Because I remember as a kid, I wanted to be a penciler for about 10 years.
0:50:30 So I was I was really tracking all of this.
0:50:32 And then I was an illustrator in high school and then part of college.
0:50:37 I actually had the, I was the graphics editor at a magazine where Jim Lee had
0:50:39 been the previous graphics editor.
0:50:41 So I had Jim Lee’s had a DC Comics.
0:50:47 And he had these sketches in the desk that he’d done after getting hammered in
0:50:50 college and I thought these are just treasures at the time.
0:50:52 So this is a lot of fun for me to explore.
0:50:54 And I remember Image being a very big deal.
0:51:01 So for people who have no context, he explained why and when Image was
0:51:03 founded because I think that’s a big piece of this story.
0:51:07 Look at, I assume that the majority of people listening don’t collect
0:51:08 comic books and whatever.
0:51:09 So we’ll keep it simple.
0:51:11 Everybody knows Marvel and DC.
0:51:12 Everybody, right?
0:51:16 If you ask the next natural question, huh?
0:51:17 Who’s number three?
0:51:21 That has been Image comic books for 30 years.
0:51:23 We were celebrating our 30th anniversary.
0:51:25 So was the spawn character because it came out that first year.
0:51:30 And we’ve been number three for 30 consecutive years.
0:51:32 As a matter of fact, those first couple months we came out, we actually
0:51:33 passed DC comic books.
0:51:34 We were number two for a few months.
0:51:41 So when people sort of get past, you know, the Marvel and DC and even in the
0:51:44 industry of Hollywood and or people that are looking for ancillary products,
0:51:49 which you have to because people don’t know Marvel’s owned by Disney.
0:51:50 Marvel’s owned by Disney.
0:51:52 They don’t share that too much.
0:51:57 And DC comic book is for a long, long time has been owned by Time Warner.
0:52:01 Now Warner Brothers Discovery, AT&T, you know, but let’s call it Warner
0:52:01 Brothers.
0:52:03 So one’s owned by Disney.
0:52:05 One’s owned by Warner Brothers.
0:52:06 Okay.
0:52:12 So you’re Sony, you’re universal, you’re Paramount Studios, your Netflix,
0:52:14 you’re Apple, you’re Paramount Plus.
0:52:14 What are you talking about?
0:52:15 Where are you getting product?
0:52:17 Not getting it from Marvel.
0:52:17 Why?
0:52:20 They’re not sharing and you’re not getting it from DC because they’re
0:52:21 not sharing.
0:52:27 So you literally have to go and redact all those books and you’re left with
0:52:33 everybody else and that puts our books in really good position.
0:52:35 Now let’s go back because that doesn’t answer your question.
0:52:37 How did we get to image comic books?
0:52:42 For me personally, when I was trying to break into comic books, like I said,
0:52:46 in all those years leading up to breaking in those, I was reading
0:52:49 everything I could get my hands on about our industry.
0:52:57 And what I found was I was coming across a common theme and the common
0:53:06 theme was that everybody, no matter how big your standing had been in
0:53:10 our industry, eventually got pushed out against their will.
0:53:17 And in some cases got the short end of creative and financial sticks.
0:53:18 These are artists.
0:53:20 These are artists, writers, whatever.
0:53:25 These stories had been written over and over and over again.
0:53:30 And so I remember one in particular reading about, there’s a gentleman,
0:53:34 his name was Jack Kirby and his nickname was Jack the King Kirby, right?
0:53:39 To put in perspective to people who are laymen listening that they called
0:53:45 him the King for a reason because he was and he got the short end of the stick.
0:53:49 And Jack Kirby is a guy who helped create the Fantastic Four and the X-Men
0:53:55 and even created the costume for Spider-Man and the Hulk and Iron Man
0:53:56 and on and on.
0:53:58 That’s who Jack Kirby was.
0:53:59 He helped create it with Stan Lee.
0:54:04 So I remember reading those articles and this is long before I break
0:54:10 into the industry and I went, man, if they can do that to Jack King Kirby,
0:54:12 they can do it to anyone.
0:54:18 And so when I got my first job in comic books, you know, three weeks
0:54:21 before I graduated, I went in with my eyes wide open.
0:54:25 And so I knew what the game was.
0:54:32 And I go, okay, their job is to exploit me as much as possible.
0:54:38 Can I do the same in reverse at the same time?
0:54:41 The win is they’re getting something of value out of you.
0:54:43 You’re getting something out of them.
0:54:47 And the value that I was getting out of them was twofold.
0:54:51 One, I had all these dozens of characters in my portfolio, including
0:54:56 Spawn and I never ever had one second of temptation to ever pull any of
0:55:00 those out and offer them to to Marvel or DC when I was working with them.
0:55:04 Did I create new characters when I got the plots from the writers?
0:55:05 Of course, I did.
0:55:05 I was a professional.
0:55:10 So I helped co-create and I’m the visual creator of Venom.
0:55:11 So Venom’s my guy.
0:55:11 Why?
0:55:14 Because, you know, we came up with a story and that was what it was.
0:55:15 Okay, fine.
0:55:18 But I never said, oh man, I’m having a good career at Marvel.
0:55:21 Let me reach into my portfolio and offer them my characters.
0:55:21 Never.
0:55:22 Why?
0:55:26 Because in the back of my mind, those stories had been haunting me that
0:55:32 were there and at some point, Tim, I was selling more comic books
0:55:38 than any human being Marvel was employing period to the point that
0:55:40 I had set a record on one of the books.
0:55:43 I helped take over artistically amazing Spider-Man.
0:55:46 It was sitting at like number 22 in the sales chart.
0:55:50 They came and they went, hey, Todd, if you want to draw it cool because
0:55:53 I had just finished a run on the incredible Hulk that you had mentioned.
0:55:56 And they said, whatever you want to do because it’s sort of in a dumpers.
0:56:00 Spider-Man’s in the dumpers in short order at some points.
0:56:04 Amazing Spider-Man became number one or two every single month in
0:56:08 total sale to the point then that they’re like, oh, and it’s really
0:56:09 what catapulted my career.
0:56:13 And just so you know, all the things that I was doing artistically to
0:56:19 help move it from number 22 to number one, I was getting pushback from
0:56:23 the corporate entity up above and the executives up above and the editor
0:56:27 and chief up above that you can’t do what you’re doing, Todd.
0:56:28 You’re messing with the icon.
0:56:29 That’s not how we do it.
0:56:33 Let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, as an old man now, the
0:56:38 single greatest danger you are going to meet in your life is status quo.
0:56:42 It is the thing that they are going to fight and battle you against more
0:56:45 than any other thing in the world.
0:56:51 And what’s staggering about what I just said, which is a truism is that
0:56:55 there’s only 200 percenters in the world that I can give you.
0:56:57 One, we’re all going to die.
0:56:58 Hate to break it to you.
0:56:59 It’s just a matter of time.
0:57:04 The second is everything is going to eventually change.
0:57:08 Otherwise we’d be living in caves right now.
0:57:15 Change is part of the human condition and yet every day you run into
0:57:21 systems that are crushingly holding on to status quo are holding on to
0:57:22 yesterday.
0:57:28 And and for those of us that are wired to think about tomorrow, we become
0:57:30 the rebels.
0:57:31 We become the outcast.
0:57:35 We become the people who are rocking the boat, who are just Todd.
0:57:40 Why don’t you just relax, get along, all the things that they’re going to
0:57:40 tell you.
0:57:44 And what I’m saying that happened to me has happened to millions of
0:57:48 people throughout history that wanted to do something different, not better.
0:57:52 Let me be very clear, not better, different.
0:57:57 So when I was doing my different Spider-Man, I wasn’t doing it because
0:57:58 I thought I was better.
0:58:02 I wasn’t doing it because I thought what they were doing was worse,
0:58:04 which is how they took it.
0:58:10 I was doing it because I’m a young kid with a career and I need to figure
0:58:14 out how to stand out in a sea of people that are doing the exact same job
0:58:14 as me.
0:58:16 And there’s only one way.
0:58:17 I’ve got to be a little bit different.
0:58:23 So I started doing some funky fun little stuff on Spider-Man.
0:58:24 And guess what?
0:58:26 The fans liked it.
0:58:30 And more importantly, it was enjoyable for me to draw because drawing is a
0:58:35 lonely occupation like a novelist where you sit in a room for 12 hours a
0:58:37 day with you and your thoughts.
0:58:38 That’s your day.
0:58:42 And if you can’t entertain yourself, it’s a long day.
0:58:46 So I was coming up with crazy little silly things I was putting in the book.
0:58:47 They were having a heart attack.
0:58:51 I was getting called on the carpet as the sales are going up.
0:58:53 I finally quit Spider-Man.
0:58:55 They go, no, no, no, because you’re selling so many books.
0:58:57 We’ll give you a new Spider-Man book.
0:59:00 They were going to do a fourth Spider-Man book anyway, so they could
0:59:02 have one every week of the month.
0:59:03 So they gave it to me.
0:59:04 I’ve never written before.
0:59:05 I’m going, you’re going to give it to me.
0:59:08 I’ve never written before, but I got it right, which is why I quit.
0:59:12 I go, I want to write and that’s because I don’t want to draw other people’s
0:59:12 stories.
0:59:14 I want to tell my story.
0:59:16 And they said, yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:59:17 And that book set a record.
0:59:22 It’s in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most sales by a single
0:59:22 creator.
0:59:25 I also own that record on the other side with spawn.
0:59:29 I own the corporate and non-corporate record for a single issue by a single
0:59:29 person done.
0:59:31 Now, I’m not saying that bragging.
0:59:36 I’m just saying that has a fact so that now that guy who’s setting records
0:59:40 when he comes into the office in New York from Canada, little Canadian
0:59:47 Hick, you would think that they would say, thank you, not fuck you, right?
0:59:51 And instead they’re calling me on the carpet going, Todd, you’ve got to stop
0:59:53 doing this and this and this.
0:59:57 All the things that got me and their books were there.
1:00:02 And I remember having these bizarre conversations with the editors going,
1:00:05 dude, you don’t have to like me personally.
1:00:07 You don’t have to like my drawing style.
1:00:09 You don’t have to like anything I do.
1:00:11 You hired me for one job.
1:00:13 Sell comic books.
1:00:15 You guys are in the commerce business.
1:00:18 Don’t you realize you’re a money making machine.
1:00:19 You want to sell books.
1:00:22 I do that better than anybody that you employ.
1:00:29 Why are we continuing to have these conversations and they wore me out.
1:00:30 Tim, they wore me out.
1:00:34 So when was there a particular moment when you knew it seems like you have
1:00:38 basically in your back pocket, the plan to eventually go out on your own
1:00:40 because you had all these characters you developed.
1:00:45 So what was the day or the conversation where you just like, fuck this.
1:00:46 Now is the time.
1:00:48 Oh, I’m splitting off.
1:00:50 I remember with clarity.
1:00:54 They had been doing the comic books have this thing in a corner called
1:00:58 the comics code and the comics code was created because in the late fifties
1:01:03 there was the whole war them scared that comic books were degrading the youth
1:01:07 of America and they had the Senate hearings and it actually in a weird way
1:01:12 ended up leading to the sort of the advent of Marvel comics because there
1:01:14 was Marvel was a company called timely comics.
1:01:18 But then they went, oh, we don’t want to get caught up in this whole Senate
1:01:18 hearing.
1:01:24 Let’s sort of whitewash if you will our presentation and they change your name
1:01:28 to Marvel and the first book out fantastic for and then after that here
1:01:32 comes Spider-Man, Iron Man, Hulk and all the other things that we all know.
1:01:36 Right. So you can argue that thanks to some loony tune in the Senate in
1:01:39 the late fifties, Marvel exists.
1:01:39 Right.
1:01:40 Maybe minus him.
1:01:41 There is no Marvel.
1:01:44 So we actually we shouldn’t be given all the credit to Stanley.
1:01:49 We should be given it to McCarthy and the doctor were them who was the one
1:01:51 who wrote the book, the seduction of the innocence.
1:01:52 Right.
1:01:57 So look it up anyways is I’m doing the books because of that comics code
1:01:59 every now and then they would get you to fix a panel.
1:02:01 Todd, you can’t do that.
1:02:01 Why?
1:02:02 Because the comics code.
1:02:03 Okay.
1:02:07 Now I used to ask him could somebody actually send me the comic code.
1:02:11 So instead of having to guess what’s in the comics code and then you guys
1:02:14 tell me I got to redraw something because I have deadlines and I don’t
1:02:16 like to redraw and redo anything.
1:02:20 And so it’s like burning your pasta.
1:02:22 Then you go, oh man, I got to cook it and boil the water again.
1:02:24 It just you get aggravated the second time around.
1:02:29 So at some point they kept doing that and then the day came and then it
1:02:33 was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back because I’d
1:02:37 been doing it for years and they sat there and it was this issue and
1:02:40 it was the sideways issue.
1:02:41 My last issue at Marvel.
1:02:44 It was a sideways issue of the Spider-Man book.
1:02:44 The one I had.
1:02:48 I was writing myself except for we were doing a crossover with some of
1:02:52 that the mutant X-Men and in this case X factor characters.
1:02:56 The ones that were sort of dead pool and cable came from those characters.
1:03:00 And there was a bad guy and his name was a juggernaut and a juggernaut
1:03:02 was like, you couldn’t beat the juggernaut, right?
1:03:06 He’s a big, giant dude and he had armor and you couldn’t do it.
1:03:09 So my thing was, well, he’s got isolates.
1:03:11 He’s got to look out those isolates.
1:03:15 And so the way that I was going to get to him was I had one of the
1:03:19 mutants take their sword and put it in the eye and jam it in the
1:03:22 eye because then it would be like, oh my gosh, right?
1:03:23 You’d catch him off guard.
1:03:27 And then if you team tackle him, you’re going to win the day.
1:03:29 So I drew that.
1:03:33 I still have that page today, Tim, because it’s the page that broke
1:03:35 the camel’s back, right?
1:03:38 I have the, I have the unedited version even better.
1:03:40 I, I, I don’t even have the edited version.
1:03:41 I have the unedited version.
1:03:47 And, and so they phoned me up and they said, Todd, you got to redraw it.
1:03:48 And I went, what?
1:03:49 What, what redraw what?
1:03:52 You can’t stab somebody in the eye with a knife.
1:03:54 And I go, what are you talking about?
1:03:55 Well, I know, like the commerce code.
1:04:00 I go, well, of course you can because just not long ago, there
1:04:02 was this great cover.
1:04:06 Not only was it in the, it was on the cover of Daredevil, Frank Miller.
1:04:11 And he’s got bull’s eye on the cover and he’s stabbing.
1:04:14 Electra, a character on the cover.
1:04:20 And so I go, of course you can stab people and they go, well, yes,
1:04:24 you can stab people, but you can’t, you can’t have a rear exit wound.
1:04:26 And I went, what are you talking about?
1:04:27 Did you look at that cover?
1:04:30 The guy’s killing the lecturers, going in the front is coming out the back.
1:04:34 No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you can stab them and it can
1:04:37 come out of rear exit wound, but you can’t tear the cloth.
1:04:40 So if you look at the drawing, you’re going to see that it’s like,
1:04:42 you don’t really see the sword coming out.
1:04:43 It’s like a teepee.
1:04:44 It’s like a teepee.
1:04:49 The back of her costume was like, it’s, it’s teepee, but it hasn’t cut.
1:04:50 So I go, so I just want to be clear.
1:04:55 You can gut somebody and you can have it come out the other side.
1:05:03 After you gut them, you just can’t rip the cloth and that won’t offend
1:05:04 the mothers and the children.
1:05:05 Yes.
1:05:06 Wow.
1:05:06 Okay.
1:05:09 So there’s no rear exit wound.
1:05:10 I’m just stabbing them in the eye.
1:05:11 Yeah.
1:05:12 But you know what?
1:05:16 People are sensitive to eyes because if everybody gets something in their
1:05:18 eye, we all know how much pain that is and teeth.
1:05:22 Because if you go to the dentist and he drills you wrong and I’m having this
1:05:26 absurd conversation with five or six of my editors and I’m just going,
1:05:29 what are, so I just want to be clear.
1:05:31 Can I stab them in the chest?
1:05:31 Yes.
1:05:32 In the knee.
1:05:33 Yes.
1:05:34 In the elbow.
1:05:35 Yes.
1:05:35 In the eye.
1:05:36 No.
1:05:37 In the cheek.
1:05:37 Yes.
1:05:38 In the neck.
1:05:39 Yes.
1:05:39 In the mouth.
1:05:40 No.
1:05:41 Wow.
1:05:42 Wow.
1:05:48 So somehow I was in bizarre land and so I had at that moment, I stopped
1:05:52 the conversation because you never want to have a conversation with
1:05:56 anybody where two plus two equals giraffe, right?
1:05:58 Never talk to somebody who comes up with that equation.
1:06:01 So I said, guys, here’s what’s going to happen.
1:06:03 I’m going to send you the page.
1:06:05 I’ll do a little quick drawing over if you want.
1:06:10 You guys fix it any way you see fit.
1:06:13 By the way, I’m handing in my resignation.
1:06:14 I am done.
1:06:16 I am exhausted.
1:06:22 I also was a few days away from becoming a father for the first time and
1:06:23 I just went, you know what?
1:06:25 It’s time to catch my breath.
1:06:27 I don’t know what being a dad’s about.
1:06:33 These guys have worn me out and all I do is sell books for them.
1:06:36 And I just called uncle and that was it.
1:06:38 That was the day I walked away.
1:06:40 Now, did I have a plan B?
1:06:41 Of course I didn’t, Tim.
1:06:42 Of course I did.
1:06:47 The plan B was I had spawn as a character and I just went, I guess
1:06:49 I’ll just have to self publish, right?
1:06:52 Not ideal, but okay, here we go.
1:06:58 The upside of it was that I was talking to a couple other people.
1:07:04 Let me also say before me quitting, I also was going around trying to create a union.
1:07:06 I was like the normal Ray.
1:07:08 I was go, come on, man, power to the people, right?
1:07:12 If we stopped drawing, put pencils down, they got nothing to print.
1:07:13 We show them our power.
1:07:20 It was frustrating for me when I tried it for a few months that the most scared people
1:07:25 that will say, yeah, let’s join together are those that don’t have a job.
1:07:27 It was weird to me.
1:07:32 I’d be talking to dozens of people that I knew that wanted to be in the business, that
1:07:35 we’re in the business, but weren’t getting steady work that needed a better life.
1:07:36 And I go, come on, let’s just go.
1:07:39 Let’s just create like an enclave of people.
1:07:43 And again, you know, and deal with the whole is better than the parts.
1:07:47 And they would say, no, I can’t because what if they blackball me?
1:07:49 I’m like, blackball you?
1:07:50 What do you talk about?
1:07:52 You’re not getting any work from them right now.
1:07:54 Yeah, but what if they blackball me?
1:07:54 I’ll go.
1:07:56 So here’s what I’ll do for you.
1:08:02 Right now you have no job, no car, no girlfriend, no house, no money.
1:08:08 If you join this enclave, I will promise I will make all of those equal to you, right?
1:08:12 You’ve got nothing to lose other than to go up.
1:08:14 Come on, man.
1:08:16 I’m selling more books than anybody else.
1:08:20 I’m making more money than anybody else in our industry and I’m willing to throw it away.
1:08:24 You should be 10 times more fearless than me.
1:08:27 It was actually oddly the opposite.
1:08:33 So during that time, I had been talking to two of my friends and peers.
1:08:34 They were also in the industry.
1:08:38 A gentleman by the name of Rob Lifelt and another one named Eric Larson.
1:08:46 And both of them had that same entrepreneurial, let’s just call it rebellious trait in them.
1:08:47 And we were always talking.
1:08:52 And I remember in one conversation, Rob was saying, yeah, I’m going to maybe go, you know,
1:08:53 I’m working, he’s still working for Marvel.
1:08:54 So is Eric.
1:08:56 And it’s like, yeah, I’m going to go do my own book.
1:08:59 And then Eric was on the call going, yeah, I’m going to go do my own book.
1:09:01 And I had just quit.
1:09:04 And at some point during the conversation, the topic came up, go, well,
1:09:08 if you’re going to do your own book on your own, Rob, and you’re going to do your own book
1:09:10 on your own, Eric, and I’m planning on it.
1:09:14 Why don’t we do all of them together in the same place?
1:09:15 It’s never been done.
1:09:22 What’s happened is people have left Marvel and DC one at a time or they pushed them out the door.
1:09:23 Think of it like a sports team.
1:09:25 So you lose a free agent.
1:09:26 You’ll go get another player.
1:09:27 So you lose enough.
1:09:33 But what if 10 of your players on a championship team quit the same year?
1:09:37 That would be detrimental to that competition of that team.
1:09:40 So the conversation was, why don’t we just join forces?
1:09:46 So all of a sudden, very quickly, it was three Rob, who’s super energetic,
1:09:48 came up with the name image comic books.
1:09:50 And the reason why he came up with the name.
1:09:54 So he tells me is that there was a commercial that was on TV.
1:09:57 And it was Andre Agassi, I think.
1:09:59 And it was a it was a camera commercial.
1:10:01 And he says image is everything.
1:10:04 So that was the punchline of the commercial.
1:10:07 So he was like, let’s do image, right?
1:10:08 Image is everything.
1:10:09 Let’s do image, right?
1:10:10 So that was it.
1:10:11 Image comic books was born.
1:10:17 You don’t overthink people think that we come up with all this stuff and we know what we’re doing.
1:10:20 No, venom in and of itself was a happy accident.
1:10:22 We can go back to that in a minute if you want to.
1:10:26 So the three of us get together and then and then Rob says, Todd.
1:10:31 I’ve got a buddy, Jim Valentino, he does some independent comic books.
1:10:34 Is it OK if he comes and so I get what are you talking about?
1:10:37 I like this is a group, the more the merrier.
1:10:42 So we’ve got four and then we find somebody to help us publish.
1:10:45 And we say that’s it.
1:10:50 We’re flying to New York and we’re going to break the news to Marvel that we’re quitting.
1:10:56 Four of us, Rob, Eric, Todd, Jim, Jim Valentino.
1:11:03 We fly to New York and I land the day before we have a meeting with the top people.
1:11:05 Terry Stewart, who was the publishing head at that point.
1:11:10 And later at that meeting I’ll get to was the editor-in-chief who happened to be walking down the hall.
1:11:14 So I’ve got a meeting with Terry Stewart, the top dog.
1:11:15 And to basically say, we’re quitting.
1:11:17 Here’s our reasons why.
1:11:22 And if it was me, I would close this barn door because you may have some more people quitting
1:11:24 next week or the week after the week after.
1:11:29 So we land the day before and I got to blow some time.
1:11:30 So I happened to walk around.
1:11:33 I heard there’s an auction, somebody selling some artwork.
1:11:38 I go to the auction and Jim Lee, the person you know, you talked about the beginning
1:11:40 who’s now the head of DC Congress.
1:11:45 Jim Lee is at the auction and he’s like, hey, Todd, what are you doing here?
1:11:49 I’m like, oh, and I told him and then I start giving the sales pitch.
1:11:57 Tim, let me tell you one thing when I have my passion involved, I’m a good salesman.
1:11:59 I’m a good salesman.
1:12:05 And so I start pounding on Jim Lee and Jim Lee at this point, just so you know,
1:12:10 is doing the X-Men and it is the number one selling book is doing the number one selling book.
1:12:14 The only time I ever got beat with Jim Lee, that guy, he was he was my competition.
1:12:16 Like I was Magic Johnson.
1:12:17 He was Larry Bird.
1:12:21 OK, and so we just we had a rival, but we liked each other and we got along.
1:12:25 And so I tell him what we’re doing and he starts thinking about it.
1:12:31 And then to my surprise says, I think I can go with that.
1:12:36 Now, this is a monumental moment from my perspective.
1:12:42 And here’s why, ladies and gentlemen, Todd, the rebel leaving was going to be easy
1:12:45 for Marvel to basically discount because they were going to go.
1:12:50 Ah, that kid’s always sort of rocking the boat and he’s always a bit of a pistol.
1:12:51 You know what?
1:12:51 That’s fine.
1:12:54 Rob Liefeld had the same attitude.
1:12:55 So it’s like, oh, we were the bad boys.
1:12:57 Ah, so the bad boys left.
1:12:58 Good riddance.
1:13:01 Jim Lee was the golden child.
1:13:04 He was the chef’s kiss.
1:13:06 He was the guy.
1:13:08 He was perfect.
1:13:13 If they could clone employees and artist Jim Lee was the mold.
1:13:19 And so when Jim said he would go, that was a thunder clap in my head to go.
1:13:26 Oh, my God, if the choir boy can go, then that means all bets are off.
1:13:31 And they are going to have to sit up and pay attention because not only are you
1:13:34 losing the bad boys, you are losing the model citizens.
1:13:39 And so Jim then says, oh, by the way, I got a pal, Will’s Pertasio.
1:13:41 Is it okay if I phone him and because he’s looking for the word.
1:13:42 I think he’ll join too.
1:13:44 Shoot.
1:13:46 He was doing another X-Men book.
1:13:47 I’m going, what?
1:13:49 We’re going to get two X-Men.
1:13:51 The X-Men books are the number one selling book at that point.
1:13:53 Bring them on.
1:13:57 So we got six and I’m walking now back to my hotel with the biggest grin on my
1:14:00 face because I go, they don’t even know what’s about to come.
1:14:05 And as I’m walking into my hotel, I see another sort of peer, a guy by
1:14:07 name of Mark Sylvester.
1:14:13 Now, Mark Sylvester to me at that time was the best artist, like just in terms
1:14:15 of skill, Mark Sylvester.
1:14:18 I don’t believe the thing that my son is saying.
1:14:18 Yeah.
1:14:19 That’s my, that’s my dad.
1:14:20 I’m taking care of here.
1:14:22 Yeah, yeah.
1:14:22 Okay.
1:14:23 Yeah.
1:14:25 So Mark Sylvester is there.
1:14:26 It’s about 11 o’clock at night.
1:14:28 And I go, Hey, Mark, what are you doing?
1:14:29 Cause I’m going to bed.
1:14:30 You got, you got, you got five minutes for me.
1:14:31 Right.
1:14:35 And so I sit down and like Mussolini from the balcony.
1:14:36 I give him the speech.
1:14:37 Right.
1:14:38 And I give it to him.
1:14:40 And he’s like, Oh my God.
1:14:42 He goes, Todd, that sounds good.
1:14:43 And Jim Lee’s on board.
1:14:44 Yeah.
1:14:44 He just signed on.
1:14:46 Let me think about it.
1:14:48 I go, Mark, here’s the gig.
1:14:50 We’ve got a meeting at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.
1:14:54 I need to know if you’re in or not by eight o’clock in the morning.
1:14:56 He goes, so I’ve got to, I’ve got to go to bed.
1:14:59 I’ve got to think about it, whether I’m going to change my entire career.
1:15:02 And I’ve got nine hours of which eight of them I’m going to sleep.
1:15:03 Yeah.
1:15:04 That’s it.
1:15:08 Now, I don’t know what he did or how well he slept that night, but in
1:15:12 the morning at seven, 30, the phone rings and he goes, Hey Todd, Mark,
1:15:14 I’m in seven.
1:15:15 We went to New York.
1:15:19 I flew to New York with Rob with four of us, with four of us.
1:15:22 And by the time we walk into that office, we’ve got seven.
1:15:25 Oh, by the way, Mark Sylvester was doing the Wolverine comic book.
1:15:31 We had literally the dream team to put in perspective for people
1:15:32 listening again, that don’t know.
1:15:38 There’s probably a, every year about that year was probably about six,
1:15:42 seven thousand comic books come out from all companies, right?
1:15:45 Cause again, Spider-Man comes out once a month, so that’s 12.
1:15:48 And then you’ve got three Spider-Man books at 36 and then Iron Man’s
1:15:50 another 12 and 12 and you add it all up.
1:15:53 Literally thousands of comic books come out.
1:16:01 The people who gathered together to create image, we had accomplished 44 of
1:16:04 the top 50 sales that year.
1:16:10 Just to put in perspective who we were, 44 of the top 50 sales of 6,000.
1:16:15 We were literally the comic book equivalent of the dream team,
1:16:18 the basketball team that was happening in basketball at that time.
1:16:22 So I knew this was going to reverberate somewhere.
1:16:25 And again, the stock went down at Marvel the next day.
1:16:27 Take a look at it because CNN reported on it.
1:16:30 And we went into the meeting and essentially it went like this.
1:16:35 And here would be a fun interview is to get Terry Stuart’s perspective
1:16:41 of it because not only has he literally lied about it.
1:16:44 He will tell you otherwise, but now is he lied about it.
1:16:48 But then 30 years later, I met up with him and my wife went and talked to him
1:16:52 and he still is spewing the lie.
1:16:53 And I get it.
1:16:54 He’s corporate.
1:16:55 What’s he going to do?
1:16:59 He doesn’t want to say that it was on his watch that all these people left.
1:17:01 But here’s his lie.
1:17:02 And it is.
1:17:04 I got witnesses because there’s more than one of us in that room.
1:17:09 He’s saying we came in and we asked for the copyrights of our characters.
1:17:11 What are you talking about?
1:17:13 None of us is that crazy.
1:17:16 We understood the dynamics of the business.
1:17:19 We would give me Spider-Man and give him the X-Men.
1:17:20 What are you talking about?
1:17:23 He’s saying he had to let us go because that was our demand.
1:17:28 No, no, the way that it went down was simply like this.
1:17:29 We are leaving.
1:17:32 There’s nothing you can give us that’s going to keep us.
1:17:36 And oh, by the way, here’s some of our reasons.
1:17:42 If it was us, you may want to do something about those reasons
1:17:45 because next week you may have another seven quitting.
1:17:48 I don’t understand why you want to keep having people quitting.
1:17:49 But you know what?
1:17:51 Do what you got to do.
1:17:53 It’s your company, whatever.
1:17:57 Now, during that conversation, the editor-in-chief had coincidentally happened
1:18:00 to be up on the upper floors.
1:18:03 Don’t know why and just came in and whatever.
1:18:04 He was a good man.
1:18:08 Tom DeFalco, the one that used to tell me, can’t do that, Todd.
1:18:10 You can’t do that, Todd on Spider-Man.
1:18:14 Anyway, at the end of this conversation, because Rob, I felt who was in there
1:18:16 and my wife was there and Jim Lee was there.
1:18:20 Rob left because he had to go pick up his girlfriend.
1:18:21 So that was classic Rob.
1:18:25 Like, oh, you guys just finished this world changing conversation.
1:18:28 I go get my wife and got to grab a burger.
1:18:32 So, and this is why I like Rob so much because he’s just, he’s by the cuff
1:18:34 and it’s what makes him special to me.
1:18:38 Anyways, we get in the elevator at the end of this conversation
1:18:42 and I will never forget the words.
1:18:45 Has the elevator doors are closing just like in a movie.
1:18:49 The doors are closing and you can see the editor-in-chief looking at us
1:18:54 and he says, hey, if it doesn’t work, you’re welcome back.
1:18:59 And the door shut and I remember turning to Jim Lee.
1:19:04 Now, just to give a little background on Jim Lee, Jim Lee went to college
1:19:05 to become a doctor.
1:19:06 I think his dad’s a doctor.
1:19:09 This is a smart, intelligent human being.
1:19:13 And for me, my dad, who you just heard, was in the printing business
1:19:14 for 40, 50 years.
1:19:17 The one thing that I knew, it’s printing.
1:19:19 And if not, I knew lots of people who did.
1:19:24 So the doors closed and I looked at Jim and I go, oh, my God,
1:19:27 they think we’re dumb and I’m not that we’re smart.
1:19:30 Tim, not that we’re smart, Tim, but you know what printing comic books
1:19:33 is ink on paper.
1:19:38 That’s it, ladies and gentlemen, ink on paper done.
1:19:42 Maybe there’s a couple of details beyond that, but that’s it.
1:19:45 Every time you pick up a pen and you write on a piece of paper,
1:19:47 it’s sort of kind of like doing comic books.
1:19:50 It’s just if you keep going and draw it in the shape of Spider-Man
1:19:52 or the Hulk, you got a comic book.
1:19:55 It’s not rocket science.
1:19:58 And so I was like, oh, my God, they don’t think we can print.
1:19:59 Oh, my God.
1:20:01 So that was it.
1:20:05 And from there, the collective whole of the seven of us left.
1:20:09 Here’s sort of this silly, funny part of the rest of that day.
1:20:14 Historically, what was happening, Tim, is that if you quit Marvel,
1:20:15 you only had one choice.
1:20:18 You went literally across the street to DC Comics.
1:20:22 Or if you quit DC Comics, you quit and you walked across the street
1:20:23 to Marvel. That’s all you did.
1:20:26 You literally ping-ponged your whole career back and forth, back
1:20:27 and forth.
1:20:29 Whenever you got mad, you just went to the other date.
1:20:30 There was across the street.
1:20:34 So we went across the street to DC Comics books.
1:20:38 And DC sees, I had started, you know, I had done about a year,
1:20:39 a year and a half there.
1:20:42 Rob Lifout had done a year there.
1:20:44 But Jim Lee and I walk in there.
1:20:48 Jim Lee has never stepped foot in DC Comics books.
1:20:51 And he’s the golden child at Marvel.
1:20:54 And they just go, there’s only one reason he’s in the office.
1:20:59 Somebody got mad and we’re getting the golden child and we’re getting
1:21:00 Todd, we’ll take the bad boy too.
1:21:03 Cause he’s like, that’s, these are the number one and number two
1:21:05 selling guys in the industry.
1:21:08 Woo, we hit the mother load, the mother.
1:21:08 Oh my God.
1:21:14 And quickly they assemble 15, 16 people in this room and they pour
1:21:16 the coffee and they get us the refreshments.
1:21:21 And they just go, oh my goodness, we are sitting here and we sit down
1:21:23 and then they hear the fateful words.
1:21:27 I go, Hey guys, just so you know, we’re not here to work for you.
1:21:28 I just couple of things.
1:21:29 We just quit Marvel.
1:21:32 Their eyes light up, but we are not here to work for you either.
1:21:36 You could just see the lead balloon and then we’re like, pardon.
1:21:39 And it’s like, no, no, no, we’re not here to work for you.
1:21:41 So, and you can just see the, so we’re just clay her.
1:21:47 So you came here with Jim Lee and walked into our offices and are
1:21:52 now dangling and teasing us and saying it’s for nothing.
1:21:54 That’s exactly what we’re saying.
1:21:56 Wow.
1:21:57 Wow.
1:21:58 Why would you guys do that?
1:22:02 And I go, well, because you know, we got some other plans and then
1:22:03 then they start giving their sales pitch.
1:22:05 Well, here’s why you should work for us.
1:22:06 Don’t do that.
1:22:09 DC is your place to be DC, DC, DC.
1:22:12 And they go, and by the way, we just did a new contract that’s
1:22:14 for the betterment of the creative community.
1:22:18 And then I asked them the question for me that was like the dagger
1:22:21 for me where they go, Hey, you don’t know, that was super cool.
1:22:22 That was super, super cool.
1:22:25 You wrote up that new contract for the creative community.
1:22:28 Could I just ask you just like one, one, one question here just
1:22:29 before we get going.
1:22:34 Did you ask one fucking creator to have any input in that contract
1:22:37 that is to better the creative community?
1:22:40 Did you ask one single creator?
1:22:44 And let me tell you, Tim, when you get pregnant pauses in rooms,
1:22:46 it’s all you need to know.
1:22:48 You get your answer at the pregnant pause.
1:22:50 Of course they didn’t.
1:22:51 Of course they didn’t.
1:22:53 And that was the reason.
1:22:55 This is why we’re quitting Marvel.
1:23:02 This is why we’re quitting DC because of your disregard for your community.
1:23:08 And Jim and I are examples and we’ve climbed the top of the ladder just
1:23:12 like Jack King Kirby and all those hundreds before him.
1:23:17 This is just a repeat of history and it’s time.
1:23:20 And we thought that that was it.
1:23:24 And that was when the collective whole, not me, the collective
1:23:26 whole, the seven of us started image comics.
1:23:31 So the DC visit, I’m trying to think of the names involved.
1:23:34 Was there anyone who is quitting DC or did you just go in there
1:23:38 to put them on alert and say, No, we put them on alert and gave
1:23:40 them the same sort of speech we gave Marvel.
1:23:45 If you think that the dissatisfaction of the seven of us is unique
1:23:47 to the seven of us, you guys are blind.
1:23:48 I see.
1:23:52 So it was a change your ways or become a fatality.
1:23:56 Every conversation is the exact same.
1:24:01 And if we prove that there’s any success on the outside of the only
1:24:05 two bubbles that exist in most freelancers sort of brains, which is
1:24:08 Marvel DC or you get another job.
1:24:10 And I mean another job in another industry.
1:24:16 So if we if we move on and we create a third possibility, why do that?
1:24:23 Now, to their credit, let me say, Tim, to their credit, they did start changing.
1:24:28 They did start bettering pay and, you know, even starting to give medical,
1:24:33 which was never a part of the equation and giving bonuses and being
1:24:39 a little more fair minded on royalties because they knew that what
1:24:43 we were saying at some point that reality sunk in, that we could start
1:24:49 losing almost all of our top talent, if not a big portion of our talent period.
1:24:52 And this isn’t good for business.
1:24:57 So even those that were jealous or in our creative community and or
1:25:02 thought that we were crazies or whatever, they still, whether
1:25:05 they know it or not prospered by us leaving because all their contracts
1:25:09 got upgraded while they were still throwing darts at us, our own
1:25:12 community, as you can imagine, saying, you guys go take your big egos
1:25:13 and go do your thing.
1:25:14 Okay.
1:25:15 So I just came back from a bathroom break.
1:25:18 You mentioned before we started recording, you had a camel bladder
1:25:21 and that you talk until I had to take a bathroom break, which was true.
1:25:25 So how is a camel bladder a competitive advantage?
1:25:26 It is.
1:25:28 And so because people go, so what?
1:25:28 So why?
1:25:30 So you don’t go to the bathroom.
1:25:34 I mean, I went to a signing not long ago and I got there at seven
1:25:37 and then I signed from seven in the morning to midnight and I didn’t
1:25:39 move from the desk where I was signing.
1:25:43 And they had to now again, other human, other human beings had to
1:25:44 eat and go to the bathroom.
1:25:48 So I, so I go, you better have two teams and you’re going to have to rotate
1:25:48 them.
1:25:50 Let me just sort of quickly get out of the way.
1:25:54 First, how you cannot go to the bathroom for 17 hours.
1:25:56 It’s really sort of easy stuff.
1:25:59 If you don’t put anything into your top hole, nothing comes out of
1:26:00 any of the bottom holes, right?
1:26:01 Just, it’s just basic.
1:26:04 So I don’t eat and I don’t drink.
1:26:07 That’s a whole nother conversation, but like they’re going, what, what,
1:26:08 how do you do that?
1:26:09 That’s another conversation.
1:26:13 But if you don’t put anything, nothing in, nothing out, simple, easy.
1:26:17 And I know this to be scientifically true because I’ve used it to my advantage.
1:26:21 Now, because I have a camel bladder, two things have happened in my career
1:26:22 that I think have been advantageous.
1:26:25 One, everybody when I go to the conventions would have to go and
1:26:26 take a lunch break.
1:26:26 Why?
1:26:28 Because they’re hungry.
1:26:29 They’re hungry.
1:26:32 My wife would tell you, I have never uttered those words.
1:26:32 I’m hungry.
1:26:35 I eat because science says I need to.
1:26:36 My body needs fuel.
1:26:40 So I put it in not because I’m hungry because I have to.
1:26:42 It’s an essential ingredient food.
1:26:46 So I do it, but I can outlast you if you got to go away.
1:26:50 So people would take off at conventions and go away for lunch or bathroom
1:26:51 breaks or whatever.
1:26:52 Guess who didn’t?
1:26:54 Me.
1:26:57 And here’s why that matters because there’s people in line.
1:27:00 And if you’ve got at the time of our popularity, when they used to open it up,
1:27:04 you’d have at times I’m telling you literally thousands of people in line
1:27:05 waiting for your autograph.
1:27:10 First off, in good conscience, I can’t have somebody waiting in line for two
1:27:13 hours, three hours, and then look at them and say, cut.
1:27:15 I’m going for an hour and a half lunch break.
1:27:17 And the kids going, what?
1:27:18 I’ve really been in line for three hours.
1:27:19 Like I can’t do it.
1:27:20 I can’t look at somebody in the eye.
1:27:21 I won’t do it.
1:27:27 So I said, no, I’ll just figure out how to not do this thing that most humans do.
1:27:28 And here’s where the upside is.
1:27:33 Is it when all my peers have gone to lunch, then people were waiting in line
1:27:36 and then they’re just sitting there going, well, that guy’s still signing.
1:27:36 What’s his name?
1:27:39 Todd, Tom, Tim, whatever.
1:27:39 What’s he do?
1:27:40 Spider-Man.
1:27:42 Well, I like comic books.
1:27:42 I know Spider-Man.
1:27:44 And guess what happens, Tim?
1:27:45 They’d get in your line.
1:27:48 They don’t care really at that point about you.
1:27:49 They just go, he’s signing.
1:27:50 The line’s moving.
1:27:51 I’ll get in his line.
1:27:52 And then they come up.
1:27:54 You’ve got 20 seconds.
1:27:56 You become as gracious as you can to them.
1:28:00 And maybe you peel off and you’ve got a new couple of fans.
1:28:04 And all of a sudden it’s like, you know, I only collect X-Men, but you know, that
1:28:07 Todd was a gentleman and he was very nice and he smiled at me.
1:28:08 He was very kind.
1:28:12 You know, maybe I’ll go buy one of his Spider-Man books or, you know, in the
1:28:13 future, his Spawn books.
1:28:14 And so that’s it.
1:28:15 Good, right?
1:28:18 I’ll always be nice to anybody, no matter who they are.
1:28:23 Number two on the business end, and this one is sadly even easier.
1:28:25 And it’s just pathetic at times.
1:28:30 I live in Phoenix, Arizona, and Phoenix, Arizona can be 110 degrees.
1:28:31 Let me tell you, I’m like a cockroach.
1:28:33 I don’t care what the weather is.
1:28:34 I’ll survive.
1:28:35 Don’t worry about me.
1:28:36 I’m good.
1:28:37 But here’s what I know about other people.
1:28:39 They have comfort zones.
1:28:44 And so whenever I was in some big legal dispute or contract dispute, I would say,
1:28:46 especially the people in LA, I go, you fly them to me.
1:28:47 You fly them to me.
1:28:50 Now this is just the art of war.
1:28:54 So my desk is facing a big giant glass window, right?
1:28:57 And I know when the sun comes down that window.
1:29:02 Now, usually when I’m in my room, I bring down the drapes and I put up the AC and
1:29:03 I’m comfortable.
1:29:07 But when the enemy is coming, i.e., the people I’ve got to negotiate with come,
1:29:13 I make sure that the blinds are up and that I turn the air conditioning so that
1:29:15 it’s actually stuffy in that room.
1:29:16 Because why?
1:29:17 I can endure it.
1:29:18 I’ve done it plenty of times.
1:29:22 And then they always come dressed in a three-piece suit.
1:29:24 Wrong move, guys.
1:29:24 Wrong move.
1:29:28 And then they come in and they come into the room and I closed the door and I know
1:29:29 it’s going to get stuffy.
1:29:33 And then I put a giant pitcher of water in front of them.
1:29:42 And then I uttered the words, guys, this has been going on far, far too long.
1:29:43 Here’s the deal.
1:29:49 We’re not leaving this room until we settle every single outstanding point.
1:29:56 And during those conversations, they either pour their own water on a constant
1:29:59 basis because they’ve got their three-piece wool suit on.
1:30:03 I’ve got my t-shirt and I’m in my Nike shorts.
1:30:09 And I can just see them getting hotter and hotter and hotter.
1:30:11 And they keep having to get more and more water.
1:30:13 And at some point, nature calls.
1:30:18 And then we get down to the last one and I go, I’m not moving on point 10.
1:30:19 I’m not moving.
1:30:19 It’s a deal break.
1:30:21 If I don’t get it, this whole deal.
1:30:25 And you know how many times I’ve had people in my room go, fine.
1:30:26 This is how it works.
1:30:27 It goes like this time.
1:30:28 Fine.
1:30:29 You can have point 10.
1:30:30 Are we done?
1:30:30 Yes.
1:30:31 Are we done?
1:30:31 Yes.
1:30:32 Where’s your bathroom?
1:30:35 The very next thing is where’s your bathroom?
1:30:43 Because I think in my mind that they literally came in on the 10th point because
1:30:45 they couldn’t hold it anymore.
1:30:49 And if they could have held it, they could have argued longer with me.
1:30:53 And perhaps I might have conceded or we could have compromised on that point.
1:30:56 But their bladder cost them too bad.
1:30:58 How sad, right?
1:31:01 You find your, you find your advantages, wherever you can get them.
1:31:04 Oh, McFarlane the Barbarian.
1:31:05 What a savage.
1:31:06 Nice work.
1:31:08 So let’s come back to Venom.
1:31:12 You mentioned that Venom came together, I think as an accident.
1:31:14 Maybe the was the phrasing that you use.
1:31:16 I mean, this is an iconic character known the world over.
1:31:17 Happy accident.
1:31:18 Yeah.
1:31:19 So how, how did it come together?
1:31:25 So we’ll go back early in my Marvel career, like I said early in the podcast.
1:31:28 So if you can keep deadlines, that’s a giant value in that industry.
1:31:31 So I was showing them that I could keep deadlines.
1:31:34 So I knew then that that was going to be getting me continuous work.
1:31:41 So once you get continuous work, the next upgrade is can you draw characters
1:31:43 that people have heard of, right?
1:31:48 So because the first job I got at Marvel was on a book and it was
1:31:49 like an obscure book.
1:31:52 It was called Steve Engelhardt’s Coyote and it wasn’t even Coyote.
1:31:55 I was doing a backup in the Coyote.
1:31:57 I was doing an obscure backup in an obscure book.
1:32:00 It literally was starting in the mail room.
1:32:05 But eventually I got a steady job over DC because they cancel Coyote.
1:32:08 And I got a, I got a monthly book over DC.
1:32:13 Unfortunately, Tim, and this is where sometimes one person’s break
1:32:15 is another person’s tragedy.
1:32:19 An artist on another book who was a fit human being with super awesome
1:32:23 artists, I followed him, was a health freak, drank some unpasteurized milk,
1:32:26 went into a seizure and had an allergic reaction and died.
1:32:32 And so I get a phone call and they go, Hey, Todd, my artist just passed
1:32:32 away.
1:32:35 Can you come on and help us for a couple of months?
1:32:38 And I, at that point, they had canceled Coyote.
1:32:40 I literally took me years to get in.
1:32:43 I was employed for four months and then they canceled Coyote.
1:32:48 And I’m like, man, so I sent my samples back to all the people that were
1:32:52 gracious enough to give me constructive criticism, except for a thing
1:32:53 changed on the resume, Tim.
1:32:57 I was now able to say, um, I am Todd McFarland, the professional
1:32:59 from Marvel comic books.
1:33:00 The drawing was exactly the same.
1:33:01 It only been four months.
1:33:05 It was just as horrible as it was four months earlier, except for
1:33:08 instead of being an amateur, I got to go now into the smaller pile,
1:33:11 which is the professionals looking for work pile.
1:33:13 So I get the job.
1:33:15 I go, yeah, I get, I’ve got some work.
1:33:18 The guy who was supposed to take over that book, because I was only
1:33:21 supposed to fill in for two months, decided to bail.
1:33:25 So after the first issue, they said, do you want to take over the book?
1:33:28 It was a book called Infinity Incorporated and I stayed on the book
1:33:29 for two, three years.
1:33:32 So when I went over to Marvel, they went, okay, you can keep a deadline.
1:33:33 Check.
1:33:38 The question is you got to stop doing, and here’s a bizarre thing that was
1:33:39 happening at Marvel at that point.
1:33:43 You got to stop doing what they called, they dubbed the big, your big
1:33:45 dice drawing style.
1:33:48 And the only reason it was called that because on one page in
1:33:52 Infinity Incorporated, I drew this page layout and it was these big
1:33:52 giant dice.
1:33:56 And then I did panels inside drawings inside the big dice and
1:33:59 somebody, I guess, in editorial saw that page.
1:34:01 And so it was like, oh, he’s the big giant dice guy.
1:34:07 And the reason I was doing giant dice and doing all these crazy flamboyant
1:34:13 layouts in Infinity Incorporated, because Tim, my drawing was mediocre.
1:34:14 I knew that.
1:34:17 Like at some point you got to be realistic about your skills.
1:34:19 I was mediocre and I had two choices.
1:34:26 I could either put mediocre drawings and boring layout or I could be
1:34:30 flamboyant and baffle them with my BS and get them to look at all this
1:34:34 sort of window trimming and not sort of pay attention that maybe I’m
1:34:36 drawing my eyes crooked, right?
1:34:38 And it worked and it worked.
1:34:39 So people are like, oh my gosh.
1:34:43 And so by the time I left Infinity, I think I had risen to the point
1:34:47 that I was like, voted the fifth most popular pencil at that point.
1:34:48 So I’m like, wow.
1:34:52 So I go over to Marvel and then they say, which was weird because Marvel
1:34:53 was always the house of ideas.
1:34:56 And at this point they were in, they had flopped with DC and they
1:34:57 were, they were boring.
1:35:02 And they said, you can come, but you can’t do the giant dice style.
1:35:03 And I go, so what do you want me to do?
1:35:05 And I go, we just want you to do like a grid.
1:35:08 Now, let me just tell you, anybody listen, that means you take a piece
1:35:12 of paper and you divide it into six equal, equal panels and you go.
1:35:15 It is the most boring, easiest thing to do.
1:35:19 So essentially they took a guy like me who I thought was an artistic
1:35:22 sprinter and they said, could you put lead boots on?
1:35:25 Shoot, this is going to be easy, right?
1:35:28 I don’t know why you want to do it, but it was frustrating because
1:35:31 there was no artistic freedom to do it.
1:35:32 So I did it.
1:35:35 They give me the first job back at Marvel and they go, hey, problem.
1:35:37 You usually have 30 days to do a book, right?
1:35:40 Once a month, but we got, we’re behind the eight ball.
1:35:42 We can give you this job, but you only got 10 days.
1:35:43 I gave it to him and eight.
1:35:44 Was it my best job?
1:35:45 Of course it wasn’t.
1:35:47 But was it done in eight?
1:35:47 Yeah.
1:35:51 Did it get me brownie points right on the spot?
1:35:52 They were amazed.
1:35:53 I gave it to him in eight days.
1:35:54 Boom.
1:35:57 Within weeks, they’re offering me the Incredible Hulk.
1:36:01 Now, once you get the Incredible Hulk, this is the next step in climbing
1:36:02 the ladder all of a sudden.
1:36:07 Look, I’d been in the business probably two, three, four years at that point.
1:36:10 And when I get the Incredible Hulk, finally I hear the words from my mom
1:36:12 and dad, oh my God, you finally made it.
1:36:16 And the reason was because they had heard of the Hulk, right?
1:36:19 And so up to then everything I was doing was like, I don’t know
1:36:20 if he’s ever going to make it.
1:36:22 I was still working at Marvel and DC.
1:36:23 It just wasn’t for books.
1:36:27 But if you can go to the neighbor’s, you know, Halloween party and say,
1:36:30 my son draws the Hulk, they’ve heard of the word Hulk too.
1:36:33 So all of a sudden it’s like, oh my gosh, your son, he must be good.
1:36:37 So it’s important to have characters that know because it helps
1:36:40 the relatives in your circle sort of think that you’re a bigger
1:36:43 shot than you are, even though it’s the exact same amount of work
1:36:45 and the same pay on top of it.
1:36:51 So, okay, so you get to the next step and now you’re going, ha, now
1:36:54 you’re just fighting for the next step up.
1:36:57 And I’ll quickly sort of get you to this.
1:36:59 And I know I’m long winded and all your questions.
1:37:00 I wish I was better.
1:37:02 That I I’m into it.
1:37:05 Okay, so I do the I do the Hulk.
1:37:08 I’m doing penciling and then I go, I’m going to do inking because
1:37:10 at this point I got fast enough that I could do two books.
1:37:12 There weren’t too many people that could do two books.
1:37:13 I was doing two books.
1:37:15 So they give me a second book.
1:37:18 The same editor who gave me the Incredible Hulk gives me another
1:37:20 book is called GI Joe real American hero.
1:37:21 Right.
1:37:24 Now the thing that’s sort of ironic about that is I was living up in
1:37:25 Canada, right?
1:37:29 Never really sort of I was going, wow, if they only knew that this Canadian
1:37:33 and I’m Canadian up here in Canada drawing their real American heroes.
1:37:35 This might be a bit of a problem, but nobody’s going to tell.
1:37:36 There was no internet.
1:37:38 So I did it.
1:37:43 The first issue of GI Joe and I was doing the Hulk and I get a phone
1:37:46 call and I was going back and forth with this writer and it was we
1:37:47 were bashing heads.
1:37:50 Every single page of that.
1:37:53 And finally, after the first issue, my editor phones up and says,
1:37:55 Todd, I’ve got to let you go.
1:37:57 I’m like one issue.
1:37:58 I’m one issue in the GI Joe.
1:38:01 I’m making my marks on the Hulk.
1:38:04 I’m now in the top three of some of the voting artistically.
1:38:07 And I go, what are you going to fire me?
1:38:11 But let me just tell you it was a relief because it was such a pain for
1:38:17 that one month and that my view of comic books and the writer’s view of
1:38:20 comic books were so diametrically opposed.
1:38:22 Where did you guys clash on that?
1:38:24 What kind of decisions or what type of stuff?
1:38:27 He probably sees it a little bit differently, but I’ll just
1:38:28 show you, give him my point of view.
1:38:31 I assume the people that were reading the comic books had eyes and brains.
1:38:36 He assumed from my perspective, they didn’t because he said it.
1:38:40 Assume your reader isn’t his words.
1:38:40 Not mine.
1:38:45 Assume the reader is an aboriginal Bushman and he just came out of the
1:38:49 tundra in Australia and he’s never seen a comic book.
1:38:54 Your storytelling must be that clear, which basically meant you can’t
1:38:58 have somebody walk into a house and then cut to them inside the house
1:39:00 or even closing the door on the inside.
1:39:04 You have to grab the door, open the door, walk in the room
1:39:08 because and I just want I just want Larry.
1:39:10 I guess I see the world differently.
1:39:15 I assume silly me that the people reading the comic books, watch
1:39:19 fucking TV, go to movies, read books.
1:39:22 They understand how stories are told.
1:39:27 And as a matter of fact, on a movie, when you cut scenes, they don’t
1:39:30 even have a caption in ninety nine point nine percent of the time.
1:39:35 So people just know that it’s different people in a different setting.
1:39:36 It must be a scene cut.
1:39:38 You don’t have to do it.
1:39:41 But anyways, he had his way of seeing the world.
1:39:43 I had my way of seeing the world.
1:39:44 Fine.
1:39:44 No big deal.
1:39:45 Got it.
1:39:47 So he fires me off it.
1:39:52 And I remember I was sitting in my apartment up in Vancouver and I lean
1:39:55 back and I looked at the clock and it was like twelve oh six.
1:39:59 And I was like a little bit bomb come like, man, I never been never been fired.
1:39:59 Right.
1:40:02 So it’s like, oh, man, it twelve fourteen.
1:40:05 Bring I am telling you no lie.
1:40:06 Seven minutes.
1:40:08 I was unemployed for seven minutes.
1:40:11 Bring Todd.
1:40:11 Yeah.
1:40:13 Hey, this is Dip Giordano over at D.C.
1:40:15 Now remember, I’d left D.C. to go back over to Marvel.
1:40:19 Remember when you left, you said the only reason you would come back is
1:40:20 to draw Batman.
1:40:21 Yeah.
1:40:24 Well, we’ve got this book.
1:40:27 First, there was Batman the Dark Knight.
1:40:28 Then there was Batman year one.
1:40:30 And they had another project called Batman year two.
1:40:33 We’ve got a book called Batman year two.
1:40:37 It’s a four part story and the artists quit after the first one.
1:40:38 Can you finish the last three?
1:40:42 What like what you’re saying?
1:40:45 I my choice right now is either stay on, which I didn’t have an option,
1:40:46 but stay on G.I.
1:40:50 Joe just got fired from that was basically like putting daggers in my eyes
1:40:54 or do Batman and that was the only character I’d come back for.
1:40:57 So I jump on Batman year two.
1:41:02 Now, it gets a little crazier by that point because because at this
1:41:04 point, I was only being the pencil artist.
1:41:08 And in comic books, they bring in another person who is the anchor.
1:41:10 Some people call him the tracer.
1:41:11 It’s not true.
1:41:13 Good anchors add a lot to pages.
1:41:18 I thought I had my drawing style is what I would call sort of this
1:41:20 new wave 90 style.
1:41:26 And I was constantly getting anchors that were like these 1960s
1:41:27 old school brush guys.
1:41:31 I was drawing in a way that I thought you should be using a pen
1:41:33 because there’s a different technique with it.
1:41:35 And they kept putting brush guys on me.
1:41:39 And it was so transforming like you like they literally would
1:41:41 bury the artwork from if you saw what I was drawing.
1:41:42 You saw the printed page.
1:41:45 It was like to me night and day.
1:41:49 So I do this part two of Batman year two.
1:41:50 Then I do part three.
1:41:52 And then they send me the samples.
1:41:55 And I finally, again, another one of those moments in my life with
1:42:00 clarity that I look at it and I see the splash page and the splash
1:42:04 page has a commissioner Gordon and he’s holding the gun.
1:42:06 And to me, it looks hairy, right?
1:42:07 I go, it’s metallic.
1:42:08 Why is it looking hairy?
1:42:14 And it’s because the anchor was doing these lines that work for him.
1:42:14 I guess.
1:42:19 And then I looked at like another panel and it was the hallway.
1:42:23 And when you’re doing like a downshot of a hallway, you the
1:42:26 line to get closer, it’s basically perspective.
1:42:29 I won’t bore people, but it’s just the illusion of depth.
1:42:32 And I done all these drawings or these lines to give that illusion
1:42:34 and they were horizontal.
1:42:37 And then I looked at the panel and he had done the exact same thing.
1:42:40 It was brilliant, except for he did them vertically.
1:42:41 And it was these moments.
1:42:47 And so it wasn’t that one was better than the other, right?
1:42:48 They both work.
1:42:52 It was again, I just sort of try to get as simple as possible.
1:42:56 The reason and I don’t know if anybody sort of could understand this
1:43:03 concept, but the reason I made them go up and down vertically was
1:43:06 because silly me, I fucking wanted them to go up and down vertically
1:43:11 because if I had wanted them to go horizontally, which was another
1:43:13 option, I would have drawn them.
1:43:19 I can draw horizontal lines equally as well has vertical lines.
1:43:24 The reason they were vertical because I must have meant horizontal.
1:43:26 That’s why I did like, what are you talking about?
1:43:31 Just copy the lines and do your thing with the lines that are there.
1:43:37 And so I phone the editor and I go, Hey, Denny, I don’t mean to do this
1:43:39 to you because you already lost one artist and I don’t mean to do
1:43:41 power play because I don’t like doing that.
1:43:43 I don’t want to be that guy, but here’s the gig.
1:43:48 If I can’t ink the last chapter of this book and let me be completely
1:43:50 honest, I’ve never inked before.
1:43:51 So I’m a complete noob.
1:43:53 I can’t do this.
1:43:57 I can’t have people literally going in the opposite direction of my artwork.
1:43:58 I can’t do it.
1:44:01 So he kind of was in a tough spot.
1:44:04 He was like, oh, okay, fine, Todd, can you get it done by the deadline?
1:44:05 Yeah, sure.
1:44:07 So I did my first thinking.
1:44:10 So thanks to all those anchors for turning me into an anchor.
1:44:13 And from there on out, I was my own anchor.
1:44:14 I started inking the Hulk.
1:44:18 If you look at it, I went back to my editor on the Hulk and I go, well,
1:44:20 they let me ink the Batman.
1:44:23 And so he’s like, oh, okay, I guess you can ink the Hulk.
1:44:26 And so, and now I’m going to eventually get to your question about venom.
1:44:27 So it was a long winded way.
1:44:28 Sorry.
1:44:29 Eventually.
1:44:29 That’s okay.
1:44:31 Let me pause you for just a, just a quick sec.
1:44:35 So for people who have no context on your art, I mean, very fine details.
1:44:41 And when you’re talking about the older school inking, lots of thick black,
1:44:43 I mean, lots of maybe obscuring.
1:44:44 You simplify it.
1:44:44 Yeah.
1:44:46 So you simplify it.
1:44:46 Right.
1:44:52 And so, so when you went from penciling to I need to ink this or I’m out,
1:44:57 what were the biggest differences between penciling and inking?
1:45:02 As someone who’s never inked, I’d be curious to know what you learned or felt
1:45:04 or if it just mapped over really easily.
1:45:06 What was it like to do your first inking?
1:45:11 Hey, Tim, here’s the first shock that my sometimes my enthusiasm gets the better
1:45:15 of me and there’s nobody that hates Todd more than Todd at times.
1:45:18 Cause it’s like, what are you doing, Todd?
1:45:20 So then I learned the magic.
1:45:23 I’m now going to do two jobs, right?
1:45:26 If you, if you pencil a book, you get 30 days.
1:45:30 If you ink a book, like I pencil it, they give me 30 days.
1:45:33 Then they hand the pages to you, Tim, you ink it, you get 30 days.
1:45:38 If I want to pencil and ink, they don’t give me 30 plus 30.
1:45:39 Right.
1:45:40 There’s two of us.
1:45:42 It’s 30 plus 30.
1:45:43 I get 30, you get 30.
1:45:46 They’re going, you can do two jobs, Todd, but you still only got 30 days.
1:45:52 Essentially, you’re doing twice the work and you have to do it twice as fast
1:45:53 because the book still comes out.
1:45:58 And so lesson learned, if you’re going to pick up more work, you might
1:46:01 want to ask how much extra time do you have?
1:46:05 And when the answer is zero, you might want to rethink your ask.
1:46:10 So because eventually I got to the point going, I’m going to write
1:46:11 my own stories too, right?
1:46:15 And that extra time also is zero.
1:46:18 So, but that comes a little bit later in the career.
1:46:22 So the first shock is I’ve now got to go faster.
1:46:27 What it taught me personally, because now I’m doing two books
1:46:27 and I’m inking, right?
1:46:30 I like, so I’m a bit of a unicorn at this point because very few people
1:46:36 can even pencil two book was I had to create for myself efficiencies.
1:46:39 And this goes into business now, right?
1:46:42 And even though we’re doing art, this is just efficiencies.
1:46:46 So I do the efficiency and I go, I don’t have time to do a lot of
1:46:48 what they call underdrawing.
1:46:50 I got to literally draw with ink.
1:46:52 I don’t have time to do the job twice.
1:46:54 I can’t pencil and then ink my own work.
1:46:59 I have to do it all in one fell swoop, which is horrifying to people
1:47:03 who’ve never inked themselves because every person I’ve shown
1:47:06 amongst some amazing peers, among some amazing peers.
1:47:10 When they see what my process is, they go, I can’t even make out
1:47:12 what’s on your page.
1:47:13 And I go, that’s okay.
1:47:16 I just kind of finish it with the ink and I go, no, no, no, no, no,
1:47:17 no, you can’t go with the ink.
1:47:18 I’m like, why?
1:47:18 Because it’s permanent.
1:47:21 I’m like, what if you make a mistake?
1:47:23 There’s a thing called whiteout.
1:47:26 You just white it out and they’re going.
1:47:27 Yeah, but what if you make another mistake?
1:47:28 I just use whiteout.
1:47:30 Let me ask you a question in reverse.
1:47:32 What happens if you draw on pencil and you make mistake?
1:47:33 Oh, I just use an eraser.
1:47:36 Well, why can you use an eraser and I can’t use whiteout?
1:47:37 It’s the same thing.
1:47:38 Yeah, but it’s ink.
1:47:42 It literally was this mental wall for people.
1:47:45 And these are people that I would sit next to at a convention
1:47:49 that would do 20 sketches with a pencil and never erase one line.
1:47:51 And I used to turn to them go, why couldn’t you?
1:47:53 Why couldn’t you’ve done that with ink?
1:47:54 And their answer was always the same.
1:47:55 What if I made a mistake?
1:47:56 You didn’t.
1:47:58 I’ve been watching you for four hours.
1:47:59 You haven’t made one mistake.
1:48:03 Why is it if I changed the tool that somehow you’re going to make a mistake?
1:48:04 But you know what?
1:48:05 You do you.
1:48:06 I’ll do my thing.
1:48:12 And so I had to just pull back the drawing and figure it out kind of in one
1:48:14 step so I could keep the deadline.
1:48:16 That was my learning experience.
1:48:19 Now question number two, did I hit the ground running?
1:48:20 Of course I didn’t.
1:48:21 Of course I didn’t.
1:48:26 But if you look at my inking at the beginning, it’s very, very crude.
1:48:29 And even on Spider-Man, which is the book that catapult me, if you look at the
1:48:34 thickness of the webs on his costume, you will see a noticeable difference.
1:48:39 I think from issue 300 when I started inking Spider-Man.
1:48:44 And if you look at like about issue 320 for sure, by the time I get in the new
1:48:48 Spider-Man book that I’m drawing for sure, there’s a dramatic difference visually.
1:48:51 So I was constantly learning that trade.
1:48:55 It was Todd, the professional who’d been penciling for five, six years and Todd,
1:48:59 the newbie inker, I wasn’t going to be a five or six year vet inking.
1:49:00 I was a new inker.
1:49:04 So I had to learn that trade and catch up those five or six years that the
1:49:08 other half of my brain had already sort of tackled with penciling.
1:49:09 So go ahead.
1:49:12 So I, because eventually now this is going to get me to Venom.
1:49:13 Yeah, to Venom.
1:49:14 Okay.
1:49:18 So very quickly, so then I finished the Batman project and now I’m back down
1:49:20 to only one book so I can do two books.
1:49:25 And so again, I, I’m looking for another book and all the editors at Marvel said,
1:49:27 Hey, yeah, yeah, yeah, you don’t come and talk to me, but whatever you do,
1:49:32 don’t go into the Spider-Man office because it’s a shambles.
1:49:38 Now you may or may not have gathered that Todd doesn’t seem to color
1:49:40 inside the lines a lot of the times.
1:49:46 And so you don’t tell me don’t go into that office, right?
1:49:48 Cause to me, unless you want Todd to go into the office.
1:49:49 Yeah, what are you guys doing?
1:49:54 So I went, I went into the office and it was, it was he, the editor,
1:49:59 Jim Salkrup at that time, good man, was losing and turning over artists.
1:50:01 The books were in a bit of a sales decline.
1:50:05 Like I said, when I picked up the book, it was like at number 2122.
1:50:09 And I said, Hey, I can do another book and we had a chat.
1:50:14 And I said, I want to ink the book and then they’re like, well, you know,
1:50:17 maybe in a couple of months and I go on mink into Hulk, right?
1:50:20 Come on, go talk to Bob, the editor on that book.
1:50:23 And he’s like, well, you know, just give me a couple months.
1:50:24 You, how about it starting at 300?
1:50:28 You can ink the book and I’m like, yeah, okay, we’ll do it.
1:50:33 But the other piece of it was just one other sort of slight problem.
1:50:35 Spider-Man’s got a black costume.
1:50:39 And this is this costume that was created and for this book called
1:50:43 Secret Wars, which is the black costume with the white spider on it.
1:50:46 And I go, that’s not Spider-Man to me.
1:50:47 Maybe I’m just old school.
1:50:51 Spider-Man’s that guy in the blue and the red with the webs on it, Spider-Man.
1:50:56 So can we just get rid of that black costume and get back to Spider-Man?
1:50:59 Then this is sort of the happy accident.
1:51:04 He said, wow, you know, the editor in chief really likes the black costume.
1:51:06 And I don’t think he’s going to go for that.
1:51:08 So he’s not going to want to get rid of it.
1:51:12 He had something to do with Secret Wars and, you know, they kind of digging it.
1:51:16 And I went, oh, man, I just, I don’t want to draw Spider-Man a black costume.
1:51:19 It’s like doing Batman and polka dots doesn’t make any sense to me.
1:51:22 So what if I come back to you with some designs?
1:51:24 We just ripped the costume off him.
1:51:25 We put it on somebody.
1:51:26 I create another character.
1:51:28 Give it to the writers.
1:51:29 We’ll just figure it out.
1:51:32 And then we still have the black costume and then we can get the red and blue
1:51:34 back on Peter Parker and that’s a win, win, win.
1:51:36 And he was like, okay, that might work.
1:51:37 So I go away.
1:51:38 I do the drawing.
1:51:41 The costume was alive.
1:51:43 So I go, oh, it must be an alien.
1:51:47 So I created this big, giant hulking alien and gave him the big eyes and the
1:51:49 slobbering teeth.
1:51:50 And to me, it was a gorilla.
1:51:54 It’s like an alien gorilla and then the claws and everything else.
1:51:56 And that was the design for Venom.
1:51:59 Like here, we didn’t have a name at that point, but just go here.
1:52:00 Here’s the new bad guy.
1:52:00 Here it is.
1:52:01 Go.
1:52:03 And they looked at it and went, oh, that’s kind of cool.
1:52:05 We’ll give it to the writer.
1:52:06 And so they gave it to the writer.
1:52:08 They cleared it through upper management.
1:52:10 They said, yeah, yeah, yeah, that seems like a reasonable thing.
1:52:14 The writer comes back to me and says, Todd, the guy is Eddie Brock.
1:52:16 And I went, whoa, whoa, whoa.
1:52:18 The writer’s name was David.
1:52:21 Whoa, David, Eddie Brock, Eddie Brock’s a human.
1:52:22 Did you see my design?
1:52:24 Like information I could have used earlier.
1:52:29 I would have designed it differently if I knew it was a human that I was
1:52:30 putting the black costume on.
1:52:32 But I sort of liked the design.
1:52:37 I thought it was cool and it was giant and I thought that it would be more
1:52:40 formidable for Spider-Man to go up against something that was way
1:52:44 bigger than him than another human humanoid form.
1:52:47 And this is sort of the geeky stuff that us creators go through.
1:52:52 And so I said, but man, if Bruce Banner, little shit can turn into the Hulk,
1:52:58 then by gosh, why can’t Eddie Brock somehow be buried in this costume somewhere?
1:52:58 Right.
1:53:00 So we never sort of wavered from it.
1:53:08 Venom comes out, has a big play and issue 300 amazing Spider-Man 300 sales go crazy.
1:53:12 We knew we had something on our hand because every time Venom kept coming back,
1:53:16 the mail again, there was no internet, but the mail kept getting bigger and people
1:53:18 were like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh.
1:53:24 And so now fast forward with hindsight and Venom is, you know, a worldwide
1:53:27 brand, you know, made a billion dollars for Sony in a movie.
1:53:29 So again, there’s the happy accident.
1:53:33 And if you look at issue 300, if you want to go by it, it comes
1:53:34 with a couple of things.
1:53:35 One, it’s an anniversary book.
1:53:36 Sales are going way up on it.
1:53:40 One, it’s an anniversary book issue 300 amazing Spider-Man.
1:53:40 Goodbye.
1:53:45 Some of the very first early work of me on Spider-Man and my
1:53:47 first inking job on Spider-Man.
1:53:50 But more importantly, it’s the origin of Venom.
1:53:53 And so for people, they spend hundreds of dollars.
1:53:54 If you get these books, great.
1:53:56 It’s thousands of dollars so you can get the origin of Venom.
1:53:58 I don’t consider that book.
1:54:00 If you were to ask me, is that the origin of Venom?
1:54:02 No, it’s the issue.
1:54:05 How do we get that damn black costume up Peter Parker so I can
1:54:06 draw the classic red and blue costume?
1:54:09 Cause that’s Spider-Man to me, right?
1:54:12 Venom, I didn’t care at that moment about Venom.
1:54:13 It was like, get rid of it.
1:54:17 The last page of that issue, Peter Parker gets rid of the black
1:54:19 costume because he has a fight with Venom.
1:54:22 Venom goes on his way and he pulls a box out from underneath the
1:54:26 bed and he pulls out the classic uniform, the red and blue, the
1:54:30 one that to me is Spider-Man and the last page, which I still
1:54:33 have today because it was like, finally, I’m drawing Spider-Man
1:54:35 because I started on issue 298.
1:54:36 Nope.
1:54:37 Black costume, 299.
1:54:37 Nope.
1:54:42 Black costume and every page, but one of issue 300.
1:54:45 But that last page, it was, it even says, I think a caption
1:54:46 and it says, and a new beginning.
1:54:48 And to me, I go finally.
1:54:49 I get to dress.
1:54:51 This was for me, finally.
1:54:55 Now, somehow Venom was the byproduct of that, right?
1:54:57 Now, here’s what should happen.
1:55:00 Tim, an employee should come into the office.
1:55:02 They should say, no, he’s wearing the black costume.
1:55:05 We want to give you the job on Amazing Spider-Man, one of the
1:55:07 granddaddy books of the company.
1:55:10 And most sane employees will go, yes, sir.
1:55:11 Yes, ma’am.
1:55:12 When is the book due?
1:55:14 I don’t know.
1:55:18 Todd is Todd and yeah, yeah, yeah, right?
1:55:22 And so I just was like, no, I need the red and blue costume.
1:55:28 And and and but because of some of that arrogance, ego, immaturity,
1:55:29 whatever you want to call it.
1:55:32 Your byproduct is you’ve got a character called Venom that
1:55:35 now creates carnage in this whole slew, right?
1:55:41 So if I was that guy, that employee, all of that maybe never materializes.
1:55:43 That’s the true possibility of that.
1:55:46 And then I just take all of that.
1:55:48 Remember Marvel’s that they’re boring storytelling.
1:55:52 I start pushing the boundaries of storytelling to make it more.
1:55:53 I thought dynamic.
1:55:56 I thought everything we do in comic books is just a Broadway play.
1:55:59 You must, everything should be big and you should be talking and
1:56:03 performing for the lady with bad hearing that’s in the last row at the theater.
1:56:05 So that’s what comic books are.
1:56:06 It’s bravado.
1:56:11 And so I was doing all this fancy storytelling and my editors were
1:56:15 going, Todd, you can’t, you can’t, you can’t, you can’t.
1:56:17 And I’m like, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
1:56:18 But I just kept doing it.
1:56:22 And then I eventually I was asking them and I go, why can’t we?
1:56:24 And I go, well, the editor in chief, Jim, Jim Shooter.
1:56:25 He doesn’t like that.
1:56:31 I found that to be impossible to believe, impossible to believe.
1:56:37 Jim Shooter wants vanilla when he can have 2D fruity or a banana split.
1:56:38 Hard to believe.
1:56:41 So we went and had a meeting one time.
1:56:45 My editor was Bob Harris, who ended up being the top dog at DC.
1:56:46 I think he still has maybe.
1:56:49 And we went into this meeting with Jim Shooter, the editor in chief where
1:56:53 every, every editor was literally shaken in the boots from Jim Shooter.
1:56:56 He was like this authoritarian sort of figure.
1:57:01 And he, as we’re walking in the meeting, all as Bob says, don’t ask him
1:57:04 about storytelling, Todd, because he just wanted to say hi to me because I
1:57:07 was, you know, this new guy in the Hulk and my career was starting to bud.
1:57:09 And he just wanted to say hi to me.
1:57:11 It was just a casual conversation.
1:57:12 We have a nice, pleasant conversation.
1:57:15 And then it’s like, he goes, okay, I’ve got to get to my next meeting.
1:57:16 I’m going, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:57:20 And as we get up, because I want it Bob to be moving, I went, oh, hey, Jim,
1:57:21 just have one, one quick question.
1:57:24 Can I change storytelling?
1:57:25 Like, let me just ask you.
1:57:28 Am I allowed to have characters burst out of the panels?
1:57:30 Because that was what they, I was doing with Spider-Man.
1:57:31 And they’re going, you can’t, you can’t.
1:57:36 And he was like, looked at me quizitively and went, yeah, sure, why?
1:57:38 Okay.
1:57:39 But can I, can I do this other thing?
1:57:41 And he went, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.
1:57:45 And I went, so it’s okay for me to, to, because I go, I think
1:57:48 I heard somebody, it wasn’t Bob, my editor standing in front of you.
1:57:52 It must have been somebody else told me that somehow that you said you
1:57:57 can’t have things punch, you can’t have panels overlapping and you can’t
1:57:58 have characters punching out.
1:58:01 And I walked them through a couple of things and he was horrified.
1:58:03 And he was like, what?
1:58:03 What are you saying, Todd?
1:58:06 And I’m going, yeah, yeah, that’s just what they’re telling all the artists.
1:58:09 And he was like, no, and he got angry at that moment.
1:58:12 He goes, no, I never said that.
1:58:13 He goes, here’s what I said.
1:58:15 And I knew this was the answer, Tim.
1:58:17 I knew this was the answer.
1:58:23 He said, you can’t do bad overlapping panels and bad drawings of people
1:58:24 jumping out.
1:58:29 And then he explained to me the difference between a bad version and
1:58:31 a good version, right?
1:58:33 And I knew what the bad and good version was.
1:58:37 Basically don’t have a guy jumping out of a panel and you’re covering
1:58:39 up half the drawing of the next panel.
1:58:42 As long as you’re doing it in some negative space, you’re okay.
1:58:46 Just as long as the storytelling is clear, I don’t care how you design it, Todd.
1:58:47 I knew it.
1:58:49 Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
1:58:54 And shoot, from that meeting on, you take a look at my layouts in Spider-Man.
1:58:56 It started getting crazier and crazier.
1:58:58 Now, Jim Shooter gets pushed out very quickly.
1:59:01 I keep doing my Todd thing on Spider-Man.
1:59:06 I keep, and here’s what I did on Spider-Man that literally catapulted my career.
1:59:08 It was a simple move.
1:59:11 They were doing Spider-Man emphasis on man.
1:59:15 I flipped it to Spider-Man emphasis on the word spider.
1:59:18 So when he put the costume on, I thought he was an insect.
1:59:20 And I didn’t care about anatomy.
1:59:21 I didn’t care whether it mattered.
1:59:26 I just cared about the dynamics of this character looking like a
1:59:29 bug man and crawling in a way.
1:59:33 And then as part of that, I added more webbing on his costume.
1:59:37 And then I had to come up with a new way of doing his webs that have
1:59:39 been done this way for 30 years.
1:59:43 I go, it doesn’t work if you want to shoot it towards camera.
1:59:47 Or if you want to create a false sense of volume, which is the
1:59:51 only thing we have as artists, you must give the illusion of 3D given
1:59:52 that you’re drawing on a 2D piece of paper.
1:59:56 So again, all these silly things that would bore people.
1:59:57 But I was doing it.
1:59:59 And oh, by the way, it fucking looks cool.
2:00:00 It doesn’t bore me.
2:00:02 Now, this stuff is, this is key.
2:00:03 This is important.
2:00:06 So I go, and it looks cool.
2:00:09 And here’s the moment I was talking about earlier.
2:00:12 The moment you start missing with anybody’s icon.
2:00:16 Status quo comes into the equation.
2:00:18 And I’m now messing it.
2:00:21 I probably could have done what I did with a lower tier character,
2:00:22 but not Spider-Man.
2:00:25 Spider-Man, at this point, again, at the Republic Company,
2:00:27 he is on their checks.
2:00:29 Every check’s got a little spidey on it.
2:00:32 He’s on their quarterly reports.
2:00:33 He’s on their internal memos.
2:00:37 And I’m messing with that look, right?
2:00:41 And so they came and they were sitting there and they took it
2:00:44 as I was doing something.
2:00:47 I thought they were doing it wrong and I was right.
2:00:48 No, no, no, no, no.
2:00:50 Here is the reality of it.
2:00:51 And I’ve said it plenty of times.
2:00:54 I thought that the look that had been presented, the classic
2:00:57 look that was there, the one that everybody, if you close your
2:01:00 eyes, you have in your mind if you’re a certain age, was
2:01:03 literally the Norman Rockwell version of Spider-Man.
2:01:04 It was perfect.
2:01:09 And the best I could hope for as a young budding artist is to
2:01:14 do a bad version of that and go, man, that’s almost as cool as
2:01:15 Norman Rockwell’s painting.
2:01:17 Let me tell you, if you’re going to be a painter, never paint
2:01:19 like Norman Rockwell, the best you’re going to get is, man,
2:01:20 he’s almost as good as Norman.
2:01:22 That’s the best you can hope for.
2:01:24 You will never be better than Norman, right?
2:01:27 He’s already conquered that hill.
2:01:29 Go find another hill and make it your own.
2:01:33 You can take pieces of Norman Rockwell, but you can’t be
2:01:35 that exact same look.
2:01:38 So I was putting all these different looks together and
2:01:40 coming up with some crazy stuff and just making the spider
2:01:41 part of it.
2:01:43 The eyes got bigger, more webs.
2:01:45 I reinvented the webbing.
2:01:47 I made the blue a little bit darker.
2:01:50 I forgot about anatomy and I put them in these cool funky
2:01:53 poses that the readers just went crazy for.
2:01:57 And every single time I walked into the offices, so I didn’t
2:02:00 go there that often, they would call me on the carpet and
2:02:04 they would say, no, no, stop it, stop it.
2:02:06 And Tom denies it by my Tom.
2:02:08 There are moments of clarity in my life.
2:02:09 This is one of them.
2:02:11 Tom DeFalco was the editor-in-chief.
2:02:15 He’s an Italian guy and he was giving me heck again, wiggling
2:02:18 his finger, going, you got to stop doing the big eyes and
2:02:20 this and then he got so mad.
2:02:22 I remember his face getting a little red and he goes, and
2:02:26 that webbing, those damn spaghetti webbing, you got
2:02:27 to stop it.
2:02:29 Now all that now from my perspective, ladies and gentlemen,
2:02:32 if you’re in my head, it’s like a Charlie Brown sort of
2:02:32 cartoon.
2:02:35 Alls I heard was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, spaghetti
2:02:36 webbing.
2:02:39 And I went, oh my gosh, I’ve got a name for them now.
2:02:43 So I was like so happy in that moment because Tom gave me
2:02:44 an official name for him.
2:02:46 They’ve been known ever since has just spaghetti webbing.
2:02:48 Thank you, Tom DeFalco.
2:02:51 I think he was cussing me out and giving me heck at that
2:02:51 point.
2:02:54 I wasn’t paying attention though because I was like, oh,
2:02:54 super cool.
2:02:56 I’ve got, I’ve got a name for it.
2:02:59 He then says in that same meeting, you got to, you just
2:03:00 got to control this stuff.
2:03:06 And my answer was, and anybody is under the age of 30-ish
2:03:09 listening, I’m going to give you a bit of a golden rule.
2:03:11 Anybody asks you to do something, especially somebody
2:03:14 in authority, always say yes, even if you’re not going
2:03:14 to do it.
2:03:15 It’s just way easier.
2:03:19 You get out of the room faster, no confrontation.
2:03:22 Just nod your head yes in agreement and go do whatever
2:03:22 the hell you want.
2:03:26 And I knew that the editors would only circle back like
2:03:30 every 90 days and look at the books and do their evaluation.
2:03:33 And I walked out of that room.
2:03:35 Not only did I not make the webbing smaller.
2:03:36 I’ll show you the issue.
2:03:38 They got twice as long, right?
2:03:40 Cause they just look cool.
2:03:41 I got to tell you Tim, they look cool.
2:03:44 And by the time I came back the next time, I’ve seen the books.
2:03:45 I’ve seen them.
2:03:45 I’ve seen them.
2:03:46 I haven’t been home.
2:03:49 They wiggle their finger at you and they go, no.
2:03:52 And next time I go to New York, they go, no, Todd, but here’s
2:03:53 what was happening.
2:03:55 And here was their conundrum.
2:03:57 Sales were going up.
2:03:59 Sales were going up.
2:04:05 And at one point, again, I had that conversation of that.
2:04:09 It’s like, Tom, what do you care how I draw?
2:04:10 What do you care?
2:04:15 All you should care about is that I am selling you comic books
2:04:18 and you gave me the task of moving Spider-Man, amazing
2:04:21 Spider-Man from 21 up the ranks.
2:04:23 And it’s at number two right now.
2:04:24 Jim Lee and the X-Men were beating us.
2:04:25 And I was at one meeting.
2:04:26 It was odd.
2:04:27 There was this stranger in the room.
2:04:28 I never met him before.
2:04:29 Didn’t know who he was.
2:04:31 And he just sat there silent the whole time.
2:04:32 He had this big fat book.
2:04:33 I didn’t know who he was.
2:04:36 And then at the, finally at the end of an hour conversation,
2:04:39 when I said that, I go, I’m selling more damn books than
2:04:41 almost anybody you employ right here right now.
2:04:44 This dude I found out later was an accountant.
2:04:46 He opened up his big giant accounting book.
2:04:48 Tom came behind him.
2:04:50 The accountant didn’t utter a word.
2:04:54 He just pointed at something on his data sheet and he shook
2:04:59 his head, yes, but he just said, yes, sales are going up.
2:05:04 And it was, you could just see that it was like, what do we do?
2:05:04 Right?
2:05:08 It’s working, but we disagree with it because the status
2:05:09 quo is getting.
2:05:11 Let me tell your audience.
2:05:14 Here’s the bizarro thing in now that years have passed.
2:05:19 Everything they told me not to do on Spider-Man that I was
2:05:23 rebellious against and I just stuck to my guns and I did it
2:05:26 and the sales are, do you know that if you’re a young person
2:05:29 right now and you go to Marvel and you draw Spider-Man, do you
2:05:32 know what style you have to draw Spider-Man in?
2:05:33 Todd McFarland.
2:05:40 So the guy who was told not to create it, I’ve now bizarrely
2:05:43 as I was going, no, I’m not going to draw that status quo.
2:05:47 I’m going to do something funky that my style is now the new
2:05:48 status quo.
2:05:52 And I don’t think anybody should draw on Todd McFarland style
2:05:55 because the next person they should be encouraging to do
2:05:58 their thing because it might be five times better than what
2:05:59 I ever came up with.
2:06:04 I don’t understand corporations of just coming up with an
2:06:08 idea and glomming onto it so hard.
2:06:13 Yes, I’m talking to you IBM and then this little dudes in a
2:06:16 garage come up with this little computer and they call it an
2:06:23 apple and somehow they beat you eventually because you become
2:06:24 dinosaurs.
2:06:26 And this is the thing.
2:06:31 There is nobody in the world that’s ever made change and
2:06:35 everybody like them, especially the people who were had the
2:06:39 power and the prestige and the money ahead of them.
2:06:42 Nobody, if you go to any corporation and you say, I’ve got
2:06:46 this new idea, you will never hear the words from the people
2:06:47 that are the industry leaders.
2:06:49 That sounds super cool.
2:06:53 Let us get out of your way so you can just do that on your
2:06:54 own unfettered.
2:06:56 Are you out of your mind?
2:06:59 They will take out bazookas and blades and put down the
2:07:02 fucking the strips and the throwing darts and they will
2:07:06 do everything in their powers to discourage you because they
2:07:10 are industry leaders, but eventually they become their
2:07:13 own worst enemy.
2:07:16 Todd, we’re at almost two hours now.
2:07:20 I’ve realized that we’ve barely scratched the service.
2:07:22 We’ve established a lot of the background, of course, the
2:07:27 personality, the rule breaking, the camel bladder, and we
2:07:30 have not even touched upon your personal relationship with
2:07:32 Stanley, which is of great interest to me.
2:07:35 We have not talked about the toy empire.
2:07:39 We have not talked about how any of that started TV, film,
2:07:41 music, spawn.
2:07:43 I mean, there’s a long list of things that I would love to
2:07:44 cover with you.
2:07:47 Would you be open to doing a round two?
2:07:50 I think people would certainly be interested in listening to
2:07:50 one.
2:07:53 Could I convince you to come back for a round two?
2:07:58 Tim, you’ll find that like I’m not shy at opening my mouth
2:08:00 and talking to, you know, to the point I’m always going,
2:08:02 am I, am I boring people?
2:08:04 Because I actually know all these stories because I live
2:08:04 them.
2:08:09 But yeah, I think there are some interesting forks in the
2:08:14 road that may be not interesting for my career, but
2:08:17 just sort of the human condition of what happens when
2:08:19 you get to certain walls.
2:08:25 I’ve been talking about what I had to do in one industry,
2:08:29 but now because of that success, what you just mentioned,
2:08:32 I, and it was able to break into multiple industries and
2:08:41 found some of the same sort of repetition and how you navigate
2:08:43 the sharks when you’re a guppy, right?
2:08:46 So yeah, I’ll come back.
2:08:47 I appreciate you given.
2:08:50 Hopefully we haven’t bored people these two because I’ll
2:08:51 go, why would I want to listen to another two?
2:08:52 So it’s your show.
2:08:54 I’ll let you decide whether that works.
2:09:00 Ultimately, I mean, let’s call it selfish, self-interested.
2:09:03 If I keep it interesting for me, just like you in those 10,
2:09:07 12-hour days, you got to keep your artwork interesting to
2:09:10 you because otherwise, and even maybe still, it can be really
2:09:10 lonely.
2:09:13 So for me, I just try to scratch my own itch and asking
2:09:14 questions about the things I’m interested in.
2:09:15 So I’m very interested.
2:09:18 I’m sure we’ll have plenty of people along for the ride and
2:09:21 people can find you on all the social handles that I mentioned.
2:09:22 Of course.
2:09:24 Are there any other places you’d like to point them?
2:09:26 So we can find you on Instagram at Todd McFarland.
2:09:28 No, Twitter, Todd, underscore McFarland.
2:09:30 You can find it.
2:09:31 These are hipsters, right?
2:09:32 I’m the old guy.
2:09:33 The type in your name.
2:09:33 They’ll find you.
2:09:34 Yeah, whatever.
2:09:36 People, if you’re interested, you can find it.
2:09:39 What I’ll try and endeavor the next time is to answer more
2:09:41 than three questions because I think that’s all you got in.
2:09:46 And I need a temper and get like, Todd, he just asked you
2:09:47 how old you are.
2:09:50 You don’t have to talk about the entire sort of evolution
2:09:52 of humanity to get to that answer.
2:09:59 But but I think that a little bit of backstory to get to the
2:10:03 reasoning why when you make that call at that moment matters.
2:10:04 Oh, yeah.
2:10:05 It’s critical.
2:10:05 Yeah.
2:10:09 So so we’ve now painted hopefully some of the personalities.
2:10:14 So now we can just maybe be a little more varied in the
2:10:17 questions and we can pepper and jump around a bunch of industries.
2:10:20 And I can tell you some silly stories about those ones too.
2:10:23 Yeah, we’ll get into the trenches and we can hear more of your
2:10:24 art of war stories.
2:10:25 Right.
2:10:26 And creative.
2:10:30 They almost killed Eddie Vedder.
2:10:31 We’ll talk about that one.
2:10:33 There we go.
2:10:36 So that’ll be that’ll be the cliffhanger and everybody listening.
2:10:40 As usual, we will put show notes and links to everything in
2:10:46 the show notes at tim.blog/podcast and until next time.
2:10:49 Don’t be afraid of rocking the boat and consider your upside
2:10:51 down side, just like you were talking about those those artists
2:10:54 earlier and image.
2:10:55 It’s human nature.
2:10:56 What a thing.
2:10:57 Todd, thank you for making the time today.
2:11:00 So to be continued and we’ll figure out a time for round two.
2:11:02 Hey guys, this is Tim again.
2:11:06 Just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet
2:11:07 Friday.
2:11:09 Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that
2:11:13 provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a
2:11:16 half and two million people subscribed to my free newsletter,
2:11:18 my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday.
2:11:20 Easy to sign up easy to cancel.
2:11:25 It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to
2:11:28 share the coolest things I’ve found or discovered or have
2:11:29 started exploring over that week.
2:11:31 It’s kind of like my diary of cool things.
2:11:33 It often includes articles.
2:11:34 I’m reading books.
2:11:38 I’m reading albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of
2:11:41 tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends,
2:11:46 including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric
2:11:49 things end up in my field and then I test them and then I
2:11:51 share them with you.
2:11:54 So if that sounds fun again, it’s very short, a little tiny
2:11:57 bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend.
2:11:58 Something to think about.
2:12:02 If you’d like to try it out, just go to tim.vlog/friday.
2:12:06 Type that into your browser tim.vlog/friday.
2:12:08 Drop in your email and you’ll get the very next one.
2:12:09 Thanks for listening.
2:12:12 This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep.
2:12:15 I have been using Eight Sleep pod cover for years now.
2:12:16 Why?
2:12:18 Well, by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top
2:12:21 like a fitted sheet, you can automatically cool down or
2:12:23 warm up each side of your bed.
2:12:26 Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the
2:12:30 pod and I’m excited to test it out, pod for ultra.
2:12:33 It cools, it heats and now it elevates automatically.
2:12:34 More on that in a second.
2:12:37 First, pod for ultra can cool down each side of the bed as
2:12:41 much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature, giving
2:12:44 you and your partner cool, even in a heat wave or you can switch
2:12:46 it up depending on which of you is heat sensitive.
2:12:50 I am always more heat sensitive, pulling the sheets off,
2:12:52 closing the windows, trying to crank the AC down.
2:12:54 This solves all of that.
2:12:57 Pod for ultra also introduces an adjustable base that fits
2:12:59 between your mattress and your bed frame and adds reading
2:13:02 and sleeping positions for the best unwinding experience.
2:13:05 And for those snore heavy nights, the pod can detect your
2:13:08 snoring and automatically lift your head by a few degrees to
2:13:11 improve air flow and stop you or your partner from snoring.
2:13:14 Plus with the pod for ultra, you can leave your wearables on
2:13:15 the night scan.
2:13:16 You won’t need them because these types of metrics are
2:13:19 integrated into the pod for ultra itself.
2:13:22 They have imperceptible sensors, which track your sleep time,
2:13:23 sleep phases and HRV.
2:13:28 Their heart rate tracking is just one example is at 99% accuracy.
2:13:33 So get your best night’s sleep head to 8sleep.com/tim and
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2:13:45 code Tim Tim to get $350 off the pod for ultra.
2:13:48 They currently shipped to the United States, Canada, the
2:13:50 United Kingdom, Europe and Australia.
2:13:55 This episode is brought to you by element spelled L M N T.
2:13:57 What on earth is element?
2:14:01 It is a delicious sugar-free electrolyte drink mix.
2:14:04 I’ve stocked up on boxes and boxes of this was one of the
2:14:07 first things that I bought when I saw COVID coming down the
2:14:10 pike and I usually use one to two per day.
2:14:13 Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte
2:14:16 needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto low carb
2:14:17 or paleo diet.
2:14:19 Or if you drink a ton of water and you might not have the
2:14:22 right balance, that’s often when I drink it or if you’re
2:14:24 doing any type of endurance exercise, mountain biking,
2:14:26 et cetera, another application.
2:14:29 If you’ve ever struggled to feel good on keto, low carb or
2:14:32 paleo, it’s most likely because even if you’re consciously
2:14:35 consuming electrolytes, you’re just not getting enough.
2:14:38 And it relates to a bunch of stuff like a hormone called
2:14:40 Dosterone, blah, blah, blah when insulin is low.
2:14:43 But suffice to say, this is where element against spelled
2:14:44 L M N T can help.
2:14:49 My favorite flavor by far is citrus salt, which is a side
2:14:53 note you can also use to make a kick-ass no sugar margarita.
2:14:56 But for special occasions, obviously, you’re probably
2:14:59 already familiar with one of the names behind it, Rob Wolf,
2:15:03 R-O-B-B, Rob Wolf, who is a former research biochemist and
2:15:05 two-time New York Times bestselling author of the paleo
2:15:07 solution and wired to eat.
2:15:10 Rob created element by scratching his own itch.
2:15:12 That’s how it got started.
2:15:15 His Brazilian jujitsu coaches turned him on to electrolytes
2:15:16 as a performance enhancer.
2:15:19 Things clicked and bam, company was born.
2:15:22 So if you’re on a low carb diet or fasting, electrolytes
2:15:25 play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches,
2:15:27 tiredness and dizziness.
2:15:30 Sugar, artificial ingredients, coloring, all that’s garbage,
2:15:32 unneeded, there’s none of that in element.
2:15:36 And a lot of names you might recognize are already using
2:15:39 element is recommended to be by one of my favorite athlete
2:15:41 friends, three Navy SEAL teams as prescribed by their Master
2:15:45 Chief, Marine Units, FBI Sniper teams, at least five NFL
2:15:47 teams who have subscriptions.
2:15:50 They are the exclusive hydration partner to team USA weight
2:15:51 lifting and on and on.
2:15:52 You can try it risk-free.
2:15:55 If you don’t like it, element will give you your money back.
2:15:56 No questions asked.
2:15:58 They have extremely low return rates.
2:16:01 Get your free sample pack with any element purchase at
2:16:06 drinklmnt.com/tim. Be sure to also try the new element sparkling,
2:16:10 a bold 16 ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water.
2:16:18 Again, check it all out, drink element.com/tim, drinklmnt.com/tim.
2:16:20 [applause]
2:16:23 [silence]
2:16:26 [silence]
2:16:29 [silence]
2:16:32 [silence]
2:16:35 [silence]
2:16:38 [silence]
2:16:46 [BLANK_AUDIO]
0:00:05 What on earth is Element?
0:00:09 It is a delicious sugar-free electrolyte drink mix.
0:00:12 I’ve stocked up on boxes and boxes of this.
0:00:15 It was one of the first things that I bought when I saw COVID
0:00:18 coming down the pike and I usually use one to two per day.
0:00:21 Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte
0:00:24 needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low carb
0:00:25 or paleo diet.
0:00:28 Or if you drink a ton of water and you might not have the right
0:00:30 balance, that’s often when I drink it.
0:00:32 Or if you’re doing any type of endurance exercise, mountain
0:00:33 biking, etc.
0:00:34 Another application.
0:00:38 If you’ve ever struggled to feel good on keto, low carb or paleo,
0:00:41 it’s most likely because even if you’re consciously consuming
0:00:43 electrolytes, you’re just not getting enough.
0:00:46 And it relates to a bunch of stuff like a hormone called
0:00:48 aldosterone, blah, blah, blah, when insulin is low.
0:00:51 But suffice to say, this is where Element against spelled
0:00:53 L-M-N-T can help.
0:00:57 My favorite flavor by far is citrus salt, which is a side
0:01:01 note you can also use to make a kick ass, no sugar, margarita.
0:01:04 But for special occasions, obviously, you’re probably
0:01:07 already familiar with one of the names behind it, Rob Wolf,
0:01:11 R-O-B-B, Rob Wolf, who is a former research biochemist
0:01:14 and two-time New York Times bestselling author of the paleo
0:01:15 solution and Wired to Eat.
0:01:19 Rob created Element by scratching his own itch.
0:01:20 That’s how it got started.
0:01:23 His Brazilian jujitsu coaches turned him on to electrolytes
0:01:24 as a performance enhancer.
0:01:27 Things clicked and bam, company was born.
0:01:31 So if you’re on a low carb diet or fasting, electrolytes
0:01:34 play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches,
0:01:35 tiredness and dizziness.
0:01:39 Sugar, artificial ingredients, coloring, all that’s garbage,
0:01:41 unneeded, there’s none of that in Element.
0:01:44 And a lot of names you might recognize are already using
0:01:45 Element.
0:01:48 It was recommended to be by one of my favorite athlete friends.
0:01:50 Three Navy SEAL teams as prescribed by their Master Chief,
0:01:54 Marine Units, FBI Sniper teams, at least five NFL teams who
0:01:55 have subscriptions.
0:01:59 They are the exclusive hydration partner to team USA weight
0:02:00 lifting and on and on.
0:02:01 You can try it risk-free.
0:02:03 If you don’t like it, Element will give you your money back.
0:02:04 No questions asked.
0:02:06 They have extremely low return rates.
0:02:09 Get your free sample pack with any Element purchase at
0:02:12 drinklmnt.com/tim.
0:02:16 Be sure to also try the new Element Sparkling, a bold 16
0:02:18 ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water.
0:02:20 Again, check it all out.
0:02:26 Drink Element.com/Tim. Drinklmnt.com/Tim.
0:02:32 This episode is brought to you by 8Sleep.
0:02:35 I have been using 8Sleep pod cover for years now.
0:02:36 Why?
0:02:39 Well, by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top
0:02:42 like a fitted sheet, you can automatically cool down or
0:02:44 warm up each side of your bed.
0:02:47 8Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the pod
0:02:48 and I’m excited to test it out.
0:02:50 Pod 4 Ultra.
0:02:54 It cools, it heats, and now it elevates automatically.
0:02:55 More on that in a second.
0:02:58 First, Pod 4 Ultra can cool down each side of the bed as
0:03:01 much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature,
0:03:04 keeping you and your partner cool, even in a heat wave.
0:03:06 Or you can switch it up depending on which of you is heat
0:03:07 sensitive.
0:03:10 I am always more heat sensitive pulling the sheets off,
0:03:13 closing the windows, trying to crank the AC down.
0:03:14 This solves all of that.
0:03:17 Pod 4 Ultra also introduces an adjustable base that fits
0:03:19 between your mattress and your bed frame and adds reading
0:03:22 and sleeping positions for the best unwinding experience.
0:03:25 And for those snore heavy nights, the pod can detect your
0:03:28 snoring and automatically lift your head by a few degrees
0:03:31 to improve air flow and stop you or your partner from snoring.
0:03:34 Plus with Pod 4 Ultra, you can leave your wearables on
0:03:35 the nightstand.
0:03:37 You won’t need them because these types of metrics are
0:03:39 integrated into the Pod 4 Ultra itself.
0:03:42 They have imperceptible sensors which track your sleep time,
0:03:44 sleep phases, and HRV.
0:03:48 Their heart rate tracking is just one example is at 99% accuracy.
0:03:50 So get your best night’s sleep.
0:03:56 Head to 8sleep.com/tim and use Code Tim to get $350 off of
0:03:57 the Pod 4 Ultra.
0:03:58 That’s 8sleep.
0:04:03 I’ll spelled out 8sleep.com/tim and Code Tim TIM to
0:04:06 get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra.
0:04:08 They currently ship to the United States, Canada, the
0:04:10 United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia.
0:04:15 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before
0:04:17 my hands start shaking.
0:04:19 Can I ask you a personal question?
0:04:21 No, I just need an appropriate time.
0:04:25 I’m a cyber-nerdy organism living this year over a metal
0:04:26 endoskeleton.
0:04:37 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs.
0:04:38 This is Tim Ferriss.
0:04:41 Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show where it is
0:04:44 my job to sit down with world-class performers from
0:04:47 every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines,
0:04:50 favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in
0:04:51 your own lives.
0:04:55 This episode is a two-for-one and that’s because the podcast
0:04:58 recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane
0:05:01 to think about, and past one billion downloads.
0:05:05 To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best,
0:05:09 some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the
0:05:09 last decade.
0:05:13 I could not be more excited to give you these super combo
0:05:16 episodes and internally we’ve been calling these the super
0:05:19 combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to yes,
0:05:22 enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to
0:05:27 also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars.
0:05:30 These are people who have transformed my life and I
0:05:32 feel like they can do the same for many of you.
0:05:35 Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle.
0:05:36 Perhaps you missed an episode.
0:05:40 Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put
0:05:44 these pairings together and for the bios of all guests,
0:05:49 you can find that and more at tim.blog/combo and now
0:05:53 without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for
0:05:53 listening.
0:05:59 First up, Nassim Nikolas Taleb bestselling author of
0:06:04 Anti-Fragile, the Black Swan, fooled by randomness, the bed
0:06:07 of Procrustes and skin in the game.
0:06:11 Nassim is joined in this conversation by Scott Patterson
0:06:15 Wall Street Journal investigative reporter and author
0:06:19 of Chaos Kings, how Wall Street traders make billions
0:06:21 in the new age of crisis.
0:06:27 You can find Nassim on Twitter at NNTaleb and you can find
0:06:30 Scott on Twitter at Patterson Scott.
0:06:36 Is it true that you wrote a resignation letter your first
0:06:39 day at a trading job and put it in your desk drawer?
0:06:40 I read this on the internet.
0:06:41 I don’t know if it’s true.
0:06:43 You can’t believe everything you read, but it was from
0:06:44 the Guardian.
0:06:45 So I thought it might be credible.
0:06:49 One thing is actually, as I said, I recommend people do
0:06:49 that.
0:06:53 I wrote that but not on the day I started, but I recommended
0:06:57 that people, because you feel relief when you do it because
0:07:01 then you can continue on your job without feeling like
0:07:02 someone’s controlling you.
0:07:03 You’ve got the gun loaded.
0:07:06 The whole idea, Flanby, you thought about that problem.
0:07:10 So you write the resignation letter and you don’t date it.
0:07:18 I’m very fascinated by your ways of thinking, the way that
0:07:20 you’ve embraced different philosophies.
0:07:25 And you emailed me an aphorism in 2010 and you can correct
0:07:28 me if I get any of the wording wrong, but it stuck with me.
0:07:31 This is in 2010.
0:07:35 Here’s the aphorism of the quote, “Robustness is when you
0:07:38 care more about the few who like your work than the multitude
0:07:38 who hates it.”
0:07:41 And then in parentheses, artists fragility is when you care
0:07:44 more about the few who hate your work than the multitude
0:07:45 who loves it.
0:07:47 And then in quotation marks, politicians.
0:07:54 Have you always had that type of robustness or resilience
0:07:55 against criticism?
0:07:57 Is that something that is inborn?
0:08:02 Maybe because I was never really someone who took, you know,
0:08:04 established ideas at face value.
0:08:09 So you necessarily have, you know, it violates some norms,
0:08:10 some thinking norms.
0:08:15 And often people protect those norms by, you know, attacking
0:08:16 your reputation.
0:08:19 And I realized that while writing food by randomness, I say,
0:08:22 “Hey, you’re saying that what I’m doing is random or using
0:08:22 wrong models.
0:08:23 These don’t work.”
0:08:24 So they attack your reputation.
0:08:28 So I realized quickly, it was time that my reputation was
0:08:30 going to be under some kind of fire.
0:08:35 And I decided that, no, my reputation is how few important
0:08:40 people or people who know something about the subject view
0:08:40 me.
0:08:43 And it’s not like I don’t care about my reputation.
0:08:45 I only care about my reputation in some circles.
0:08:51 And it was people I can talk to to try to explain what it’s
0:08:53 about and has worked out.
0:08:57 So if you have to go defend your reputation and you’re doing
0:09:01 the right thing, it’s too much energy wasted and it’s not going
0:09:01 to help.
0:09:03 Haters are not going to hate.
0:09:06 This resembles another aphorism inspired by Charlie
0:09:12 Munger’s, that you want to be the most ethical person where
0:09:15 people think that you’re corrupt or you’re the most corrupt
0:09:18 person where people think that you’re ethical.
0:09:22 Make your choice and use that as guideline.
0:09:23 That’s the same thing.
0:09:26 So except there’s something in between is that there’s some
0:09:30 people I care about and I want to not lose respect for me.
0:09:34 Of course, you start with your mother, you have your children
0:09:36 or whatever your family members.
0:09:39 But there are also a lot of people on the planet and I care
0:09:43 about my reputation, but in these circles, not with the
0:09:43 general public.
0:09:46 So it allows you to take much, much more aggressive positions
0:09:50 which I’ve done over the long life and Mark, for example,
0:09:53 has a lot of enemies and they’re going to pick on something.
0:09:54 You don’t care.
0:09:55 You don’t do the right things.
0:09:57 And how do you know you’re doing the right thing?
0:10:03 If people, you respect, approve of your action, not if the
0:10:04 general public does.
0:10:08 What are some of the things that make the same different or
0:10:10 unique in those you’ve interacted with?
0:10:13 I have some of my own questions and thoughts on this, but I
0:10:14 wouldn’t love to hear yours.
0:10:16 He mentioned his contrarian nature.
0:10:18 It’s not a contrarian nature.
0:10:19 It’s independent.
0:10:21 So you gotta be in line with it.
0:10:22 I mean, people say I’m contrarian.
0:10:25 I’m with a conspiracy theorist on many of the things.
0:10:27 I’m against them on many other things.
0:10:30 Some are just contrarian because they have a father problem.
0:10:36 So to me, contrarian is an explicit rather than attribute.
0:10:39 So, but the other thing is I thought it’s gonna be about me.
0:10:41 It should be about the idea, the precaution.
0:10:46 He’s a lot more interested in literature and philosophy and
0:10:48 not financial.
0:10:50 I just think it drives him.
0:10:54 He doesn’t look at the stock market page, you know, every
0:10:56 day, like some people do.
0:10:56 He’s done it.
0:10:58 You have to figure out what people envious of.
0:11:04 So, you know, if you’re in a hedge fund business and you
0:11:07 have $500 million in a bank and someone else has $600 million
0:11:08 is gonna be envious of that person.
0:11:12 I was always envious of people had more erudition than me.
0:11:13 Okay.
0:11:14 So more erudites.
0:11:16 And you realize that that’s what makes me tick.
0:11:18 Being envious is not good.
0:11:22 You see, but at the same time, if you figure out who you
0:11:25 tend to envy, I don’t believe in this.
0:11:26 They say, oh, people having enough.
0:11:29 There’s someone here from East Hampton, the fellow who
0:11:30 wrote cash 22.
0:11:32 A lot of interesting folks out there.
0:11:35 Yeah, he met a financier at the time for hedge funds.
0:11:40 And the financier said, what is it that about you?
0:11:42 Because he was an author, a very successful one.
0:11:46 What is it that distinguishes you from me?
0:11:49 He told him, I know the meaning of enough.
0:11:53 So in other words, you know, you’re upper bound and effectively
0:11:58 I don’t play that game, meaning I may am literally and I say
0:11:59 envious of people who are erudites.
0:12:04 Like if someone knows Latin very well, I’m envious.
0:12:07 If someone knows Sanskrit, I’m envious.
0:12:07 All right.
0:12:09 And I discovered that early on.
0:12:12 So I made money on Wall Street because I wanted to make money
0:12:15 on Wall Street, but I didn’t think it was worth the effort.
0:12:17 And luckily he was a combination of the universe.
0:12:21 I had so much leverage, you know, was marketing all the stuff.
0:12:24 So the spillover on me was more than satisfactory.
0:12:26 So I have knock on the wood a lot more than I wished.
0:12:29 So part of the reason I’m asking, we’re talking about the ideas,
0:12:33 but the person who’s acting as the vessel or communicator of
0:12:36 these ideas, the developer of these ideas is integrally related
0:12:40 to, I think, the sort of totality that I want to explore.
0:12:44 So part of what interests me about your story and your thinking
0:12:48 is how various inputs have impacted your thinking around
0:12:50 not just markets, but other things.
0:12:56 For instance, like the Stoics and the Seneca the Younger and so
0:12:58 on or other philosophical inputs.
0:13:01 Did those come early and then aid you?
0:13:06 You think in your career when you were active in the markets
0:13:09 or did those come later and you sort of always had a deep
0:13:13 interest, but were able to explore them at a later point?
0:13:16 It’s actually, I was, I started liking the Stoics and all those
0:13:19 people I talk about, I like them much early on in my life.
0:13:23 But I went overboard for every idea I’ve had.
0:13:27 I did the exact opposite of what one should do is like if you
0:13:29 had an idea, say, oh, I had this idea, right?
0:13:32 Because I don’t consider myself so different from others.
0:13:36 And then particularly when you look at history is so many
0:13:38 10,000 scholars surviving works.
0:13:44 So I went back and figured out of these scholars who had similar
0:13:46 ideas or who preceded the ideas.
0:13:48 So and who start things like that.
0:13:53 So I went into the the empirics, the Eastern Mediterranean,
0:13:57 Greco, Levantine, Greco-Roman mostly using Greek language
0:13:58 thinkers.
0:14:02 And then of course, and to others, this fundamental skepticism
0:14:05 because I noticed a lot of people are skeptical, particularly
0:14:06 conspiracy theories.
0:14:08 They’re skeptical of small things.
0:14:10 But not about big ones.
0:14:11 All right.
0:14:12 They get taken for a ride.
0:14:15 It’s find me a conspiracy theorist or find me someone who’s
0:14:17 naturally skeptic of all things.
0:14:18 And I show you a turkey.
0:14:22 So I wanted to find people who are fundamentally skeptic,
0:14:24 being skeptic, and being skeptic about important things,
0:14:25 not about small things.
0:14:27 Because it would be an example of a big thing.
0:14:29 Let me give you an example.
0:14:30 I wrote a paper.
0:14:34 It never ended up in a book on the stock market and religion.
0:14:34 All right.
0:14:37 It’s called The Bishop and the Economist.
0:14:41 And I said that those who are skeptical about the existence
0:14:46 of God, skeptical about religious matters, typically tend
0:14:49 to be complete suckers when it comes to stocks.
0:14:52 They believe in a stock market or believe in some kind of pseudo
0:14:55 scientific theory on whatever it is.
0:14:55 Okay.
0:14:59 So, but they don’t believe in religion and the reverse.
0:14:59 All right.
0:15:03 And people who are religious typically, they’re harder and
0:15:05 there’s some research on that.
0:15:08 There’s a guy called Bar Lahmi, Bar Halahmi, I think,
0:15:11 who did some studies about skepticism of people who go to
0:15:13 religion about affairs, skepticism of where it matters.
0:15:15 And I wrote about it, I think, in the Black Swan.
0:15:17 So skepticism of where it matters.
0:15:21 And I noticed that a lot of these big skeptics were not
0:15:24 skeptical of God and things that we can’t do anything about.
0:15:27 They were skeptical of the charlatan, the skeptical of
0:15:29 someone trying to take advantage of you.
0:15:32 That’s where you exercise your skepticism.
0:15:35 Among the great skeptics, there is a bishop UAE.
0:15:39 He was probably one of the second most erudite person of his
0:15:39 time.
0:15:41 Second was there’s a guy called Scaliger.
0:15:42 He’s a guy’s phenomenal.
0:15:48 He could translate into Arabic, Roman authors, Latin authors,
0:15:48 and vice versa.
0:15:49 Okay.
0:15:51 Scaliger, Scaligeri.
0:15:53 There are a lot of the, Pierre Bale.
0:15:56 Pierre Bale has a lot of works.
0:15:58 He’s one of those skeptics.
0:16:01 Hume was one of the skeptics, but these people preceded Hume.
0:16:05 Hume is known because he wrote in a language of a country that
0:16:08 had a lot of ships and a lot of trade, you know, across the
0:16:08 world.
0:16:13 But a lot of these ideas came from groups of people in
0:16:15 France or among Protestants in France.
0:16:19 It was called the Anaphideists originates, of course, in
0:16:19 Levant.
0:16:22 And of course, you have the great Al-Ghazel, the Islamic
0:16:27 theologian, Iranian origin, who definitely was showing you
0:16:31 how all these arguments are weak, you know, could
0:16:34 dismantle arguments by showing you would be skeptical about
0:16:36 human arguments about God.
0:16:40 I think it’s Spinoza is coming out of that same tradition.
0:16:44 He was skeptical about the text that was these people say,
0:16:46 okay, trust Sandy’s text.
0:16:47 Okay.
0:16:48 Be skeptical about things that really matter.
0:16:50 And there was actually a skeptical school of medicine,
0:16:51 practicing medicine.
0:16:52 So what?
0:16:54 I went back through history.
0:16:57 Every time I’ve had an idea, I would go back and see in
0:16:59 history who preceded me.
0:17:04 And sure enough, I haven’t done enough because every year
0:17:06 or so I get letter from someone.
0:17:08 Hey, how come you missed so and so?
0:17:10 Okay.
0:17:12 And sure enough, I go back to the inserto and I add that
0:17:16 person and this is why it has survived the five books,
0:17:19 the inserto, but we’re not here to talk about these five
0:17:20 books with this book.
0:17:23 Well, we’re going to talk about whatever comes up,
0:17:28 but I do want to hop over to you, Scott and maybe discuss
0:17:32 something that you had shared with me as a possible bullet
0:17:36 in the prep stages for this conversation, which is related
0:17:40 to poly crisis and the new age of crisis.
0:17:42 What does this refer to?
0:17:45 It’s the subtitle of my book.
0:17:48 Most people have focused on the first part of the subtitle
0:17:50 is how Wall Street traders make billions.
0:17:53 Second part is in the new age of crisis.
0:17:56 I feel like that hasn’t gotten that much attention,
0:18:01 but part of what I’m trying to argue is that we are seeing
0:18:06 a magnification of extreme events accelerating and overlapping.
0:18:10 There’s an economist Adam twos whose coin of phrase called
0:18:14 the poly crisis, which he says these crises that are happening
0:18:19 on a global scale are interacting in ways that the whole
0:18:22 becomes greater and worse than the sum of the parts.
0:18:26 So you’ve got pandemics, you’ve got economic instability,
0:18:31 financial crises, climate change, which is a big focus of
0:18:34 mind in my daily job at the journal, which I think is sort
0:18:40 of the big one in terms of the ever magnification of crises
0:18:41 that we’re seeing.
0:18:42 We’re seeing it in the news every day.
0:18:48 And what I wanted to do in the book is look at several of
0:18:54 these crises and think about how we should be approaching them
0:18:59 in a sort of a risk mitigation standpoint using ideas from
0:19:00 people like Naseem.
0:19:03 I think that the central idea was as I was talking about the
0:19:09 germ of the idea of the book was can you take ideas that
0:19:14 were created on Wall Street for risk mitigation and borrow
0:19:18 those and apply those to other forms of risk management.
0:19:24 And what Naseem and Mark do is they think about the extreme
0:19:27 events and how to protect against them.
0:19:31 Naseem co-wrote a paper about this exact issue called the
0:19:32 precautionary principle.
0:19:37 It delineates specific categories of risk that you
0:19:39 should take the precautionary principle and apply it to.
0:19:43 He has some specific ideas and he can talk about it way better
0:19:46 than I can, but you know, these are things that can be global
0:19:49 that represent systemic risk to humanity.
0:19:51 Things that can be exponential.
0:19:55 Must be fat-tailed or exponential things that have these
0:20:00 properties that you need to take extreme precaution and not
0:20:00 take that risk.
0:20:03 Basically don’t play Russian roulette with these risks.
0:20:07 And that’s kind of how the book was structured was first
0:20:11 looking at the growth of the strategy with Mark and Naseem
0:20:15 and then moving on to these other things that the world is
0:20:19 facing and seeing if we could think about ways to protect
0:20:20 against these risks.
0:20:22 Something like climate change.
0:20:24 You don’t really want to mess with that.
0:20:27 You know, it’s a bit too late, but there’s still lots of
0:20:28 things that we can do.
0:20:31 And that’s I think the book in a nutshell.
0:20:34 It was going to mention earlier when you asked me about
0:20:35 the birth of the idea of the book.
0:20:39 When I first suggested it to Naseem and Mark, Naseem said,
0:20:43 “No way, I have no interest in doing that with you.”
0:20:44 It took a while.
0:20:47 And then you were like, “I have these black in my photos.
0:20:48 You might want to tickle again.”
0:20:49 So Ad, you can do it.
0:20:53 It was, it warmed down.
0:20:57 I think it was more Mark put the screws on.
0:20:58 No, no, no.
0:20:59 Let me tell you what happened.
0:21:00 I actually don’t know.
0:21:02 I know that eventually he said.
0:21:05 I extracted the promise from him to not be portrayed to
0:21:10 mention that I don’t self-identify as a finance person.
0:21:15 And once he made that promise, said, “Okay, now we can talk
0:21:18 because finance represents a significant part of my life.”
0:21:19 But I don’t want.
0:21:21 This isn’t a theme with Naseem ever since I’ve known him.
0:21:23 So to me, it was like.
0:21:24 The identity piece.
0:21:26 Yeah, that he’s not a trader.
0:21:29 And I thought, I agreed because it’s true.
0:21:34 It’s, he’s not been a trader for a long, long time.
0:21:37 And it’s obvious where his interests are.
0:21:40 What would it mean or feel like for you to be broadly
0:21:45 identified as a finance person, but to think of yourself more
0:21:46 as a scholar?
0:21:48 I wrote about it in “Foodbar Randomness.”
0:21:51 George Soros and I met George Soros and one of the persons
0:21:53 on the planet will press me the most, one of those.
0:21:58 And I realized that George Soros missed his career.
0:22:01 He wanted to be a philosopher and a thinker.
0:22:03 Okay.
0:22:06 He ended up making money and spending too much time in it
0:22:08 and wrote drunk articles and books.
0:22:09 Or I think one book.
0:22:13 So yeah, it was not, it was not what he wanted out of life.
0:22:13 Okay.
0:22:17 He’s a middle European intellectual who would have liked to
0:22:21 be remembered as someone for ideas.
0:22:25 And he, of course, Carl Popper, who he claims was a professor,
0:22:26 but it was beyond.
0:22:29 So I wrote about “Foodbar Randomness.”
0:22:33 I said, here’s his fellow who was, say, okay, but he also
0:22:35 does to distinguish himself from other financiers.
0:22:39 He’s also, or has intellectual aims.
0:22:40 I said, I don’t want to be that.
0:22:46 I want to be someone who produces intellectual work and who
0:22:50 happens to have had contact with reality thanks to trading.
0:22:54 And thanks to Mark, guys, I’m still have some contact with reality.
0:22:56 But I’m not cut for that.
0:22:59 When I was writing “Foodbar Randomness,” it was 2019 that
0:23:04 I realized I was not, I don’t want to be like Soros because
0:23:07 unlike Buffett and the other people, Soros had an identity
0:23:08 crisis.
0:23:10 He wants to be known as a philosopher.
0:23:10 Okay.
0:23:12 It’s a life to control of him.
0:23:13 He didn’t.
0:23:15 Buffett told me he wanted to write a book.
0:23:19 I used to cover him and I was leaving the journal at the time
0:23:20 to write my second book.
0:23:24 And he was like, oh, I really always wanted to write a book.
0:23:25 I never got around to it.
0:23:28 So there you go with, you know, the Oracle of Omaha.
0:23:29 Yeah.
0:23:31 He wants to be thought of as an intellectual too.
0:23:32 What?
0:23:33 I mean, this is not the same.
0:23:34 Not the same.
0:23:35 The same Soros.
0:23:39 Omaha has something that I didn’t put in a precautionary principle,
0:23:42 but that’s probably very inspiring because he understood the asymmetry.
0:23:47 If you say no a thousand times, he says no, if you doubt.
0:23:49 And that’s the precautionary principle.
0:23:54 Could you give people the precautionary principle one-on-one just to back
0:23:54 up?
0:23:55 Okay.
0:23:55 Let me ask you.
0:24:00 You’re the first flying to go to Mexico.
0:24:03 You go to JFK and they tell you they have uncertainty.
0:24:06 About the skills of the pilot.
0:24:08 But we think he’s good, but there’s uncertainty.
0:24:09 What do you do?
0:24:13 You’re not going to get on that plane and say, okay, life is too important for me.
0:24:18 You’ll take a train, you walk, maybe you’ll ride a bicycle, you know,
0:24:20 take a few months, but you’re not going to get on that plane.
0:24:21 Okay.
0:24:24 You change your plans and say, okay, there are other plans or other countries too
0:24:25 and other planes.
0:24:28 So that’s Warren Buffett with his investments.
0:24:30 And that’s my precaution principle.
0:24:34 The idea that there’s an asymmetry is that uncertainty about certain things is
0:24:35 not good.
0:24:40 So the climate, for example, if you have uncertainty about the climate, stop these
0:24:41 models.
0:24:41 All right.
0:24:42 Just don’t pollute.
0:24:44 You’ve got to use something else.
0:24:45 Try to mitigate.
0:24:47 So that’s the first part of it.
0:24:50 People get it right away when I give them a story of plane or I take water.
0:24:52 So this is the last one on the table.
0:24:54 There’s no evidence that it’s poisonous.
0:24:56 Would you drink it?
0:24:59 No, there’s no evidence.
0:25:03 Yeah, there’s no evidence that so, but when you tell them, Hey, you know,
0:25:04 you should worry about GMOs.
0:25:05 This is, there’s no evidence they’re harmful.
0:25:08 Yeah, but there’s no evidence that they’re not harmful.
0:25:09 Okay.
0:25:13 So the asymmetry where you put the burden of the asymmetry on, that’s a precaution
0:25:14 principle.
0:25:17 But then what we did is we’ve noticed a lot of people.
0:25:20 In fact, it was a counter precaution principle because a lot of people were
0:25:23 invoking it for nothing to say we’re going to have a non-native precaution
0:25:30 principle by delineating the areas where you should exercise such precaution
0:25:34 systematically as a planet or as a communal group.
0:25:35 And what are they?
0:25:38 Number one, you need fat tails.
0:25:40 Now, what does fat tail mean?
0:25:41 Let me explain to you.
0:25:43 Let’s say you go to planet Mars.
0:25:44 Okay.
0:25:46 Elon would help you get in there.
0:25:50 You have connection and you have no news from Earth.
0:25:54 And then on the way back, you hear that a billion people died.
0:25:55 Okay.
0:26:03 Which one is more likely to be the cause Ebola or car accidents?
0:26:04 Ebola.
0:26:10 Now, on a given day, if you hear Joe Smith died today, what’s more like
0:26:11 the Ebola or a car accident?
0:26:12 Car accident.
0:26:13 Car accident.
0:26:14 That’s fat tails.
0:26:14 Fat tails.
0:26:18 You had to identify things backwards.
0:26:20 If you hear the big thing, where’d it come from?
0:26:21 And you had to get these.
0:26:22 Okay.
0:26:25 So they have different dynamics because of scale differently.
0:26:30 So in the black swan, I showed the difference with the following metaphor.
0:26:35 There are environments where you may have a large deviation.
0:26:38 It’s not going to be consequential because it can’t be very big.
0:26:42 So if I take a thousand people and put them on a scale and add to
0:26:46 that sample, the largest human being confined on the planet, how
0:26:48 much of the total will he or she represent?
0:26:50 It’s 30 basis point.
0:26:50 Nothing.
0:26:51 Okay.
0:26:54 And then if you go from a thousand to 10,000, that lose completely.
0:26:55 So you can have a tail event.
0:26:58 That’s not going to be consequential.
0:27:00 Extremistan is different.
0:27:04 Extremistan, if you gather a thousand people and add to that sample, the
0:27:09 wealthiest person on the planet, how much of the total will he or she represent?
0:27:10 All of it.
0:27:11 There’d be a running error.
0:27:12 There’d be running error.
0:27:15 I mean, there’d be on average on the planet Earth, right?
0:27:19 There’d be in total, maybe they have two or three million in total.
0:27:21 And then you have a hundred and some billion right next to it.
0:27:24 So this is where you have to focus on environment that produces fat tails.
0:27:26 And this is what market is, is universal.
0:27:31 Inversa is named after the universal mechanism that generates fat tails.
0:27:32 That was the name.
0:27:36 So everything, we’re in it basically intellectually, everything in all details.
0:27:40 So you have to identify what produces fat tails in the financial
0:27:43 markets and why it’s getting thicker.
0:27:46 Fat tails means that you have the greatest contribution comes
0:27:47 from smallest number of events.
0:27:51 So concentration, like, for example, you have a lot of people.
0:27:52 All the wealths come from one person.
0:27:58 It’s so happened that under fat tails, the models that we use for risk
0:28:02 management on Wall Street, RBS, this is why I have a lot of enemies.
0:28:05 This is why I have to protect myself against reputational damage.
0:28:06 All right.
0:28:10 So because all the economy saved me, all their models are based on that.
0:28:11 So what is fat tails?
0:28:14 Practically everything in socioeconomic life is fat tailed.
0:28:16 What is not fat tailed?
0:28:18 Number of calories we’re going to eat tonight.
0:28:21 How many calories can we have in one day tonight?
0:28:22 We can only go for the gold.
0:28:26 I’d say, I’d say we could each down a few thousand calories a piece.
0:28:27 Two thousand, two thousand.
0:28:28 Say I go three thousand for me.
0:28:29 All right.
0:28:31 I can play with fat and stuff.
0:28:31 Three thousand.
0:28:32 That’s nothing.
0:28:34 How many calories do I consume a year?
0:28:36 Yeah, it’s not a single day is going to make a difference.
0:28:38 Can you lose all your money in a single day?
0:28:39 Yes.
0:28:40 There we go.
0:28:42 So you have two environment and they’re separable.
0:28:46 So this is why the universal approach, it makes things separable.
0:28:49 The fact that you can identify what is fat tailed.
0:28:51 You identify where models don’t work.
0:28:54 You can identify where you have to understand and we have to use more refined
0:28:57 tools to figure out stuff.
0:29:01 And then also in fatness of tails, number one, pandemics.
0:29:06 Number two wars are close, close second wars and pandemics.
0:29:06 Okay.
0:29:11 And so you can use that to prioritize application of the precautionary principle
0:29:12 or bingo.
0:29:18 And let me tell you how, for example, if cancer is thin tails, nuclear,
0:29:21 thin tail, if you can diversify it, it’s thin tails.
0:29:24 If you can have a thousand nuclear reactors, all right.
0:29:28 If you can ensure it, or rather than one, it is thin tailed.
0:29:30 If you can ensure it, it’s thin tailed.
0:29:33 If you can ensure it, not insurable fat tails.
0:29:37 So a lot of things that are believed to be very risky, but they’re
0:29:39 not like nuclear for me.
0:29:43 I mean, not for one of my co-authors, but I’ll settle it with a beer or
0:29:44 what’s in English.
0:29:50 Rupert Reed is a co-author of and also a major character in the book.
0:29:52 He’s a very environmentally focused person.
0:29:55 He’s a leader in climate these days.
0:30:00 And yeah, he told me that’s one thing that he disputed the precautionary
0:30:04 principle paper, which was written with him first, drinking, you know,
0:30:11 in English pub in somewhere in Northern England, where the portions
0:30:15 are like smaller than what they give you for espresso in Italy.
0:30:17 You know, the espresso that you sip up.
0:30:21 So we had to have like, again, it’s like you and the eggs, all right.
0:30:25 So to go back to the insurable, we don’t have to worry about it.
0:30:29 And a very simple example I give that when Ebola started or later on
0:30:32 when COVID started, people using the arguments, yeah, you know,
0:30:36 3,000 Americans die every year drowning in a swimming pool.
0:30:38 That was something by the guy called Dr. Phil.
0:30:41 Should we shut down pools at a time less than a thousand Americans
0:30:43 had died of COVID?
0:30:45 And then I followed this, presented the following argument.
0:30:51 I said, if I die drowning in a swimming pool, my neighbor drowning
0:30:54 in her or his swimming pool has not changed.
0:30:59 If I die of COVID, the odds of my neighbor dying of COVID has increased.
0:31:01 So we had that transmission that makes it fat tail.
0:31:03 That mechanism of transmission.
0:31:08 So this is why you cannot compare as basically the press in the beginning,
0:31:12 the so-called established press was against our ideas.
0:31:14 Because it was racist against China.
0:31:19 They could not distinguish between risks of car accidents and heart
0:31:22 attacks and risks of things spreading.
0:31:25 This is why, for example, I am in favor of vaccines.
0:31:29 The risk is sin tailed and I’m against GMOs because they spread
0:31:30 in the environment.
0:31:36 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be
0:31:37 right back to the show.
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0:32:46 Tim for 20% off.
0:32:56 And now, Todd McFarlane, Emmy and Grammy winning director and
0:33:02 producer, co-creator of Marvel’s top villain Venom, co-founder of
0:33:06 Image Comics and creator of Spawn, one of the world’s best
0:33:10 selling comic books and one that earned Todd the Guinness
0:33:14 World Record for longest running creator owned superhero comic
0:33:15 book series.
0:33:20 You can find Todd on Instagram at Todd McFarlane.
0:33:23 Todd, welcome to the show.
0:33:24 Nice to see you.
0:33:25 Tim, thanks for having me this morning.
0:33:26 Appreciate it.
0:33:29 And I thought we could start with a confession on my side
0:33:33 which is ever since I was a kid and to this day, I still have
0:33:37 a poster of the Incredible Hulk number 340 Gray Hulk versus
0:33:43 Wolverine that features your artwork and I am a long time
0:33:45 collector and fan of your work.
0:33:48 So it’s exciting to have you here and I’m excited to to
0:33:50 dig into all sorts of things.
0:33:53 And I thought we would begin and this might be a dead end.
0:33:54 We’ll see where it goes.
0:34:03 But asking about how baseball informed your approach to art
0:34:06 and comics, if at all, if those two things tie together for
0:34:06 you.
0:34:10 So here’s what I would say about that and I’ll give you a
0:34:11 little bit of back history.
0:34:16 I would say it informed me more on the eventual business side,
0:34:19 the competitiveness on the business side.
0:34:24 So it’s always interesting when you do certain interviews or
0:34:28 with people, I always just sort of think that sometimes interviews
0:34:31 are like laying on a psychologist couch and they’re like,
0:34:33 Todd, why are you like that?
0:34:34 What drives you?
0:34:36 Here’s the answer to that question so we can get that
0:34:37 out of the way.
0:34:40 I think it was the day I came out of the womb and it was in
0:34:41 my DNA.
0:34:45 There’s not a single day I don’t recall not being Todd.
0:34:49 So what is natural for me, I guess for other people because
0:34:53 I now understand as I get older, their personalities that my
0:34:57 personality has been baked every day of my life and it’s not
0:34:59 an effort to do what I’ve done in life, right?
0:35:03 So people go, oh my God, you’re so tenacious and you go up
0:35:06 against people and you’re such a rebel and you fight for what
0:35:07 you believe in.
0:35:10 Of course, there’s no other option in my brain.
0:35:12 So it’s not, I’m not fighting.
0:35:13 I just, there’s no other option.
0:35:17 So it’s just a natural progression on where I want to go.
0:35:21 But I would argue that whatever that DNA is got enhanced
0:35:22 with two things.
0:35:26 One, I had a brother that was a year older and one a year
0:35:29 younger and then you get three boys together.
0:35:30 What are you talking about?
0:35:31 Every day was a competition.
0:35:33 Who could eat the cereal the fastest?
0:35:35 Who could jump the most steps down?
0:35:37 Who could run to school the fast?
0:35:38 What are you talking about?
0:35:39 Everything is a competition.
0:35:43 And then you take that and eventually I was never going to
0:35:45 go to university.
0:35:47 I remember being in class when they brought in high school,
0:35:51 they brought the recruit in the college and they sort of talk
0:35:52 and I go, well, I’m not going.
0:35:54 So I’ll just put my head down and continue drawing because
0:35:56 I was always doodling.
0:35:58 And then somebody tapped me on the shoulder.
0:36:02 I remember and they went, son, why is your arm not raised?
0:36:03 And I’m like, what?
0:36:05 I wasn’t even paying attention, sadly.
0:36:08 And I go, well, what was the question?
0:36:09 They’re going, well, who wants to go to college?
0:36:14 And I looked up and every single person in my class had their
0:36:15 arm up.
0:36:19 Now that’s okay, but I looked at the two sort of druggies that
0:36:22 I know because I’m friends with all of them and I’m looking
0:36:25 at them going, what are you talking about?
0:36:26 You’re not going to college.
0:36:28 You got F’s like across the board.
0:36:30 You might even drop out in grade 12.
0:36:36 So anyways, I gave them my reason, which is I don’t enjoy education.
0:36:39 And so let’s just convert it to broccoli and let’s say I don’t
0:36:40 like broccoli.
0:36:45 Why would I then go and pay people money to eat more broccoli?
0:36:47 Does it make much sense?
0:36:47 Does it?
0:36:49 So I go, I’m not going.
0:36:50 Now, did I go to college?
0:36:51 Of course I did.
0:36:52 Why?
0:36:53 Because I’m an athlete.
0:36:55 And so I played baseball, getting back to your question.
0:37:02 And somebody offered me a scholarship to go to play baseball.
0:37:05 So my last three years, I was on a Pac-Tan baseball scholarship.
0:37:09 And at some point now you have to get sort of simplistic.
0:37:13 If somebody’s going to give you free education, I’m going to grab it.
0:37:14 Did I want it?
0:37:15 Not really.
0:37:17 But if it’s free, I’m going to grab it.
0:37:23 And oddly, Tim, of the 25 guys on our team, only two of us graduated
0:37:25 with a degree in four years.
0:37:27 And the other guy was, I’m Canadian, the other guy was Canadian.
0:37:30 I remember the coach going, because Canadians don’t want to hustle
0:37:32 as much in sports, right?
0:37:33 Because we got a degree.
0:37:34 Like what he’s talking about was free.
0:37:38 And the reason I took it and I got it done for free, because
0:37:42 the dumb athlete was alive and well, but they’re not really dumb.
0:37:43 They just don’t go to class.
0:37:46 And if you don’t go to class, you don’t get your marks.
0:37:49 And if you don’t get your marks, then eventually you don’t get your degree.
0:37:51 Here’s the funny thing about that.
0:37:56 Somebody has offered you a free degree and 23 of my teammates
0:37:58 decided they wouldn’t get it in four years.
0:38:02 So either they would never get a degree or gun to my head.
0:38:03 This is weird.
0:38:07 They’re going to come back and pay to finish it.
0:38:09 I go finish it.
0:38:11 The buffet was open the whole time you were there
0:38:13 and you chose not to eat.
0:38:14 Like, oh my gosh.
0:38:17 So if nothing else, given that I’m sort of a cheapskate,
0:38:19 I’m going to, they’re going to give it to me for free.
0:38:21 I’m not paying another penny to come back here.
0:38:22 I’ll take that degree.
0:38:25 So I got my degree and I was off to the races.
0:38:29 Now between the baseball, which is competitive and my brothers,
0:38:32 then all of a sudden three weeks before I graduate, I end up getting
0:38:39 my first job in comic books and all of that sort of made me a freelancer
0:38:42 and I had to begin taking care of myself.
0:38:45 And it’s like, OK, it’s just another game, another game of competition.
0:38:47 First job in comic books.
0:38:53 You’ve posted, I want to say photographs of 350 or so rejection letters.
0:38:56 When did you first start sending those out?
0:39:01 And did you get any particularly helpful feedback that allowed
0:39:04 you to modify things so that you were able to get that first job?
0:39:05 Yes.
0:39:08 So let’s go through it real quick.
0:39:11 Did I get over 300 rejections?
0:39:12 Yes.
0:39:15 Is that tenacious?
0:39:18 Is that determination or is that delusion?
0:39:21 Like how many, like at what point do you say, I’m going to be an opera singer
0:39:25 and the people keep giving you nose and you go, man, look at how determined
0:39:28 is at what point do you say, maybe I just can’t sing opera.
0:39:28 Right.
0:39:31 But again, so there’s a fine line.
0:39:34 People give me way too much credit for those 300.
0:39:39 I think a normal sane person with sort of less enthusiasm will leave it at
0:39:44 that work than me would have probably at 200 rejections found another option
0:39:44 to make money.
0:39:49 But the reason I was able to assimilate that many rejections was
0:39:51 because I was going to college.
0:39:57 So I was sending off samples almost continuously while I was in school.
0:39:58 So I didn’t have a job.
0:39:59 I was going to school.
0:40:00 So I didn’t care.
0:40:02 I had four years to basically try and get a job.
0:40:05 And then it probably at the end of those four years, I was going to
0:40:08 look at that pile and say, maybe I need to find something else.
0:40:14 My degree is, I thought is in graphic designing and I thought I was going
0:40:16 to be the guy who’s going to do Michelin tire ads.
0:40:17 I go, that’s okay.
0:40:20 It’s an admirable job, but you know, it’s a graphic designer.
0:40:23 That was sort of where I thought the reality of it was going to be.
0:40:28 But three weeks before I graduate, I get my first job and how did I
0:40:33 get it by sending literally 700 samples over the course of those four
0:40:38 years and just on one level, I think I just wore them out because I sent
0:40:43 it to every editor at every company.
0:40:46 They used to have, let’s say at Marvel because my first job was at Marvel.
0:40:48 They have like one submission editor.
0:40:49 No, no, no, no, no.
0:40:53 The people who give you the work are the editors and they have 16 editors.
0:40:56 So I would send it to all 16 editors.
0:40:58 Ultimately, I went around the submission guy.
0:40:59 I just went, what?
0:41:01 You got to give it to the editors anyways.
0:41:02 Might as well send it directly to the editors.
0:41:07 So I would keep sending it to the editors over and over and over to every
0:41:08 company, every editor.
0:41:13 And I think Tim and hindsight, I think that they probably had a board
0:41:16 meeting or whatever, one of those Monday morning meetings and they just said
0:41:20 something like, and I’m making this up, but said, oh, for the love of God,
0:41:25 that Todd kid, that punk that keeps sending us, we keep getting like a box
0:41:30 of mail from this guy every two weeks, would somebody in this room give him
0:41:34 a couple pages just so we don’t have to open up his mail every two weeks?
0:41:39 I think I just, I think I just wore them out and I got the job literally
0:41:41 three weeks before I graduated.
0:41:42 So I never even had to use my degree.
0:41:45 What informed me in those?
0:41:45 Yeah.
0:41:47 It was all constructive criticism.
0:41:50 Let me tell you, because people say, oh, Todd, you got the last laugh.
0:41:51 No, no, no.
0:41:56 Everything they put in those letters was constructive criticism because
0:41:59 the people who just thought that I was not very good through my portfolio,
0:42:01 my samples and the garbage.
0:42:06 So everybody who took the time to write back actually gave a little
0:42:08 bit of insight.
0:42:12 And so what I would do, they didn’t know it was actually going to keep
0:42:17 me fueled is that I would take that insight and then redo another batch
0:42:19 and send it to everybody again.
0:42:23 So, you know, where I was making 20 mistakes, eventually got down to 18
0:42:25 and then 16 and then 15.
0:42:30 And I think probably when I was at six mistakes, I think they finally
0:42:32 said, hey, he’s getting better.
0:42:35 He’s not perfect and he seems to be enthusiastic.
0:42:37 So somebody give him a chance.
0:42:38 See what he can do.
0:42:42 So for people who don’t have any familiarity with comic books,
0:42:46 penciling anything along these lines, what were some of the things
0:42:48 you were getting feedback on and getting better at?
0:42:51 And I suppose this leads into the question, like, what does it look
0:42:54 like as a comic book artist to get better?
0:42:55 What are you getting better at?
0:42:58 Maybe that sounds like a silly question, but I’ll give it a shot.
0:43:03 There’s two things that I think make a good artist in the comic book industry.
0:43:06 One is just pure drawing skills.
0:43:06 Right.
0:43:12 So there are hundreds and not thousands of people who can draw circles around
0:43:12 me.
0:43:16 If you can just draw pretty pictures, you can go a long way.
0:43:19 The second piece is storytelling.
0:43:24 And if you can do great storytelling and be average drawer, you’re still
0:43:30 going to have a pretty good career because people then will be entertained
0:43:31 by everything you do.
0:43:35 So I’ll use an example and I hope because I’m friends with him.
0:43:36 I hope he doesn’t take it.
0:43:39 Frank Miller is a great, great storyteller.
0:43:42 He’s the one that wrote The Dark Knight for Batman.
0:43:46 He’s the one that, you know, created 300 that ended up getting turned into a movie
0:43:48 in Sin City and all these things.
0:43:52 He rejuvenated dead characters like Daredevil.
0:43:58 I wouldn’t say, and I think Frank would agree, that he’s not the best anatomically
0:44:03 correct artist and his drawings don’t get every muscle right.
0:44:10 What he does is he tells stories better than anybody else in our industry period.
0:44:15 So he could do it with stickmen and you would still be engaged because of his
0:44:18 writing, the way he does it and what’s happening in it.
0:44:23 So Frank has been able to take that storytelling, which to me, as I’ve
0:44:26 gotten older, is way more important than whether you’ve got flashy lines.
0:44:30 I came in as a kid who wanted to do flashy lines because it would, people
0:44:32 go, oh my God, look at all the detail he’s doing.
0:44:38 But then I found out that really what they wanted was less flash and more clarity
0:44:40 on the pages, right?
0:44:45 You should be able to give a comic book to a non-comic book writer, go
0:44:47 next door to your neighbor, give it to your mom.
0:44:51 And at the end, they should be able to say, hmm, you know, not my cup of tea.
0:44:54 I don’t collect comic books, but that was kind of interesting because
0:44:57 they understood what they were supposed to be reading in the sequence.
0:44:59 They were supposed to be reading it.
0:45:02 And if you don’t do that, you’re no good in our industry.
0:45:07 One more thing, if you can’t keep a deadline, then you’re for sure not good
0:45:12 at anything. As a matter of fact, people who can keep a deadline in an industry
0:45:18 that is driven by monthly deadlines can have long careers and not be very good
0:45:23 at drawing because you have to get product out every 30 days.
0:45:25 So go ahead.
0:45:28 If you want to be the kid that’s flashy and do a bunch of lines and take
0:45:31 twice as long, but they’re never going to give you a regular gig because
0:45:35 you have to get books out on time, period, out.
0:45:39 And I’m embarrassed that I don’t know this, but I never made it far enough.
0:45:41 You can still lead a productive lifetime.
0:45:42 Don’t worry about it.
0:45:43 I’m working on it.
0:45:44 We’re going on the productive side.
0:45:48 But what are the deliverables on a monthly basis?
0:45:51 Are you shipping out a few pages at a time?
0:45:55 Are they waiting until you have the entire book done, so to speak?
0:46:01 What do the actual deadlines and deliverables look like for a full-time comic book artist?
0:46:04 So it is shifted, as you can imagine, with technology.
0:46:05 Yeah.
0:46:08 So the way that it used to work, and I’ll age myself because I got into the
0:46:15 business sort of pre-internet, I’d have to do my pages, take them to the either
0:46:18 phone FedEx and they were called Federal Express at that point.
0:46:23 And so I would have to phone Federal Express when I use FedEx.
0:46:25 My wife go, “Oh, you’re so hip calling them FedEx.”
0:46:26 And eventually they caught on.
0:46:30 So your phone FedEx, they’d either come and pick it up or sometimes you
0:46:32 would miss the call on their deadline.
0:46:33 They were, the drivers were past.
0:46:37 I was living in a remote area up in Canada on an island in Canada.
0:46:41 And so if I missed a driver, which is why I hired an assistant to help
0:46:44 sort of package stuff up, he would drive to the airport, which was about
0:46:48 an hour and 15 away while I was finishing up pages.
0:46:49 So I go, “Oh, I’ve got another hour.”
0:46:51 And then we drive to the airport.
0:46:55 Do you know how many times I ran down the tarmac because it was a little
0:46:58 sort of prop plane that flew to Vancouver, British Columbia.
0:47:01 And they were, I think it was always looking over his shoulder going
0:47:02 to be here in about two minutes.
0:47:07 And I’d be running down the tarmac and I basically throw my package to him
0:47:08 and he’d get it done.
0:47:13 Today, all of that’s taken away because now you can scan your pages
0:47:15 and hit a literally a download.
0:47:16 Boom, it’s gone.
0:47:18 It doesn’t solve anything, Tim.
0:47:23 All it means is you just get to push your lock with deadlines later and later.
0:47:26 So let’s give you an example currently happening.
0:47:30 The biggest comic book that’s going to come out this year in our industry
0:47:32 is a book called Batman Spawn.
0:47:34 So that goes to print.
0:47:39 Could I just talk to the people at DC Comics yesterday?
0:47:41 It goes to print on Monday.
0:47:43 You and I are talking on Friday.
0:47:45 I still have to write.
0:47:46 It’s a 48 page book.
0:47:47 I’ve only written eight pages.
0:47:49 I’ve got to finish writing the 40 pages.
0:47:52 There’s 10 pages that haven’t been colored.
0:47:57 I literally talk to the person who does the word balloons after I give
0:48:01 them the script to say, hey, sorry, dude, we’ve got to both work pretty
0:48:02 hard over the weekend.
0:48:06 They’re going to probably get the last pages at midnight on Sunday.
0:48:09 They’re going to look at it and make sure nobody, no pages are upside down
0:48:12 or backwards and then they’re going to hit send and it’s going to go to the
0:48:16 printer and the printer is waiting because when you’ve got a big print run
0:48:18 because this can, like I said, it’s going to be the biggest of this year.
0:48:22 You can’t swap out books and say, I will just swap out another book.
0:48:23 Can you just substitute?
0:48:24 Not of that magnitude.
0:48:29 They’ve got lots of printer presses waiting for this one book and we’ve
0:48:30 got to deliver.
0:48:32 So how does it work by our chinny chin chin?
0:48:35 Like a lot of other things in the world, you just get it done.
0:48:39 So let me back up for a second because I think I heard you correctly.
0:48:42 Now you have delivered so many deadlines.
0:48:46 Even if you have chased down the plan on the tarmac, you’ve, you know,
0:48:47 how to train obviously.
0:48:48 I’ve missed the plan a couple times.
0:48:49 You’ve missed the plan a couple times.
0:48:54 So this is a huge book, biggest in the industry of this year.
0:48:58 Did I hear you correctly that you said you have eight pages done out of 48?
0:49:01 I guess I’m just wondering if you, what does that mean?
0:49:02 Yeah, writing was.
0:49:03 Okay.
0:49:04 Wow.
0:49:07 Tim, I’ll tell you what that means.
0:49:11 That means before I talk to you this morning, I talked to my, what they
0:49:15 call the letterer, the guy who actually converts your script into the word balloon.
0:49:19 I talked to my letterer and go, dude, we’re going all night tonight.
0:49:22 I’m just every three pages I’m going to send to you.
0:49:23 So it’s going to be, I do three.
0:49:24 I send it to him.
0:49:25 He works on it.
0:49:28 By the time he’s done with those three, I feed him another three and we’re just
0:49:32 going to see how it works and we’ll get it done.
0:49:33 Tim, we’ll get it done.
0:49:34 Right.
0:49:37 Like you said earlier, a couple of years ago, I set a record.
0:49:40 I mean, spawn is the longest running crater on book.
0:49:42 We’re up to issue three 35.
0:49:45 That’s over 30 years of doing books.
0:49:47 And now I do a monthly book every week.
0:49:48 You just get it done.
0:49:50 Yeah, it’s just like going to the gym.
0:49:53 Every workout isn’t awesome, but did you get your workout in?
0:49:54 Yeah, sure.
0:49:55 Wow.
0:49:57 By the hair of your chinny chin chin.
0:49:58 Nobody knows on the other side.
0:49:59 Nobody knows.
0:50:02 That’s what everybody’s going to look at that book and go, man, it is.
0:50:04 Look how professionally done it was.
0:50:11 So let’s then come back to a word you used, which is important.
0:50:16 And that is the longest running creator owned superhero comic series.
0:50:18 The creator owned piece.
0:50:22 When and how did you decide to start Image Comics?
0:50:27 Because I remember as a kid, I wanted to be a penciler for about 10 years.
0:50:30 So I was I was really tracking all of this.
0:50:32 And then I was an illustrator in high school and then part of college.
0:50:37 I actually had the, I was the graphics editor at a magazine where Jim Lee had
0:50:39 been the previous graphics editor.
0:50:41 So I had Jim Lee’s had a DC Comics.
0:50:47 And he had these sketches in the desk that he’d done after getting hammered in
0:50:50 college and I thought these are just treasures at the time.
0:50:52 So this is a lot of fun for me to explore.
0:50:54 And I remember Image being a very big deal.
0:51:01 So for people who have no context, he explained why and when Image was
0:51:03 founded because I think that’s a big piece of this story.
0:51:07 Look at, I assume that the majority of people listening don’t collect
0:51:08 comic books and whatever.
0:51:09 So we’ll keep it simple.
0:51:11 Everybody knows Marvel and DC.
0:51:12 Everybody, right?
0:51:16 If you ask the next natural question, huh?
0:51:17 Who’s number three?
0:51:21 That has been Image comic books for 30 years.
0:51:23 We were celebrating our 30th anniversary.
0:51:25 So was the spawn character because it came out that first year.
0:51:30 And we’ve been number three for 30 consecutive years.
0:51:32 As a matter of fact, those first couple months we came out, we actually
0:51:33 passed DC comic books.
0:51:34 We were number two for a few months.
0:51:41 So when people sort of get past, you know, the Marvel and DC and even in the
0:51:44 industry of Hollywood and or people that are looking for ancillary products,
0:51:49 which you have to because people don’t know Marvel’s owned by Disney.
0:51:50 Marvel’s owned by Disney.
0:51:52 They don’t share that too much.
0:51:57 And DC comic book is for a long, long time has been owned by Time Warner.
0:52:01 Now Warner Brothers Discovery, AT&T, you know, but let’s call it Warner
0:52:01 Brothers.
0:52:03 So one’s owned by Disney.
0:52:05 One’s owned by Warner Brothers.
0:52:06 Okay.
0:52:12 So you’re Sony, you’re universal, you’re Paramount Studios, your Netflix,
0:52:14 you’re Apple, you’re Paramount Plus.
0:52:14 What are you talking about?
0:52:15 Where are you getting product?
0:52:17 Not getting it from Marvel.
0:52:17 Why?
0:52:20 They’re not sharing and you’re not getting it from DC because they’re
0:52:21 not sharing.
0:52:27 So you literally have to go and redact all those books and you’re left with
0:52:33 everybody else and that puts our books in really good position.
0:52:35 Now let’s go back because that doesn’t answer your question.
0:52:37 How did we get to image comic books?
0:52:42 For me personally, when I was trying to break into comic books, like I said,
0:52:46 in all those years leading up to breaking in those, I was reading
0:52:49 everything I could get my hands on about our industry.
0:52:57 And what I found was I was coming across a common theme and the common
0:53:06 theme was that everybody, no matter how big your standing had been in
0:53:10 our industry, eventually got pushed out against their will.
0:53:17 And in some cases got the short end of creative and financial sticks.
0:53:18 These are artists.
0:53:20 These are artists, writers, whatever.
0:53:25 These stories had been written over and over and over again.
0:53:30 And so I remember one in particular reading about, there’s a gentleman,
0:53:34 his name was Jack Kirby and his nickname was Jack the King Kirby, right?
0:53:39 To put in perspective to people who are laymen listening that they called
0:53:45 him the King for a reason because he was and he got the short end of the stick.
0:53:49 And Jack Kirby is a guy who helped create the Fantastic Four and the X-Men
0:53:55 and even created the costume for Spider-Man and the Hulk and Iron Man
0:53:56 and on and on.
0:53:58 That’s who Jack Kirby was.
0:53:59 He helped create it with Stan Lee.
0:54:04 So I remember reading those articles and this is long before I break
0:54:10 into the industry and I went, man, if they can do that to Jack King Kirby,
0:54:12 they can do it to anyone.
0:54:18 And so when I got my first job in comic books, you know, three weeks
0:54:21 before I graduated, I went in with my eyes wide open.
0:54:25 And so I knew what the game was.
0:54:32 And I go, okay, their job is to exploit me as much as possible.
0:54:38 Can I do the same in reverse at the same time?
0:54:41 The win is they’re getting something of value out of you.
0:54:43 You’re getting something out of them.
0:54:47 And the value that I was getting out of them was twofold.
0:54:51 One, I had all these dozens of characters in my portfolio, including
0:54:56 Spawn and I never ever had one second of temptation to ever pull any of
0:55:00 those out and offer them to to Marvel or DC when I was working with them.
0:55:04 Did I create new characters when I got the plots from the writers?
0:55:05 Of course, I did.
0:55:05 I was a professional.
0:55:10 So I helped co-create and I’m the visual creator of Venom.
0:55:11 So Venom’s my guy.
0:55:11 Why?
0:55:14 Because, you know, we came up with a story and that was what it was.
0:55:15 Okay, fine.
0:55:18 But I never said, oh man, I’m having a good career at Marvel.
0:55:21 Let me reach into my portfolio and offer them my characters.
0:55:21 Never.
0:55:22 Why?
0:55:26 Because in the back of my mind, those stories had been haunting me that
0:55:32 were there and at some point, Tim, I was selling more comic books
0:55:38 than any human being Marvel was employing period to the point that
0:55:40 I had set a record on one of the books.
0:55:43 I helped take over artistically amazing Spider-Man.
0:55:46 It was sitting at like number 22 in the sales chart.
0:55:50 They came and they went, hey, Todd, if you want to draw it cool because
0:55:53 I had just finished a run on the incredible Hulk that you had mentioned.
0:55:56 And they said, whatever you want to do because it’s sort of in a dumpers.
0:56:00 Spider-Man’s in the dumpers in short order at some points.
0:56:04 Amazing Spider-Man became number one or two every single month in
0:56:08 total sale to the point then that they’re like, oh, and it’s really
0:56:09 what catapulted my career.
0:56:13 And just so you know, all the things that I was doing artistically to
0:56:19 help move it from number 22 to number one, I was getting pushback from
0:56:23 the corporate entity up above and the executives up above and the editor
0:56:27 and chief up above that you can’t do what you’re doing, Todd.
0:56:28 You’re messing with the icon.
0:56:29 That’s not how we do it.
0:56:33 Let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, as an old man now, the
0:56:38 single greatest danger you are going to meet in your life is status quo.
0:56:42 It is the thing that they are going to fight and battle you against more
0:56:45 than any other thing in the world.
0:56:51 And what’s staggering about what I just said, which is a truism is that
0:56:55 there’s only 200 percenters in the world that I can give you.
0:56:57 One, we’re all going to die.
0:56:58 Hate to break it to you.
0:56:59 It’s just a matter of time.
0:57:04 The second is everything is going to eventually change.
0:57:08 Otherwise we’d be living in caves right now.
0:57:15 Change is part of the human condition and yet every day you run into
0:57:21 systems that are crushingly holding on to status quo are holding on to
0:57:22 yesterday.
0:57:28 And and for those of us that are wired to think about tomorrow, we become
0:57:30 the rebels.
0:57:31 We become the outcast.
0:57:35 We become the people who are rocking the boat, who are just Todd.
0:57:40 Why don’t you just relax, get along, all the things that they’re going to
0:57:40 tell you.
0:57:44 And what I’m saying that happened to me has happened to millions of
0:57:48 people throughout history that wanted to do something different, not better.
0:57:52 Let me be very clear, not better, different.
0:57:57 So when I was doing my different Spider-Man, I wasn’t doing it because
0:57:58 I thought I was better.
0:58:02 I wasn’t doing it because I thought what they were doing was worse,
0:58:04 which is how they took it.
0:58:10 I was doing it because I’m a young kid with a career and I need to figure
0:58:14 out how to stand out in a sea of people that are doing the exact same job
0:58:14 as me.
0:58:16 And there’s only one way.
0:58:17 I’ve got to be a little bit different.
0:58:23 So I started doing some funky fun little stuff on Spider-Man.
0:58:24 And guess what?
0:58:26 The fans liked it.
0:58:30 And more importantly, it was enjoyable for me to draw because drawing is a
0:58:35 lonely occupation like a novelist where you sit in a room for 12 hours a
0:58:37 day with you and your thoughts.
0:58:38 That’s your day.
0:58:42 And if you can’t entertain yourself, it’s a long day.
0:58:46 So I was coming up with crazy little silly things I was putting in the book.
0:58:47 They were having a heart attack.
0:58:51 I was getting called on the carpet as the sales are going up.
0:58:53 I finally quit Spider-Man.
0:58:55 They go, no, no, no, because you’re selling so many books.
0:58:57 We’ll give you a new Spider-Man book.
0:59:00 They were going to do a fourth Spider-Man book anyway, so they could
0:59:02 have one every week of the month.
0:59:03 So they gave it to me.
0:59:04 I’ve never written before.
0:59:05 I’m going, you’re going to give it to me.
0:59:08 I’ve never written before, but I got it right, which is why I quit.
0:59:12 I go, I want to write and that’s because I don’t want to draw other people’s
0:59:12 stories.
0:59:14 I want to tell my story.
0:59:16 And they said, yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:59:17 And that book set a record.
0:59:22 It’s in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most sales by a single
0:59:22 creator.
0:59:25 I also own that record on the other side with spawn.
0:59:29 I own the corporate and non-corporate record for a single issue by a single
0:59:29 person done.
0:59:31 Now, I’m not saying that bragging.
0:59:36 I’m just saying that has a fact so that now that guy who’s setting records
0:59:40 when he comes into the office in New York from Canada, little Canadian
0:59:47 Hick, you would think that they would say, thank you, not fuck you, right?
0:59:51 And instead they’re calling me on the carpet going, Todd, you’ve got to stop
0:59:53 doing this and this and this.
0:59:57 All the things that got me and their books were there.
1:00:02 And I remember having these bizarre conversations with the editors going,
1:00:05 dude, you don’t have to like me personally.
1:00:07 You don’t have to like my drawing style.
1:00:09 You don’t have to like anything I do.
1:00:11 You hired me for one job.
1:00:13 Sell comic books.
1:00:15 You guys are in the commerce business.
1:00:18 Don’t you realize you’re a money making machine.
1:00:19 You want to sell books.
1:00:22 I do that better than anybody that you employ.
1:00:29 Why are we continuing to have these conversations and they wore me out.
1:00:30 Tim, they wore me out.
1:00:34 So when was there a particular moment when you knew it seems like you have
1:00:38 basically in your back pocket, the plan to eventually go out on your own
1:00:40 because you had all these characters you developed.
1:00:45 So what was the day or the conversation where you just like, fuck this.
1:00:46 Now is the time.
1:00:48 Oh, I’m splitting off.
1:00:50 I remember with clarity.
1:00:54 They had been doing the comic books have this thing in a corner called
1:00:58 the comics code and the comics code was created because in the late fifties
1:01:03 there was the whole war them scared that comic books were degrading the youth
1:01:07 of America and they had the Senate hearings and it actually in a weird way
1:01:12 ended up leading to the sort of the advent of Marvel comics because there
1:01:14 was Marvel was a company called timely comics.
1:01:18 But then they went, oh, we don’t want to get caught up in this whole Senate
1:01:18 hearing.
1:01:24 Let’s sort of whitewash if you will our presentation and they change your name
1:01:28 to Marvel and the first book out fantastic for and then after that here
1:01:32 comes Spider-Man, Iron Man, Hulk and all the other things that we all know.
1:01:36 Right. So you can argue that thanks to some loony tune in the Senate in
1:01:39 the late fifties, Marvel exists.
1:01:39 Right.
1:01:40 Maybe minus him.
1:01:41 There is no Marvel.
1:01:44 So we actually we shouldn’t be given all the credit to Stanley.
1:01:49 We should be given it to McCarthy and the doctor were them who was the one
1:01:51 who wrote the book, the seduction of the innocence.
1:01:52 Right.
1:01:57 So look it up anyways is I’m doing the books because of that comics code
1:01:59 every now and then they would get you to fix a panel.
1:02:01 Todd, you can’t do that.
1:02:01 Why?
1:02:02 Because the comics code.
1:02:03 Okay.
1:02:07 Now I used to ask him could somebody actually send me the comic code.
1:02:11 So instead of having to guess what’s in the comics code and then you guys
1:02:14 tell me I got to redraw something because I have deadlines and I don’t
1:02:16 like to redraw and redo anything.
1:02:20 And so it’s like burning your pasta.
1:02:22 Then you go, oh man, I got to cook it and boil the water again.
1:02:24 It just you get aggravated the second time around.
1:02:29 So at some point they kept doing that and then the day came and then it
1:02:33 was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back because I’d
1:02:37 been doing it for years and they sat there and it was this issue and
1:02:40 it was the sideways issue.
1:02:41 My last issue at Marvel.
1:02:44 It was a sideways issue of the Spider-Man book.
1:02:44 The one I had.
1:02:48 I was writing myself except for we were doing a crossover with some of
1:02:52 that the mutant X-Men and in this case X factor characters.
1:02:56 The ones that were sort of dead pool and cable came from those characters.
1:03:00 And there was a bad guy and his name was a juggernaut and a juggernaut
1:03:02 was like, you couldn’t beat the juggernaut, right?
1:03:06 He’s a big, giant dude and he had armor and you couldn’t do it.
1:03:09 So my thing was, well, he’s got isolates.
1:03:11 He’s got to look out those isolates.
1:03:15 And so the way that I was going to get to him was I had one of the
1:03:19 mutants take their sword and put it in the eye and jam it in the
1:03:22 eye because then it would be like, oh my gosh, right?
1:03:23 You’d catch him off guard.
1:03:27 And then if you team tackle him, you’re going to win the day.
1:03:29 So I drew that.
1:03:33 I still have that page today, Tim, because it’s the page that broke
1:03:35 the camel’s back, right?
1:03:38 I have the, I have the unedited version even better.
1:03:40 I, I, I don’t even have the edited version.
1:03:41 I have the unedited version.
1:03:47 And, and so they phoned me up and they said, Todd, you got to redraw it.
1:03:48 And I went, what?
1:03:49 What, what redraw what?
1:03:52 You can’t stab somebody in the eye with a knife.
1:03:54 And I go, what are you talking about?
1:03:55 Well, I know, like the commerce code.
1:04:00 I go, well, of course you can because just not long ago, there
1:04:02 was this great cover.
1:04:06 Not only was it in the, it was on the cover of Daredevil, Frank Miller.
1:04:11 And he’s got bull’s eye on the cover and he’s stabbing.
1:04:14 Electra, a character on the cover.
1:04:20 And so I go, of course you can stab people and they go, well, yes,
1:04:24 you can stab people, but you can’t, you can’t have a rear exit wound.
1:04:26 And I went, what are you talking about?
1:04:27 Did you look at that cover?
1:04:30 The guy’s killing the lecturers, going in the front is coming out the back.
1:04:34 No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you can stab them and it can
1:04:37 come out of rear exit wound, but you can’t tear the cloth.
1:04:40 So if you look at the drawing, you’re going to see that it’s like,
1:04:42 you don’t really see the sword coming out.
1:04:43 It’s like a teepee.
1:04:44 It’s like a teepee.
1:04:49 The back of her costume was like, it’s, it’s teepee, but it hasn’t cut.
1:04:50 So I go, so I just want to be clear.
1:04:55 You can gut somebody and you can have it come out the other side.
1:05:03 After you gut them, you just can’t rip the cloth and that won’t offend
1:05:04 the mothers and the children.
1:05:05 Yes.
1:05:06 Wow.
1:05:06 Okay.
1:05:09 So there’s no rear exit wound.
1:05:10 I’m just stabbing them in the eye.
1:05:11 Yeah.
1:05:12 But you know what?
1:05:16 People are sensitive to eyes because if everybody gets something in their
1:05:18 eye, we all know how much pain that is and teeth.
1:05:22 Because if you go to the dentist and he drills you wrong and I’m having this
1:05:26 absurd conversation with five or six of my editors and I’m just going,
1:05:29 what are, so I just want to be clear.
1:05:31 Can I stab them in the chest?
1:05:31 Yes.
1:05:32 In the knee.
1:05:33 Yes.
1:05:34 In the elbow.
1:05:35 Yes.
1:05:35 In the eye.
1:05:36 No.
1:05:37 In the cheek.
1:05:37 Yes.
1:05:38 In the neck.
1:05:39 Yes.
1:05:39 In the mouth.
1:05:40 No.
1:05:41 Wow.
1:05:42 Wow.
1:05:48 So somehow I was in bizarre land and so I had at that moment, I stopped
1:05:52 the conversation because you never want to have a conversation with
1:05:56 anybody where two plus two equals giraffe, right?
1:05:58 Never talk to somebody who comes up with that equation.
1:06:01 So I said, guys, here’s what’s going to happen.
1:06:03 I’m going to send you the page.
1:06:05 I’ll do a little quick drawing over if you want.
1:06:10 You guys fix it any way you see fit.
1:06:13 By the way, I’m handing in my resignation.
1:06:14 I am done.
1:06:16 I am exhausted.
1:06:22 I also was a few days away from becoming a father for the first time and
1:06:23 I just went, you know what?
1:06:25 It’s time to catch my breath.
1:06:27 I don’t know what being a dad’s about.
1:06:33 These guys have worn me out and all I do is sell books for them.
1:06:36 And I just called uncle and that was it.
1:06:38 That was the day I walked away.
1:06:40 Now, did I have a plan B?
1:06:41 Of course I didn’t, Tim.
1:06:42 Of course I did.
1:06:47 The plan B was I had spawn as a character and I just went, I guess
1:06:49 I’ll just have to self publish, right?
1:06:52 Not ideal, but okay, here we go.
1:06:58 The upside of it was that I was talking to a couple other people.
1:07:04 Let me also say before me quitting, I also was going around trying to create a union.
1:07:06 I was like the normal Ray.
1:07:08 I was go, come on, man, power to the people, right?
1:07:12 If we stopped drawing, put pencils down, they got nothing to print.
1:07:13 We show them our power.
1:07:20 It was frustrating for me when I tried it for a few months that the most scared people
1:07:25 that will say, yeah, let’s join together are those that don’t have a job.
1:07:27 It was weird to me.
1:07:32 I’d be talking to dozens of people that I knew that wanted to be in the business, that
1:07:35 we’re in the business, but weren’t getting steady work that needed a better life.
1:07:36 And I go, come on, let’s just go.
1:07:39 Let’s just create like an enclave of people.
1:07:43 And again, you know, and deal with the whole is better than the parts.
1:07:47 And they would say, no, I can’t because what if they blackball me?
1:07:49 I’m like, blackball you?
1:07:50 What do you talk about?
1:07:52 You’re not getting any work from them right now.
1:07:54 Yeah, but what if they blackball me?
1:07:54 I’ll go.
1:07:56 So here’s what I’ll do for you.
1:08:02 Right now you have no job, no car, no girlfriend, no house, no money.
1:08:08 If you join this enclave, I will promise I will make all of those equal to you, right?
1:08:12 You’ve got nothing to lose other than to go up.
1:08:14 Come on, man.
1:08:16 I’m selling more books than anybody else.
1:08:20 I’m making more money than anybody else in our industry and I’m willing to throw it away.
1:08:24 You should be 10 times more fearless than me.
1:08:27 It was actually oddly the opposite.
1:08:33 So during that time, I had been talking to two of my friends and peers.
1:08:34 They were also in the industry.
1:08:38 A gentleman by the name of Rob Lifelt and another one named Eric Larson.
1:08:46 And both of them had that same entrepreneurial, let’s just call it rebellious trait in them.
1:08:47 And we were always talking.
1:08:52 And I remember in one conversation, Rob was saying, yeah, I’m going to maybe go, you know,
1:08:53 I’m working, he’s still working for Marvel.
1:08:54 So is Eric.
1:08:56 And it’s like, yeah, I’m going to go do my own book.
1:08:59 And then Eric was on the call going, yeah, I’m going to go do my own book.
1:09:01 And I had just quit.
1:09:04 And at some point during the conversation, the topic came up, go, well,
1:09:08 if you’re going to do your own book on your own, Rob, and you’re going to do your own book
1:09:10 on your own, Eric, and I’m planning on it.
1:09:14 Why don’t we do all of them together in the same place?
1:09:15 It’s never been done.
1:09:22 What’s happened is people have left Marvel and DC one at a time or they pushed them out the door.
1:09:23 Think of it like a sports team.
1:09:25 So you lose a free agent.
1:09:26 You’ll go get another player.
1:09:27 So you lose enough.
1:09:33 But what if 10 of your players on a championship team quit the same year?
1:09:37 That would be detrimental to that competition of that team.
1:09:40 So the conversation was, why don’t we just join forces?
1:09:46 So all of a sudden, very quickly, it was three Rob, who’s super energetic,
1:09:48 came up with the name image comic books.
1:09:50 And the reason why he came up with the name.
1:09:54 So he tells me is that there was a commercial that was on TV.
1:09:57 And it was Andre Agassi, I think.
1:09:59 And it was a it was a camera commercial.
1:10:01 And he says image is everything.
1:10:04 So that was the punchline of the commercial.
1:10:07 So he was like, let’s do image, right?
1:10:08 Image is everything.
1:10:09 Let’s do image, right?
1:10:10 So that was it.
1:10:11 Image comic books was born.
1:10:17 You don’t overthink people think that we come up with all this stuff and we know what we’re doing.
1:10:20 No, venom in and of itself was a happy accident.
1:10:22 We can go back to that in a minute if you want to.
1:10:26 So the three of us get together and then and then Rob says, Todd.
1:10:31 I’ve got a buddy, Jim Valentino, he does some independent comic books.
1:10:34 Is it OK if he comes and so I get what are you talking about?
1:10:37 I like this is a group, the more the merrier.
1:10:42 So we’ve got four and then we find somebody to help us publish.
1:10:45 And we say that’s it.
1:10:50 We’re flying to New York and we’re going to break the news to Marvel that we’re quitting.
1:10:56 Four of us, Rob, Eric, Todd, Jim, Jim Valentino.
1:11:03 We fly to New York and I land the day before we have a meeting with the top people.
1:11:05 Terry Stewart, who was the publishing head at that point.
1:11:10 And later at that meeting I’ll get to was the editor-in-chief who happened to be walking down the hall.
1:11:14 So I’ve got a meeting with Terry Stewart, the top dog.
1:11:15 And to basically say, we’re quitting.
1:11:17 Here’s our reasons why.
1:11:22 And if it was me, I would close this barn door because you may have some more people quitting
1:11:24 next week or the week after the week after.
1:11:29 So we land the day before and I got to blow some time.
1:11:30 So I happened to walk around.
1:11:33 I heard there’s an auction, somebody selling some artwork.
1:11:38 I go to the auction and Jim Lee, the person you know, you talked about the beginning
1:11:40 who’s now the head of DC Congress.
1:11:45 Jim Lee is at the auction and he’s like, hey, Todd, what are you doing here?
1:11:49 I’m like, oh, and I told him and then I start giving the sales pitch.
1:11:57 Tim, let me tell you one thing when I have my passion involved, I’m a good salesman.
1:11:59 I’m a good salesman.
1:12:05 And so I start pounding on Jim Lee and Jim Lee at this point, just so you know,
1:12:10 is doing the X-Men and it is the number one selling book is doing the number one selling book.
1:12:14 The only time I ever got beat with Jim Lee, that guy, he was he was my competition.
1:12:16 Like I was Magic Johnson.
1:12:17 He was Larry Bird.
1:12:21 OK, and so we just we had a rival, but we liked each other and we got along.
1:12:25 And so I tell him what we’re doing and he starts thinking about it.
1:12:31 And then to my surprise says, I think I can go with that.
1:12:36 Now, this is a monumental moment from my perspective.
1:12:42 And here’s why, ladies and gentlemen, Todd, the rebel leaving was going to be easy
1:12:45 for Marvel to basically discount because they were going to go.
1:12:50 Ah, that kid’s always sort of rocking the boat and he’s always a bit of a pistol.
1:12:51 You know what?
1:12:51 That’s fine.
1:12:54 Rob Liefeld had the same attitude.
1:12:55 So it’s like, oh, we were the bad boys.
1:12:57 Ah, so the bad boys left.
1:12:58 Good riddance.
1:13:01 Jim Lee was the golden child.
1:13:04 He was the chef’s kiss.
1:13:06 He was the guy.
1:13:08 He was perfect.
1:13:13 If they could clone employees and artist Jim Lee was the mold.
1:13:19 And so when Jim said he would go, that was a thunder clap in my head to go.
1:13:26 Oh, my God, if the choir boy can go, then that means all bets are off.
1:13:31 And they are going to have to sit up and pay attention because not only are you
1:13:34 losing the bad boys, you are losing the model citizens.
1:13:39 And so Jim then says, oh, by the way, I got a pal, Will’s Pertasio.
1:13:41 Is it okay if I phone him and because he’s looking for the word.
1:13:42 I think he’ll join too.
1:13:44 Shoot.
1:13:46 He was doing another X-Men book.
1:13:47 I’m going, what?
1:13:49 We’re going to get two X-Men.
1:13:51 The X-Men books are the number one selling book at that point.
1:13:53 Bring them on.
1:13:57 So we got six and I’m walking now back to my hotel with the biggest grin on my
1:14:00 face because I go, they don’t even know what’s about to come.
1:14:05 And as I’m walking into my hotel, I see another sort of peer, a guy by
1:14:07 name of Mark Sylvester.
1:14:13 Now, Mark Sylvester to me at that time was the best artist, like just in terms
1:14:15 of skill, Mark Sylvester.
1:14:18 I don’t believe the thing that my son is saying.
1:14:18 Yeah.
1:14:19 That’s my, that’s my dad.
1:14:20 I’m taking care of here.
1:14:22 Yeah, yeah.
1:14:22 Okay.
1:14:23 Yeah.
1:14:25 So Mark Sylvester is there.
1:14:26 It’s about 11 o’clock at night.
1:14:28 And I go, Hey, Mark, what are you doing?
1:14:29 Cause I’m going to bed.
1:14:30 You got, you got, you got five minutes for me.
1:14:31 Right.
1:14:35 And so I sit down and like Mussolini from the balcony.
1:14:36 I give him the speech.
1:14:37 Right.
1:14:38 And I give it to him.
1:14:40 And he’s like, Oh my God.
1:14:42 He goes, Todd, that sounds good.
1:14:43 And Jim Lee’s on board.
1:14:44 Yeah.
1:14:44 He just signed on.
1:14:46 Let me think about it.
1:14:48 I go, Mark, here’s the gig.
1:14:50 We’ve got a meeting at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.
1:14:54 I need to know if you’re in or not by eight o’clock in the morning.
1:14:56 He goes, so I’ve got to, I’ve got to go to bed.
1:14:59 I’ve got to think about it, whether I’m going to change my entire career.
1:15:02 And I’ve got nine hours of which eight of them I’m going to sleep.
1:15:03 Yeah.
1:15:04 That’s it.
1:15:08 Now, I don’t know what he did or how well he slept that night, but in
1:15:12 the morning at seven, 30, the phone rings and he goes, Hey Todd, Mark,
1:15:14 I’m in seven.
1:15:15 We went to New York.
1:15:19 I flew to New York with Rob with four of us, with four of us.
1:15:22 And by the time we walk into that office, we’ve got seven.
1:15:25 Oh, by the way, Mark Sylvester was doing the Wolverine comic book.
1:15:31 We had literally the dream team to put in perspective for people
1:15:32 listening again, that don’t know.
1:15:38 There’s probably a, every year about that year was probably about six,
1:15:42 seven thousand comic books come out from all companies, right?
1:15:45 Cause again, Spider-Man comes out once a month, so that’s 12.
1:15:48 And then you’ve got three Spider-Man books at 36 and then Iron Man’s
1:15:50 another 12 and 12 and you add it all up.
1:15:53 Literally thousands of comic books come out.
1:16:01 The people who gathered together to create image, we had accomplished 44 of
1:16:04 the top 50 sales that year.
1:16:10 Just to put in perspective who we were, 44 of the top 50 sales of 6,000.
1:16:15 We were literally the comic book equivalent of the dream team,
1:16:18 the basketball team that was happening in basketball at that time.
1:16:22 So I knew this was going to reverberate somewhere.
1:16:25 And again, the stock went down at Marvel the next day.
1:16:27 Take a look at it because CNN reported on it.
1:16:30 And we went into the meeting and essentially it went like this.
1:16:35 And here would be a fun interview is to get Terry Stuart’s perspective
1:16:41 of it because not only has he literally lied about it.
1:16:44 He will tell you otherwise, but now is he lied about it.
1:16:48 But then 30 years later, I met up with him and my wife went and talked to him
1:16:52 and he still is spewing the lie.
1:16:53 And I get it.
1:16:54 He’s corporate.
1:16:55 What’s he going to do?
1:16:59 He doesn’t want to say that it was on his watch that all these people left.
1:17:01 But here’s his lie.
1:17:02 And it is.
1:17:04 I got witnesses because there’s more than one of us in that room.
1:17:09 He’s saying we came in and we asked for the copyrights of our characters.
1:17:11 What are you talking about?
1:17:13 None of us is that crazy.
1:17:16 We understood the dynamics of the business.
1:17:19 We would give me Spider-Man and give him the X-Men.
1:17:20 What are you talking about?
1:17:23 He’s saying he had to let us go because that was our demand.
1:17:28 No, no, the way that it went down was simply like this.
1:17:29 We are leaving.
1:17:32 There’s nothing you can give us that’s going to keep us.
1:17:36 And oh, by the way, here’s some of our reasons.
1:17:42 If it was us, you may want to do something about those reasons
1:17:45 because next week you may have another seven quitting.
1:17:48 I don’t understand why you want to keep having people quitting.
1:17:49 But you know what?
1:17:51 Do what you got to do.
1:17:53 It’s your company, whatever.
1:17:57 Now, during that conversation, the editor-in-chief had coincidentally happened
1:18:00 to be up on the upper floors.
1:18:03 Don’t know why and just came in and whatever.
1:18:04 He was a good man.
1:18:08 Tom DeFalco, the one that used to tell me, can’t do that, Todd.
1:18:10 You can’t do that, Todd on Spider-Man.
1:18:14 Anyway, at the end of this conversation, because Rob, I felt who was in there
1:18:16 and my wife was there and Jim Lee was there.
1:18:20 Rob left because he had to go pick up his girlfriend.
1:18:21 So that was classic Rob.
1:18:25 Like, oh, you guys just finished this world changing conversation.
1:18:28 I go get my wife and got to grab a burger.
1:18:32 So, and this is why I like Rob so much because he’s just, he’s by the cuff
1:18:34 and it’s what makes him special to me.
1:18:38 Anyways, we get in the elevator at the end of this conversation
1:18:42 and I will never forget the words.
1:18:45 Has the elevator doors are closing just like in a movie.
1:18:49 The doors are closing and you can see the editor-in-chief looking at us
1:18:54 and he says, hey, if it doesn’t work, you’re welcome back.
1:18:59 And the door shut and I remember turning to Jim Lee.
1:19:04 Now, just to give a little background on Jim Lee, Jim Lee went to college
1:19:05 to become a doctor.
1:19:06 I think his dad’s a doctor.
1:19:09 This is a smart, intelligent human being.
1:19:13 And for me, my dad, who you just heard, was in the printing business
1:19:14 for 40, 50 years.
1:19:17 The one thing that I knew, it’s printing.
1:19:19 And if not, I knew lots of people who did.
1:19:24 So the doors closed and I looked at Jim and I go, oh, my God,
1:19:27 they think we’re dumb and I’m not that we’re smart.
1:19:30 Tim, not that we’re smart, Tim, but you know what printing comic books
1:19:33 is ink on paper.
1:19:38 That’s it, ladies and gentlemen, ink on paper done.
1:19:42 Maybe there’s a couple of details beyond that, but that’s it.
1:19:45 Every time you pick up a pen and you write on a piece of paper,
1:19:47 it’s sort of kind of like doing comic books.
1:19:50 It’s just if you keep going and draw it in the shape of Spider-Man
1:19:52 or the Hulk, you got a comic book.
1:19:55 It’s not rocket science.
1:19:58 And so I was like, oh, my God, they don’t think we can print.
1:19:59 Oh, my God.
1:20:01 So that was it.
1:20:05 And from there, the collective whole of the seven of us left.
1:20:09 Here’s sort of this silly, funny part of the rest of that day.
1:20:14 Historically, what was happening, Tim, is that if you quit Marvel,
1:20:15 you only had one choice.
1:20:18 You went literally across the street to DC Comics.
1:20:22 Or if you quit DC Comics, you quit and you walked across the street
1:20:23 to Marvel. That’s all you did.
1:20:26 You literally ping-ponged your whole career back and forth, back
1:20:27 and forth.
1:20:29 Whenever you got mad, you just went to the other date.
1:20:30 There was across the street.
1:20:34 So we went across the street to DC Comics books.
1:20:38 And DC sees, I had started, you know, I had done about a year,
1:20:39 a year and a half there.
1:20:42 Rob Lifout had done a year there.
1:20:44 But Jim Lee and I walk in there.
1:20:48 Jim Lee has never stepped foot in DC Comics books.
1:20:51 And he’s the golden child at Marvel.
1:20:54 And they just go, there’s only one reason he’s in the office.
1:20:59 Somebody got mad and we’re getting the golden child and we’re getting
1:21:00 Todd, we’ll take the bad boy too.
1:21:03 Cause he’s like, that’s, these are the number one and number two
1:21:05 selling guys in the industry.
1:21:08 Woo, we hit the mother load, the mother.
1:21:08 Oh my God.
1:21:14 And quickly they assemble 15, 16 people in this room and they pour
1:21:16 the coffee and they get us the refreshments.
1:21:21 And they just go, oh my goodness, we are sitting here and we sit down
1:21:23 and then they hear the fateful words.
1:21:27 I go, Hey guys, just so you know, we’re not here to work for you.
1:21:28 I just couple of things.
1:21:29 We just quit Marvel.
1:21:32 Their eyes light up, but we are not here to work for you either.
1:21:36 You could just see the lead balloon and then we’re like, pardon.
1:21:39 And it’s like, no, no, no, we’re not here to work for you.
1:21:41 So, and you can just see the, so we’re just clay her.
1:21:47 So you came here with Jim Lee and walked into our offices and are
1:21:52 now dangling and teasing us and saying it’s for nothing.
1:21:54 That’s exactly what we’re saying.
1:21:56 Wow.
1:21:57 Wow.
1:21:58 Why would you guys do that?
1:22:02 And I go, well, because you know, we got some other plans and then
1:22:03 then they start giving their sales pitch.
1:22:05 Well, here’s why you should work for us.
1:22:06 Don’t do that.
1:22:09 DC is your place to be DC, DC, DC.
1:22:12 And they go, and by the way, we just did a new contract that’s
1:22:14 for the betterment of the creative community.
1:22:18 And then I asked them the question for me that was like the dagger
1:22:21 for me where they go, Hey, you don’t know, that was super cool.
1:22:22 That was super, super cool.
1:22:25 You wrote up that new contract for the creative community.
1:22:28 Could I just ask you just like one, one, one question here just
1:22:29 before we get going.
1:22:34 Did you ask one fucking creator to have any input in that contract
1:22:37 that is to better the creative community?
1:22:40 Did you ask one single creator?
1:22:44 And let me tell you, Tim, when you get pregnant pauses in rooms,
1:22:46 it’s all you need to know.
1:22:48 You get your answer at the pregnant pause.
1:22:50 Of course they didn’t.
1:22:51 Of course they didn’t.
1:22:53 And that was the reason.
1:22:55 This is why we’re quitting Marvel.
1:23:02 This is why we’re quitting DC because of your disregard for your community.
1:23:08 And Jim and I are examples and we’ve climbed the top of the ladder just
1:23:12 like Jack King Kirby and all those hundreds before him.
1:23:17 This is just a repeat of history and it’s time.
1:23:20 And we thought that that was it.
1:23:24 And that was when the collective whole, not me, the collective
1:23:26 whole, the seven of us started image comics.
1:23:31 So the DC visit, I’m trying to think of the names involved.
1:23:34 Was there anyone who is quitting DC or did you just go in there
1:23:38 to put them on alert and say, No, we put them on alert and gave
1:23:40 them the same sort of speech we gave Marvel.
1:23:45 If you think that the dissatisfaction of the seven of us is unique
1:23:47 to the seven of us, you guys are blind.
1:23:48 I see.
1:23:52 So it was a change your ways or become a fatality.
1:23:56 Every conversation is the exact same.
1:24:01 And if we prove that there’s any success on the outside of the only
1:24:05 two bubbles that exist in most freelancers sort of brains, which is
1:24:08 Marvel DC or you get another job.
1:24:10 And I mean another job in another industry.
1:24:16 So if we if we move on and we create a third possibility, why do that?
1:24:23 Now, to their credit, let me say, Tim, to their credit, they did start changing.
1:24:28 They did start bettering pay and, you know, even starting to give medical,
1:24:33 which was never a part of the equation and giving bonuses and being
1:24:39 a little more fair minded on royalties because they knew that what
1:24:43 we were saying at some point that reality sunk in, that we could start
1:24:49 losing almost all of our top talent, if not a big portion of our talent period.
1:24:52 And this isn’t good for business.
1:24:57 So even those that were jealous or in our creative community and or
1:25:02 thought that we were crazies or whatever, they still, whether
1:25:05 they know it or not prospered by us leaving because all their contracts
1:25:09 got upgraded while they were still throwing darts at us, our own
1:25:12 community, as you can imagine, saying, you guys go take your big egos
1:25:13 and go do your thing.
1:25:14 Okay.
1:25:15 So I just came back from a bathroom break.
1:25:18 You mentioned before we started recording, you had a camel bladder
1:25:21 and that you talk until I had to take a bathroom break, which was true.
1:25:25 So how is a camel bladder a competitive advantage?
1:25:26 It is.
1:25:28 And so because people go, so what?
1:25:28 So why?
1:25:30 So you don’t go to the bathroom.
1:25:34 I mean, I went to a signing not long ago and I got there at seven
1:25:37 and then I signed from seven in the morning to midnight and I didn’t
1:25:39 move from the desk where I was signing.
1:25:43 And they had to now again, other human, other human beings had to
1:25:44 eat and go to the bathroom.
1:25:48 So I, so I go, you better have two teams and you’re going to have to rotate
1:25:48 them.
1:25:50 Let me just sort of quickly get out of the way.
1:25:54 First, how you cannot go to the bathroom for 17 hours.
1:25:56 It’s really sort of easy stuff.
1:25:59 If you don’t put anything into your top hole, nothing comes out of
1:26:00 any of the bottom holes, right?
1:26:01 Just, it’s just basic.
1:26:04 So I don’t eat and I don’t drink.
1:26:07 That’s a whole nother conversation, but like they’re going, what, what,
1:26:08 how do you do that?
1:26:09 That’s another conversation.
1:26:13 But if you don’t put anything, nothing in, nothing out, simple, easy.
1:26:17 And I know this to be scientifically true because I’ve used it to my advantage.
1:26:21 Now, because I have a camel bladder, two things have happened in my career
1:26:22 that I think have been advantageous.
1:26:25 One, everybody when I go to the conventions would have to go and
1:26:26 take a lunch break.
1:26:26 Why?
1:26:28 Because they’re hungry.
1:26:29 They’re hungry.
1:26:32 My wife would tell you, I have never uttered those words.
1:26:32 I’m hungry.
1:26:35 I eat because science says I need to.
1:26:36 My body needs fuel.
1:26:40 So I put it in not because I’m hungry because I have to.
1:26:42 It’s an essential ingredient food.
1:26:46 So I do it, but I can outlast you if you got to go away.
1:26:50 So people would take off at conventions and go away for lunch or bathroom
1:26:51 breaks or whatever.
1:26:52 Guess who didn’t?
1:26:54 Me.
1:26:57 And here’s why that matters because there’s people in line.
1:27:00 And if you’ve got at the time of our popularity, when they used to open it up,
1:27:04 you’d have at times I’m telling you literally thousands of people in line
1:27:05 waiting for your autograph.
1:27:10 First off, in good conscience, I can’t have somebody waiting in line for two
1:27:13 hours, three hours, and then look at them and say, cut.
1:27:15 I’m going for an hour and a half lunch break.
1:27:17 And the kids going, what?
1:27:18 I’ve really been in line for three hours.
1:27:19 Like I can’t do it.
1:27:20 I can’t look at somebody in the eye.
1:27:21 I won’t do it.
1:27:27 So I said, no, I’ll just figure out how to not do this thing that most humans do.
1:27:28 And here’s where the upside is.
1:27:33 Is it when all my peers have gone to lunch, then people were waiting in line
1:27:36 and then they’re just sitting there going, well, that guy’s still signing.
1:27:36 What’s his name?
1:27:39 Todd, Tom, Tim, whatever.
1:27:39 What’s he do?
1:27:40 Spider-Man.
1:27:42 Well, I like comic books.
1:27:42 I know Spider-Man.
1:27:44 And guess what happens, Tim?
1:27:45 They’d get in your line.
1:27:48 They don’t care really at that point about you.
1:27:49 They just go, he’s signing.
1:27:50 The line’s moving.
1:27:51 I’ll get in his line.
1:27:52 And then they come up.
1:27:54 You’ve got 20 seconds.
1:27:56 You become as gracious as you can to them.
1:28:00 And maybe you peel off and you’ve got a new couple of fans.
1:28:04 And all of a sudden it’s like, you know, I only collect X-Men, but you know, that
1:28:07 Todd was a gentleman and he was very nice and he smiled at me.
1:28:08 He was very kind.
1:28:12 You know, maybe I’ll go buy one of his Spider-Man books or, you know, in the
1:28:13 future, his Spawn books.
1:28:14 And so that’s it.
1:28:15 Good, right?
1:28:18 I’ll always be nice to anybody, no matter who they are.
1:28:23 Number two on the business end, and this one is sadly even easier.
1:28:25 And it’s just pathetic at times.
1:28:30 I live in Phoenix, Arizona, and Phoenix, Arizona can be 110 degrees.
1:28:31 Let me tell you, I’m like a cockroach.
1:28:33 I don’t care what the weather is.
1:28:34 I’ll survive.
1:28:35 Don’t worry about me.
1:28:36 I’m good.
1:28:37 But here’s what I know about other people.
1:28:39 They have comfort zones.
1:28:44 And so whenever I was in some big legal dispute or contract dispute, I would say,
1:28:46 especially the people in LA, I go, you fly them to me.
1:28:47 You fly them to me.
1:28:50 Now this is just the art of war.
1:28:54 So my desk is facing a big giant glass window, right?
1:28:57 And I know when the sun comes down that window.
1:29:02 Now, usually when I’m in my room, I bring down the drapes and I put up the AC and
1:29:03 I’m comfortable.
1:29:07 But when the enemy is coming, i.e., the people I’ve got to negotiate with come,
1:29:13 I make sure that the blinds are up and that I turn the air conditioning so that
1:29:15 it’s actually stuffy in that room.
1:29:16 Because why?
1:29:17 I can endure it.
1:29:18 I’ve done it plenty of times.
1:29:22 And then they always come dressed in a three-piece suit.
1:29:24 Wrong move, guys.
1:29:24 Wrong move.
1:29:28 And then they come in and they come into the room and I closed the door and I know
1:29:29 it’s going to get stuffy.
1:29:33 And then I put a giant pitcher of water in front of them.
1:29:42 And then I uttered the words, guys, this has been going on far, far too long.
1:29:43 Here’s the deal.
1:29:49 We’re not leaving this room until we settle every single outstanding point.
1:29:56 And during those conversations, they either pour their own water on a constant
1:29:59 basis because they’ve got their three-piece wool suit on.
1:30:03 I’ve got my t-shirt and I’m in my Nike shorts.
1:30:09 And I can just see them getting hotter and hotter and hotter.
1:30:11 And they keep having to get more and more water.
1:30:13 And at some point, nature calls.
1:30:18 And then we get down to the last one and I go, I’m not moving on point 10.
1:30:19 I’m not moving.
1:30:19 It’s a deal break.
1:30:21 If I don’t get it, this whole deal.
1:30:25 And you know how many times I’ve had people in my room go, fine.
1:30:26 This is how it works.
1:30:27 It goes like this time.
1:30:28 Fine.
1:30:29 You can have point 10.
1:30:30 Are we done?
1:30:30 Yes.
1:30:31 Are we done?
1:30:31 Yes.
1:30:32 Where’s your bathroom?
1:30:35 The very next thing is where’s your bathroom?
1:30:43 Because I think in my mind that they literally came in on the 10th point because
1:30:45 they couldn’t hold it anymore.
1:30:49 And if they could have held it, they could have argued longer with me.
1:30:53 And perhaps I might have conceded or we could have compromised on that point.
1:30:56 But their bladder cost them too bad.
1:30:58 How sad, right?
1:31:01 You find your, you find your advantages, wherever you can get them.
1:31:04 Oh, McFarlane the Barbarian.
1:31:05 What a savage.
1:31:06 Nice work.
1:31:08 So let’s come back to Venom.
1:31:12 You mentioned that Venom came together, I think as an accident.
1:31:14 Maybe the was the phrasing that you use.
1:31:16 I mean, this is an iconic character known the world over.
1:31:17 Happy accident.
1:31:18 Yeah.
1:31:19 So how, how did it come together?
1:31:25 So we’ll go back early in my Marvel career, like I said early in the podcast.
1:31:28 So if you can keep deadlines, that’s a giant value in that industry.
1:31:31 So I was showing them that I could keep deadlines.
1:31:34 So I knew then that that was going to be getting me continuous work.
1:31:41 So once you get continuous work, the next upgrade is can you draw characters
1:31:43 that people have heard of, right?
1:31:48 So because the first job I got at Marvel was on a book and it was
1:31:49 like an obscure book.
1:31:52 It was called Steve Engelhardt’s Coyote and it wasn’t even Coyote.
1:31:55 I was doing a backup in the Coyote.
1:31:57 I was doing an obscure backup in an obscure book.
1:32:00 It literally was starting in the mail room.
1:32:05 But eventually I got a steady job over DC because they cancel Coyote.
1:32:08 And I got a, I got a monthly book over DC.
1:32:13 Unfortunately, Tim, and this is where sometimes one person’s break
1:32:15 is another person’s tragedy.
1:32:19 An artist on another book who was a fit human being with super awesome
1:32:23 artists, I followed him, was a health freak, drank some unpasteurized milk,
1:32:26 went into a seizure and had an allergic reaction and died.
1:32:32 And so I get a phone call and they go, Hey, Todd, my artist just passed
1:32:32 away.
1:32:35 Can you come on and help us for a couple of months?
1:32:38 And I, at that point, they had canceled Coyote.
1:32:40 I literally took me years to get in.
1:32:43 I was employed for four months and then they canceled Coyote.
1:32:48 And I’m like, man, so I sent my samples back to all the people that were
1:32:52 gracious enough to give me constructive criticism, except for a thing
1:32:53 changed on the resume, Tim.
1:32:57 I was now able to say, um, I am Todd McFarland, the professional
1:32:59 from Marvel comic books.
1:33:00 The drawing was exactly the same.
1:33:01 It only been four months.
1:33:05 It was just as horrible as it was four months earlier, except for
1:33:08 instead of being an amateur, I got to go now into the smaller pile,
1:33:11 which is the professionals looking for work pile.
1:33:13 So I get the job.
1:33:15 I go, yeah, I get, I’ve got some work.
1:33:18 The guy who was supposed to take over that book, because I was only
1:33:21 supposed to fill in for two months, decided to bail.
1:33:25 So after the first issue, they said, do you want to take over the book?
1:33:28 It was a book called Infinity Incorporated and I stayed on the book
1:33:29 for two, three years.
1:33:32 So when I went over to Marvel, they went, okay, you can keep a deadline.
1:33:33 Check.
1:33:38 The question is you got to stop doing, and here’s a bizarre thing that was
1:33:39 happening at Marvel at that point.
1:33:43 You got to stop doing what they called, they dubbed the big, your big
1:33:45 dice drawing style.
1:33:48 And the only reason it was called that because on one page in
1:33:52 Infinity Incorporated, I drew this page layout and it was these big
1:33:52 giant dice.
1:33:56 And then I did panels inside drawings inside the big dice and
1:33:59 somebody, I guess, in editorial saw that page.
1:34:01 And so it was like, oh, he’s the big giant dice guy.
1:34:07 And the reason I was doing giant dice and doing all these crazy flamboyant
1:34:13 layouts in Infinity Incorporated, because Tim, my drawing was mediocre.
1:34:14 I knew that.
1:34:17 Like at some point you got to be realistic about your skills.
1:34:19 I was mediocre and I had two choices.
1:34:26 I could either put mediocre drawings and boring layout or I could be
1:34:30 flamboyant and baffle them with my BS and get them to look at all this
1:34:34 sort of window trimming and not sort of pay attention that maybe I’m
1:34:36 drawing my eyes crooked, right?
1:34:38 And it worked and it worked.
1:34:39 So people are like, oh my gosh.
1:34:43 And so by the time I left Infinity, I think I had risen to the point
1:34:47 that I was like, voted the fifth most popular pencil at that point.
1:34:48 So I’m like, wow.
1:34:52 So I go over to Marvel and then they say, which was weird because Marvel
1:34:53 was always the house of ideas.
1:34:56 And at this point they were in, they had flopped with DC and they
1:34:57 were, they were boring.
1:35:02 And they said, you can come, but you can’t do the giant dice style.
1:35:03 And I go, so what do you want me to do?
1:35:05 And I go, we just want you to do like a grid.
1:35:08 Now, let me just tell you, anybody listen, that means you take a piece
1:35:12 of paper and you divide it into six equal, equal panels and you go.
1:35:15 It is the most boring, easiest thing to do.
1:35:19 So essentially they took a guy like me who I thought was an artistic
1:35:22 sprinter and they said, could you put lead boots on?
1:35:25 Shoot, this is going to be easy, right?
1:35:28 I don’t know why you want to do it, but it was frustrating because
1:35:31 there was no artistic freedom to do it.
1:35:32 So I did it.
1:35:35 They give me the first job back at Marvel and they go, hey, problem.
1:35:37 You usually have 30 days to do a book, right?
1:35:40 Once a month, but we got, we’re behind the eight ball.
1:35:42 We can give you this job, but you only got 10 days.
1:35:43 I gave it to him and eight.
1:35:44 Was it my best job?
1:35:45 Of course it wasn’t.
1:35:47 But was it done in eight?
1:35:47 Yeah.
1:35:51 Did it get me brownie points right on the spot?
1:35:52 They were amazed.
1:35:53 I gave it to him in eight days.
1:35:54 Boom.
1:35:57 Within weeks, they’re offering me the Incredible Hulk.
1:36:01 Now, once you get the Incredible Hulk, this is the next step in climbing
1:36:02 the ladder all of a sudden.
1:36:07 Look, I’d been in the business probably two, three, four years at that point.
1:36:10 And when I get the Incredible Hulk, finally I hear the words from my mom
1:36:12 and dad, oh my God, you finally made it.
1:36:16 And the reason was because they had heard of the Hulk, right?
1:36:19 And so up to then everything I was doing was like, I don’t know
1:36:20 if he’s ever going to make it.
1:36:22 I was still working at Marvel and DC.
1:36:23 It just wasn’t for books.
1:36:27 But if you can go to the neighbor’s, you know, Halloween party and say,
1:36:30 my son draws the Hulk, they’ve heard of the word Hulk too.
1:36:33 So all of a sudden it’s like, oh my gosh, your son, he must be good.
1:36:37 So it’s important to have characters that know because it helps
1:36:40 the relatives in your circle sort of think that you’re a bigger
1:36:43 shot than you are, even though it’s the exact same amount of work
1:36:45 and the same pay on top of it.
1:36:51 So, okay, so you get to the next step and now you’re going, ha, now
1:36:54 you’re just fighting for the next step up.
1:36:57 And I’ll quickly sort of get you to this.
1:36:59 And I know I’m long winded and all your questions.
1:37:00 I wish I was better.
1:37:02 That I I’m into it.
1:37:05 Okay, so I do the I do the Hulk.
1:37:08 I’m doing penciling and then I go, I’m going to do inking because
1:37:10 at this point I got fast enough that I could do two books.
1:37:12 There weren’t too many people that could do two books.
1:37:13 I was doing two books.
1:37:15 So they give me a second book.
1:37:18 The same editor who gave me the Incredible Hulk gives me another
1:37:20 book is called GI Joe real American hero.
1:37:21 Right.
1:37:24 Now the thing that’s sort of ironic about that is I was living up in
1:37:25 Canada, right?
1:37:29 Never really sort of I was going, wow, if they only knew that this Canadian
1:37:33 and I’m Canadian up here in Canada drawing their real American heroes.
1:37:35 This might be a bit of a problem, but nobody’s going to tell.
1:37:36 There was no internet.
1:37:38 So I did it.
1:37:43 The first issue of GI Joe and I was doing the Hulk and I get a phone
1:37:46 call and I was going back and forth with this writer and it was we
1:37:47 were bashing heads.
1:37:50 Every single page of that.
1:37:53 And finally, after the first issue, my editor phones up and says,
1:37:55 Todd, I’ve got to let you go.
1:37:57 I’m like one issue.
1:37:58 I’m one issue in the GI Joe.
1:38:01 I’m making my marks on the Hulk.
1:38:04 I’m now in the top three of some of the voting artistically.
1:38:07 And I go, what are you going to fire me?
1:38:11 But let me just tell you it was a relief because it was such a pain for
1:38:17 that one month and that my view of comic books and the writer’s view of
1:38:20 comic books were so diametrically opposed.
1:38:22 Where did you guys clash on that?
1:38:24 What kind of decisions or what type of stuff?
1:38:27 He probably sees it a little bit differently, but I’ll just
1:38:28 show you, give him my point of view.
1:38:31 I assume the people that were reading the comic books had eyes and brains.
1:38:36 He assumed from my perspective, they didn’t because he said it.
1:38:40 Assume your reader isn’t his words.
1:38:40 Not mine.
1:38:45 Assume the reader is an aboriginal Bushman and he just came out of the
1:38:49 tundra in Australia and he’s never seen a comic book.
1:38:54 Your storytelling must be that clear, which basically meant you can’t
1:38:58 have somebody walk into a house and then cut to them inside the house
1:39:00 or even closing the door on the inside.
1:39:04 You have to grab the door, open the door, walk in the room
1:39:08 because and I just want I just want Larry.
1:39:10 I guess I see the world differently.
1:39:15 I assume silly me that the people reading the comic books, watch
1:39:19 fucking TV, go to movies, read books.
1:39:22 They understand how stories are told.
1:39:27 And as a matter of fact, on a movie, when you cut scenes, they don’t
1:39:30 even have a caption in ninety nine point nine percent of the time.
1:39:35 So people just know that it’s different people in a different setting.
1:39:36 It must be a scene cut.
1:39:38 You don’t have to do it.
1:39:41 But anyways, he had his way of seeing the world.
1:39:43 I had my way of seeing the world.
1:39:44 Fine.
1:39:44 No big deal.
1:39:45 Got it.
1:39:47 So he fires me off it.
1:39:52 And I remember I was sitting in my apartment up in Vancouver and I lean
1:39:55 back and I looked at the clock and it was like twelve oh six.
1:39:59 And I was like a little bit bomb come like, man, I never been never been fired.
1:39:59 Right.
1:40:02 So it’s like, oh, man, it twelve fourteen.
1:40:05 Bring I am telling you no lie.
1:40:06 Seven minutes.
1:40:08 I was unemployed for seven minutes.
1:40:11 Bring Todd.
1:40:11 Yeah.
1:40:13 Hey, this is Dip Giordano over at D.C.
1:40:15 Now remember, I’d left D.C. to go back over to Marvel.
1:40:19 Remember when you left, you said the only reason you would come back is
1:40:20 to draw Batman.
1:40:21 Yeah.
1:40:24 Well, we’ve got this book.
1:40:27 First, there was Batman the Dark Knight.
1:40:28 Then there was Batman year one.
1:40:30 And they had another project called Batman year two.
1:40:33 We’ve got a book called Batman year two.
1:40:37 It’s a four part story and the artists quit after the first one.
1:40:38 Can you finish the last three?
1:40:42 What like what you’re saying?
1:40:45 I my choice right now is either stay on, which I didn’t have an option,
1:40:46 but stay on G.I.
1:40:50 Joe just got fired from that was basically like putting daggers in my eyes
1:40:54 or do Batman and that was the only character I’d come back for.
1:40:57 So I jump on Batman year two.
1:41:02 Now, it gets a little crazier by that point because because at this
1:41:04 point, I was only being the pencil artist.
1:41:08 And in comic books, they bring in another person who is the anchor.
1:41:10 Some people call him the tracer.
1:41:11 It’s not true.
1:41:13 Good anchors add a lot to pages.
1:41:18 I thought I had my drawing style is what I would call sort of this
1:41:20 new wave 90 style.
1:41:26 And I was constantly getting anchors that were like these 1960s
1:41:27 old school brush guys.
1:41:31 I was drawing in a way that I thought you should be using a pen
1:41:33 because there’s a different technique with it.
1:41:35 And they kept putting brush guys on me.
1:41:39 And it was so transforming like you like they literally would
1:41:41 bury the artwork from if you saw what I was drawing.
1:41:42 You saw the printed page.
1:41:45 It was like to me night and day.
1:41:49 So I do this part two of Batman year two.
1:41:50 Then I do part three.
1:41:52 And then they send me the samples.
1:41:55 And I finally, again, another one of those moments in my life with
1:42:00 clarity that I look at it and I see the splash page and the splash
1:42:04 page has a commissioner Gordon and he’s holding the gun.
1:42:06 And to me, it looks hairy, right?
1:42:07 I go, it’s metallic.
1:42:08 Why is it looking hairy?
1:42:14 And it’s because the anchor was doing these lines that work for him.
1:42:14 I guess.
1:42:19 And then I looked at like another panel and it was the hallway.
1:42:23 And when you’re doing like a downshot of a hallway, you the
1:42:26 line to get closer, it’s basically perspective.
1:42:29 I won’t bore people, but it’s just the illusion of depth.
1:42:32 And I done all these drawings or these lines to give that illusion
1:42:34 and they were horizontal.
1:42:37 And then I looked at the panel and he had done the exact same thing.
1:42:40 It was brilliant, except for he did them vertically.
1:42:41 And it was these moments.
1:42:47 And so it wasn’t that one was better than the other, right?
1:42:48 They both work.
1:42:52 It was again, I just sort of try to get as simple as possible.
1:42:56 The reason and I don’t know if anybody sort of could understand this
1:43:03 concept, but the reason I made them go up and down vertically was
1:43:06 because silly me, I fucking wanted them to go up and down vertically
1:43:11 because if I had wanted them to go horizontally, which was another
1:43:13 option, I would have drawn them.
1:43:19 I can draw horizontal lines equally as well has vertical lines.
1:43:24 The reason they were vertical because I must have meant horizontal.
1:43:26 That’s why I did like, what are you talking about?
1:43:31 Just copy the lines and do your thing with the lines that are there.
1:43:37 And so I phone the editor and I go, Hey, Denny, I don’t mean to do this
1:43:39 to you because you already lost one artist and I don’t mean to do
1:43:41 power play because I don’t like doing that.
1:43:43 I don’t want to be that guy, but here’s the gig.
1:43:48 If I can’t ink the last chapter of this book and let me be completely
1:43:50 honest, I’ve never inked before.
1:43:51 So I’m a complete noob.
1:43:53 I can’t do this.
1:43:57 I can’t have people literally going in the opposite direction of my artwork.
1:43:58 I can’t do it.
1:44:01 So he kind of was in a tough spot.
1:44:04 He was like, oh, okay, fine, Todd, can you get it done by the deadline?
1:44:05 Yeah, sure.
1:44:07 So I did my first thinking.
1:44:10 So thanks to all those anchors for turning me into an anchor.
1:44:13 And from there on out, I was my own anchor.
1:44:14 I started inking the Hulk.
1:44:18 If you look at it, I went back to my editor on the Hulk and I go, well,
1:44:20 they let me ink the Batman.
1:44:23 And so he’s like, oh, okay, I guess you can ink the Hulk.
1:44:26 And so, and now I’m going to eventually get to your question about venom.
1:44:27 So it was a long winded way.
1:44:28 Sorry.
1:44:29 Eventually.
1:44:29 That’s okay.
1:44:31 Let me pause you for just a, just a quick sec.
1:44:35 So for people who have no context on your art, I mean, very fine details.
1:44:41 And when you’re talking about the older school inking, lots of thick black,
1:44:43 I mean, lots of maybe obscuring.
1:44:44 You simplify it.
1:44:44 Yeah.
1:44:46 So you simplify it.
1:44:46 Right.
1:44:52 And so, so when you went from penciling to I need to ink this or I’m out,
1:44:57 what were the biggest differences between penciling and inking?
1:45:02 As someone who’s never inked, I’d be curious to know what you learned or felt
1:45:04 or if it just mapped over really easily.
1:45:06 What was it like to do your first inking?
1:45:11 Hey, Tim, here’s the first shock that my sometimes my enthusiasm gets the better
1:45:15 of me and there’s nobody that hates Todd more than Todd at times.
1:45:18 Cause it’s like, what are you doing, Todd?
1:45:20 So then I learned the magic.
1:45:23 I’m now going to do two jobs, right?
1:45:26 If you, if you pencil a book, you get 30 days.
1:45:30 If you ink a book, like I pencil it, they give me 30 days.
1:45:33 Then they hand the pages to you, Tim, you ink it, you get 30 days.
1:45:38 If I want to pencil and ink, they don’t give me 30 plus 30.
1:45:39 Right.
1:45:40 There’s two of us.
1:45:42 It’s 30 plus 30.
1:45:43 I get 30, you get 30.
1:45:46 They’re going, you can do two jobs, Todd, but you still only got 30 days.
1:45:52 Essentially, you’re doing twice the work and you have to do it twice as fast
1:45:53 because the book still comes out.
1:45:58 And so lesson learned, if you’re going to pick up more work, you might
1:46:01 want to ask how much extra time do you have?
1:46:05 And when the answer is zero, you might want to rethink your ask.
1:46:10 So because eventually I got to the point going, I’m going to write
1:46:11 my own stories too, right?
1:46:15 And that extra time also is zero.
1:46:18 So, but that comes a little bit later in the career.
1:46:22 So the first shock is I’ve now got to go faster.
1:46:27 What it taught me personally, because now I’m doing two books
1:46:27 and I’m inking, right?
1:46:30 I like, so I’m a bit of a unicorn at this point because very few people
1:46:36 can even pencil two book was I had to create for myself efficiencies.
1:46:39 And this goes into business now, right?
1:46:42 And even though we’re doing art, this is just efficiencies.
1:46:46 So I do the efficiency and I go, I don’t have time to do a lot of
1:46:48 what they call underdrawing.
1:46:50 I got to literally draw with ink.
1:46:52 I don’t have time to do the job twice.
1:46:54 I can’t pencil and then ink my own work.
1:46:59 I have to do it all in one fell swoop, which is horrifying to people
1:47:03 who’ve never inked themselves because every person I’ve shown
1:47:06 amongst some amazing peers, among some amazing peers.
1:47:10 When they see what my process is, they go, I can’t even make out
1:47:12 what’s on your page.
1:47:13 And I go, that’s okay.
1:47:16 I just kind of finish it with the ink and I go, no, no, no, no, no,
1:47:17 no, you can’t go with the ink.
1:47:18 I’m like, why?
1:47:18 Because it’s permanent.
1:47:21 I’m like, what if you make a mistake?
1:47:23 There’s a thing called whiteout.
1:47:26 You just white it out and they’re going.
1:47:27 Yeah, but what if you make another mistake?
1:47:28 I just use whiteout.
1:47:30 Let me ask you a question in reverse.
1:47:32 What happens if you draw on pencil and you make mistake?
1:47:33 Oh, I just use an eraser.
1:47:36 Well, why can you use an eraser and I can’t use whiteout?
1:47:37 It’s the same thing.
1:47:38 Yeah, but it’s ink.
1:47:42 It literally was this mental wall for people.
1:47:45 And these are people that I would sit next to at a convention
1:47:49 that would do 20 sketches with a pencil and never erase one line.
1:47:51 And I used to turn to them go, why couldn’t you?
1:47:53 Why couldn’t you’ve done that with ink?
1:47:54 And their answer was always the same.
1:47:55 What if I made a mistake?
1:47:56 You didn’t.
1:47:58 I’ve been watching you for four hours.
1:47:59 You haven’t made one mistake.
1:48:03 Why is it if I changed the tool that somehow you’re going to make a mistake?
1:48:04 But you know what?
1:48:05 You do you.
1:48:06 I’ll do my thing.
1:48:12 And so I had to just pull back the drawing and figure it out kind of in one
1:48:14 step so I could keep the deadline.
1:48:16 That was my learning experience.
1:48:19 Now question number two, did I hit the ground running?
1:48:20 Of course I didn’t.
1:48:21 Of course I didn’t.
1:48:26 But if you look at my inking at the beginning, it’s very, very crude.
1:48:29 And even on Spider-Man, which is the book that catapult me, if you look at the
1:48:34 thickness of the webs on his costume, you will see a noticeable difference.
1:48:39 I think from issue 300 when I started inking Spider-Man.
1:48:44 And if you look at like about issue 320 for sure, by the time I get in the new
1:48:48 Spider-Man book that I’m drawing for sure, there’s a dramatic difference visually.
1:48:51 So I was constantly learning that trade.
1:48:55 It was Todd, the professional who’d been penciling for five, six years and Todd,
1:48:59 the newbie inker, I wasn’t going to be a five or six year vet inking.
1:49:00 I was a new inker.
1:49:04 So I had to learn that trade and catch up those five or six years that the
1:49:08 other half of my brain had already sort of tackled with penciling.
1:49:09 So go ahead.
1:49:12 So I, because eventually now this is going to get me to Venom.
1:49:13 Yeah, to Venom.
1:49:14 Okay.
1:49:18 So very quickly, so then I finished the Batman project and now I’m back down
1:49:20 to only one book so I can do two books.
1:49:25 And so again, I, I’m looking for another book and all the editors at Marvel said,
1:49:27 Hey, yeah, yeah, yeah, you don’t come and talk to me, but whatever you do,
1:49:32 don’t go into the Spider-Man office because it’s a shambles.
1:49:38 Now you may or may not have gathered that Todd doesn’t seem to color
1:49:40 inside the lines a lot of the times.
1:49:46 And so you don’t tell me don’t go into that office, right?
1:49:48 Cause to me, unless you want Todd to go into the office.
1:49:49 Yeah, what are you guys doing?
1:49:54 So I went, I went into the office and it was, it was he, the editor,
1:49:59 Jim Salkrup at that time, good man, was losing and turning over artists.
1:50:01 The books were in a bit of a sales decline.
1:50:05 Like I said, when I picked up the book, it was like at number 2122.
1:50:09 And I said, Hey, I can do another book and we had a chat.
1:50:14 And I said, I want to ink the book and then they’re like, well, you know,
1:50:17 maybe in a couple of months and I go on mink into Hulk, right?
1:50:20 Come on, go talk to Bob, the editor on that book.
1:50:23 And he’s like, well, you know, just give me a couple months.
1:50:24 You, how about it starting at 300?
1:50:28 You can ink the book and I’m like, yeah, okay, we’ll do it.
1:50:33 But the other piece of it was just one other sort of slight problem.
1:50:35 Spider-Man’s got a black costume.
1:50:39 And this is this costume that was created and for this book called
1:50:43 Secret Wars, which is the black costume with the white spider on it.
1:50:46 And I go, that’s not Spider-Man to me.
1:50:47 Maybe I’m just old school.
1:50:51 Spider-Man’s that guy in the blue and the red with the webs on it, Spider-Man.
1:50:56 So can we just get rid of that black costume and get back to Spider-Man?
1:50:59 Then this is sort of the happy accident.
1:51:04 He said, wow, you know, the editor in chief really likes the black costume.
1:51:06 And I don’t think he’s going to go for that.
1:51:08 So he’s not going to want to get rid of it.
1:51:12 He had something to do with Secret Wars and, you know, they kind of digging it.
1:51:16 And I went, oh, man, I just, I don’t want to draw Spider-Man a black costume.
1:51:19 It’s like doing Batman and polka dots doesn’t make any sense to me.
1:51:22 So what if I come back to you with some designs?
1:51:24 We just ripped the costume off him.
1:51:25 We put it on somebody.
1:51:26 I create another character.
1:51:28 Give it to the writers.
1:51:29 We’ll just figure it out.
1:51:32 And then we still have the black costume and then we can get the red and blue
1:51:34 back on Peter Parker and that’s a win, win, win.
1:51:36 And he was like, okay, that might work.
1:51:37 So I go away.
1:51:38 I do the drawing.
1:51:41 The costume was alive.
1:51:43 So I go, oh, it must be an alien.
1:51:47 So I created this big, giant hulking alien and gave him the big eyes and the
1:51:49 slobbering teeth.
1:51:50 And to me, it was a gorilla.
1:51:54 It’s like an alien gorilla and then the claws and everything else.
1:51:56 And that was the design for Venom.
1:51:59 Like here, we didn’t have a name at that point, but just go here.
1:52:00 Here’s the new bad guy.
1:52:00 Here it is.
1:52:01 Go.
1:52:03 And they looked at it and went, oh, that’s kind of cool.
1:52:05 We’ll give it to the writer.
1:52:06 And so they gave it to the writer.
1:52:08 They cleared it through upper management.
1:52:10 They said, yeah, yeah, yeah, that seems like a reasonable thing.
1:52:14 The writer comes back to me and says, Todd, the guy is Eddie Brock.
1:52:16 And I went, whoa, whoa, whoa.
1:52:18 The writer’s name was David.
1:52:21 Whoa, David, Eddie Brock, Eddie Brock’s a human.
1:52:22 Did you see my design?
1:52:24 Like information I could have used earlier.
1:52:29 I would have designed it differently if I knew it was a human that I was
1:52:30 putting the black costume on.
1:52:32 But I sort of liked the design.
1:52:37 I thought it was cool and it was giant and I thought that it would be more
1:52:40 formidable for Spider-Man to go up against something that was way
1:52:44 bigger than him than another human humanoid form.
1:52:47 And this is sort of the geeky stuff that us creators go through.
1:52:52 And so I said, but man, if Bruce Banner, little shit can turn into the Hulk,
1:52:58 then by gosh, why can’t Eddie Brock somehow be buried in this costume somewhere?
1:52:58 Right.
1:53:00 So we never sort of wavered from it.
1:53:08 Venom comes out, has a big play and issue 300 amazing Spider-Man 300 sales go crazy.
1:53:12 We knew we had something on our hand because every time Venom kept coming back,
1:53:16 the mail again, there was no internet, but the mail kept getting bigger and people
1:53:18 were like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh.
1:53:24 And so now fast forward with hindsight and Venom is, you know, a worldwide
1:53:27 brand, you know, made a billion dollars for Sony in a movie.
1:53:29 So again, there’s the happy accident.
1:53:33 And if you look at issue 300, if you want to go by it, it comes
1:53:34 with a couple of things.
1:53:35 One, it’s an anniversary book.
1:53:36 Sales are going way up on it.
1:53:40 One, it’s an anniversary book issue 300 amazing Spider-Man.
1:53:40 Goodbye.
1:53:45 Some of the very first early work of me on Spider-Man and my
1:53:47 first inking job on Spider-Man.
1:53:50 But more importantly, it’s the origin of Venom.
1:53:53 And so for people, they spend hundreds of dollars.
1:53:54 If you get these books, great.
1:53:56 It’s thousands of dollars so you can get the origin of Venom.
1:53:58 I don’t consider that book.
1:54:00 If you were to ask me, is that the origin of Venom?
1:54:02 No, it’s the issue.
1:54:05 How do we get that damn black costume up Peter Parker so I can
1:54:06 draw the classic red and blue costume?
1:54:09 Cause that’s Spider-Man to me, right?
1:54:12 Venom, I didn’t care at that moment about Venom.
1:54:13 It was like, get rid of it.
1:54:17 The last page of that issue, Peter Parker gets rid of the black
1:54:19 costume because he has a fight with Venom.
1:54:22 Venom goes on his way and he pulls a box out from underneath the
1:54:26 bed and he pulls out the classic uniform, the red and blue, the
1:54:30 one that to me is Spider-Man and the last page, which I still
1:54:33 have today because it was like, finally, I’m drawing Spider-Man
1:54:35 because I started on issue 298.
1:54:36 Nope.
1:54:37 Black costume, 299.
1:54:37 Nope.
1:54:42 Black costume and every page, but one of issue 300.
1:54:45 But that last page, it was, it even says, I think a caption
1:54:46 and it says, and a new beginning.
1:54:48 And to me, I go finally.
1:54:49 I get to dress.
1:54:51 This was for me, finally.
1:54:55 Now, somehow Venom was the byproduct of that, right?
1:54:57 Now, here’s what should happen.
1:55:00 Tim, an employee should come into the office.
1:55:02 They should say, no, he’s wearing the black costume.
1:55:05 We want to give you the job on Amazing Spider-Man, one of the
1:55:07 granddaddy books of the company.
1:55:10 And most sane employees will go, yes, sir.
1:55:11 Yes, ma’am.
1:55:12 When is the book due?
1:55:14 I don’t know.
1:55:18 Todd is Todd and yeah, yeah, yeah, right?
1:55:22 And so I just was like, no, I need the red and blue costume.
1:55:28 And and and but because of some of that arrogance, ego, immaturity,
1:55:29 whatever you want to call it.
1:55:32 Your byproduct is you’ve got a character called Venom that
1:55:35 now creates carnage in this whole slew, right?
1:55:41 So if I was that guy, that employee, all of that maybe never materializes.
1:55:43 That’s the true possibility of that.
1:55:46 And then I just take all of that.
1:55:48 Remember Marvel’s that they’re boring storytelling.
1:55:52 I start pushing the boundaries of storytelling to make it more.
1:55:53 I thought dynamic.
1:55:56 I thought everything we do in comic books is just a Broadway play.
1:55:59 You must, everything should be big and you should be talking and
1:56:03 performing for the lady with bad hearing that’s in the last row at the theater.
1:56:05 So that’s what comic books are.
1:56:06 It’s bravado.
1:56:11 And so I was doing all this fancy storytelling and my editors were
1:56:15 going, Todd, you can’t, you can’t, you can’t, you can’t.
1:56:17 And I’m like, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
1:56:18 But I just kept doing it.
1:56:22 And then I eventually I was asking them and I go, why can’t we?
1:56:24 And I go, well, the editor in chief, Jim, Jim Shooter.
1:56:25 He doesn’t like that.
1:56:31 I found that to be impossible to believe, impossible to believe.
1:56:37 Jim Shooter wants vanilla when he can have 2D fruity or a banana split.
1:56:38 Hard to believe.
1:56:41 So we went and had a meeting one time.
1:56:45 My editor was Bob Harris, who ended up being the top dog at DC.
1:56:46 I think he still has maybe.
1:56:49 And we went into this meeting with Jim Shooter, the editor in chief where
1:56:53 every, every editor was literally shaken in the boots from Jim Shooter.
1:56:56 He was like this authoritarian sort of figure.
1:57:01 And he, as we’re walking in the meeting, all as Bob says, don’t ask him
1:57:04 about storytelling, Todd, because he just wanted to say hi to me because I
1:57:07 was, you know, this new guy in the Hulk and my career was starting to bud.
1:57:09 And he just wanted to say hi to me.
1:57:11 It was just a casual conversation.
1:57:12 We have a nice, pleasant conversation.
1:57:15 And then it’s like, he goes, okay, I’ve got to get to my next meeting.
1:57:16 I’m going, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:57:20 And as we get up, because I want it Bob to be moving, I went, oh, hey, Jim,
1:57:21 just have one, one quick question.
1:57:24 Can I change storytelling?
1:57:25 Like, let me just ask you.
1:57:28 Am I allowed to have characters burst out of the panels?
1:57:30 Because that was what they, I was doing with Spider-Man.
1:57:31 And they’re going, you can’t, you can’t.
1:57:36 And he was like, looked at me quizitively and went, yeah, sure, why?
1:57:38 Okay.
1:57:39 But can I, can I do this other thing?
1:57:41 And he went, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.
1:57:45 And I went, so it’s okay for me to, to, because I go, I think
1:57:48 I heard somebody, it wasn’t Bob, my editor standing in front of you.
1:57:52 It must have been somebody else told me that somehow that you said you
1:57:57 can’t have things punch, you can’t have panels overlapping and you can’t
1:57:58 have characters punching out.
1:58:01 And I walked them through a couple of things and he was horrified.
1:58:03 And he was like, what?
1:58:03 What are you saying, Todd?
1:58:06 And I’m going, yeah, yeah, that’s just what they’re telling all the artists.
1:58:09 And he was like, no, and he got angry at that moment.
1:58:12 He goes, no, I never said that.
1:58:13 He goes, here’s what I said.
1:58:15 And I knew this was the answer, Tim.
1:58:17 I knew this was the answer.
1:58:23 He said, you can’t do bad overlapping panels and bad drawings of people
1:58:24 jumping out.
1:58:29 And then he explained to me the difference between a bad version and
1:58:31 a good version, right?
1:58:33 And I knew what the bad and good version was.
1:58:37 Basically don’t have a guy jumping out of a panel and you’re covering
1:58:39 up half the drawing of the next panel.
1:58:42 As long as you’re doing it in some negative space, you’re okay.
1:58:46 Just as long as the storytelling is clear, I don’t care how you design it, Todd.
1:58:47 I knew it.
1:58:49 Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
1:58:54 And shoot, from that meeting on, you take a look at my layouts in Spider-Man.
1:58:56 It started getting crazier and crazier.
1:58:58 Now, Jim Shooter gets pushed out very quickly.
1:59:01 I keep doing my Todd thing on Spider-Man.
1:59:06 I keep, and here’s what I did on Spider-Man that literally catapulted my career.
1:59:08 It was a simple move.
1:59:11 They were doing Spider-Man emphasis on man.
1:59:15 I flipped it to Spider-Man emphasis on the word spider.
1:59:18 So when he put the costume on, I thought he was an insect.
1:59:20 And I didn’t care about anatomy.
1:59:21 I didn’t care whether it mattered.
1:59:26 I just cared about the dynamics of this character looking like a
1:59:29 bug man and crawling in a way.
1:59:33 And then as part of that, I added more webbing on his costume.
1:59:37 And then I had to come up with a new way of doing his webs that have
1:59:39 been done this way for 30 years.
1:59:43 I go, it doesn’t work if you want to shoot it towards camera.
1:59:47 Or if you want to create a false sense of volume, which is the
1:59:51 only thing we have as artists, you must give the illusion of 3D given
1:59:52 that you’re drawing on a 2D piece of paper.
1:59:56 So again, all these silly things that would bore people.
1:59:57 But I was doing it.
1:59:59 And oh, by the way, it fucking looks cool.
2:00:00 It doesn’t bore me.
2:00:02 Now, this stuff is, this is key.
2:00:03 This is important.
2:00:06 So I go, and it looks cool.
2:00:09 And here’s the moment I was talking about earlier.
2:00:12 The moment you start missing with anybody’s icon.
2:00:16 Status quo comes into the equation.
2:00:18 And I’m now messing it.
2:00:21 I probably could have done what I did with a lower tier character,
2:00:22 but not Spider-Man.
2:00:25 Spider-Man, at this point, again, at the Republic Company,
2:00:27 he is on their checks.
2:00:29 Every check’s got a little spidey on it.
2:00:32 He’s on their quarterly reports.
2:00:33 He’s on their internal memos.
2:00:37 And I’m messing with that look, right?
2:00:41 And so they came and they were sitting there and they took it
2:00:44 as I was doing something.
2:00:47 I thought they were doing it wrong and I was right.
2:00:48 No, no, no, no, no.
2:00:50 Here is the reality of it.
2:00:51 And I’ve said it plenty of times.
2:00:54 I thought that the look that had been presented, the classic
2:00:57 look that was there, the one that everybody, if you close your
2:01:00 eyes, you have in your mind if you’re a certain age, was
2:01:03 literally the Norman Rockwell version of Spider-Man.
2:01:04 It was perfect.
2:01:09 And the best I could hope for as a young budding artist is to
2:01:14 do a bad version of that and go, man, that’s almost as cool as
2:01:15 Norman Rockwell’s painting.
2:01:17 Let me tell you, if you’re going to be a painter, never paint
2:01:19 like Norman Rockwell, the best you’re going to get is, man,
2:01:20 he’s almost as good as Norman.
2:01:22 That’s the best you can hope for.
2:01:24 You will never be better than Norman, right?
2:01:27 He’s already conquered that hill.
2:01:29 Go find another hill and make it your own.
2:01:33 You can take pieces of Norman Rockwell, but you can’t be
2:01:35 that exact same look.
2:01:38 So I was putting all these different looks together and
2:01:40 coming up with some crazy stuff and just making the spider
2:01:41 part of it.
2:01:43 The eyes got bigger, more webs.
2:01:45 I reinvented the webbing.
2:01:47 I made the blue a little bit darker.
2:01:50 I forgot about anatomy and I put them in these cool funky
2:01:53 poses that the readers just went crazy for.
2:01:57 And every single time I walked into the offices, so I didn’t
2:02:00 go there that often, they would call me on the carpet and
2:02:04 they would say, no, no, stop it, stop it.
2:02:06 And Tom denies it by my Tom.
2:02:08 There are moments of clarity in my life.
2:02:09 This is one of them.
2:02:11 Tom DeFalco was the editor-in-chief.
2:02:15 He’s an Italian guy and he was giving me heck again, wiggling
2:02:18 his finger, going, you got to stop doing the big eyes and
2:02:20 this and then he got so mad.
2:02:22 I remember his face getting a little red and he goes, and
2:02:26 that webbing, those damn spaghetti webbing, you got
2:02:27 to stop it.
2:02:29 Now all that now from my perspective, ladies and gentlemen,
2:02:32 if you’re in my head, it’s like a Charlie Brown sort of
2:02:32 cartoon.
2:02:35 Alls I heard was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, spaghetti
2:02:36 webbing.
2:02:39 And I went, oh my gosh, I’ve got a name for them now.
2:02:43 So I was like so happy in that moment because Tom gave me
2:02:44 an official name for him.
2:02:46 They’ve been known ever since has just spaghetti webbing.
2:02:48 Thank you, Tom DeFalco.
2:02:51 I think he was cussing me out and giving me heck at that
2:02:51 point.
2:02:54 I wasn’t paying attention though because I was like, oh,
2:02:54 super cool.
2:02:56 I’ve got, I’ve got a name for it.
2:02:59 He then says in that same meeting, you got to, you just
2:03:00 got to control this stuff.
2:03:06 And my answer was, and anybody is under the age of 30-ish
2:03:09 listening, I’m going to give you a bit of a golden rule.
2:03:11 Anybody asks you to do something, especially somebody
2:03:14 in authority, always say yes, even if you’re not going
2:03:14 to do it.
2:03:15 It’s just way easier.
2:03:19 You get out of the room faster, no confrontation.
2:03:22 Just nod your head yes in agreement and go do whatever
2:03:22 the hell you want.
2:03:26 And I knew that the editors would only circle back like
2:03:30 every 90 days and look at the books and do their evaluation.
2:03:33 And I walked out of that room.
2:03:35 Not only did I not make the webbing smaller.
2:03:36 I’ll show you the issue.
2:03:38 They got twice as long, right?
2:03:40 Cause they just look cool.
2:03:41 I got to tell you Tim, they look cool.
2:03:44 And by the time I came back the next time, I’ve seen the books.
2:03:45 I’ve seen them.
2:03:45 I’ve seen them.
2:03:46 I haven’t been home.
2:03:49 They wiggle their finger at you and they go, no.
2:03:52 And next time I go to New York, they go, no, Todd, but here’s
2:03:53 what was happening.
2:03:55 And here was their conundrum.
2:03:57 Sales were going up.
2:03:59 Sales were going up.
2:04:05 And at one point, again, I had that conversation of that.
2:04:09 It’s like, Tom, what do you care how I draw?
2:04:10 What do you care?
2:04:15 All you should care about is that I am selling you comic books
2:04:18 and you gave me the task of moving Spider-Man, amazing
2:04:21 Spider-Man from 21 up the ranks.
2:04:23 And it’s at number two right now.
2:04:24 Jim Lee and the X-Men were beating us.
2:04:25 And I was at one meeting.
2:04:26 It was odd.
2:04:27 There was this stranger in the room.
2:04:28 I never met him before.
2:04:29 Didn’t know who he was.
2:04:31 And he just sat there silent the whole time.
2:04:32 He had this big fat book.
2:04:33 I didn’t know who he was.
2:04:36 And then at the, finally at the end of an hour conversation,
2:04:39 when I said that, I go, I’m selling more damn books than
2:04:41 almost anybody you employ right here right now.
2:04:44 This dude I found out later was an accountant.
2:04:46 He opened up his big giant accounting book.
2:04:48 Tom came behind him.
2:04:50 The accountant didn’t utter a word.
2:04:54 He just pointed at something on his data sheet and he shook
2:04:59 his head, yes, but he just said, yes, sales are going up.
2:05:04 And it was, you could just see that it was like, what do we do?
2:05:04 Right?
2:05:08 It’s working, but we disagree with it because the status
2:05:09 quo is getting.
2:05:11 Let me tell your audience.
2:05:14 Here’s the bizarro thing in now that years have passed.
2:05:19 Everything they told me not to do on Spider-Man that I was
2:05:23 rebellious against and I just stuck to my guns and I did it
2:05:26 and the sales are, do you know that if you’re a young person
2:05:29 right now and you go to Marvel and you draw Spider-Man, do you
2:05:32 know what style you have to draw Spider-Man in?
2:05:33 Todd McFarland.
2:05:40 So the guy who was told not to create it, I’ve now bizarrely
2:05:43 as I was going, no, I’m not going to draw that status quo.
2:05:47 I’m going to do something funky that my style is now the new
2:05:48 status quo.
2:05:52 And I don’t think anybody should draw on Todd McFarland style
2:05:55 because the next person they should be encouraging to do
2:05:58 their thing because it might be five times better than what
2:05:59 I ever came up with.
2:06:04 I don’t understand corporations of just coming up with an
2:06:08 idea and glomming onto it so hard.
2:06:13 Yes, I’m talking to you IBM and then this little dudes in a
2:06:16 garage come up with this little computer and they call it an
2:06:23 apple and somehow they beat you eventually because you become
2:06:24 dinosaurs.
2:06:26 And this is the thing.
2:06:31 There is nobody in the world that’s ever made change and
2:06:35 everybody like them, especially the people who were had the
2:06:39 power and the prestige and the money ahead of them.
2:06:42 Nobody, if you go to any corporation and you say, I’ve got
2:06:46 this new idea, you will never hear the words from the people
2:06:47 that are the industry leaders.
2:06:49 That sounds super cool.
2:06:53 Let us get out of your way so you can just do that on your
2:06:54 own unfettered.
2:06:56 Are you out of your mind?
2:06:59 They will take out bazookas and blades and put down the
2:07:02 fucking the strips and the throwing darts and they will
2:07:06 do everything in their powers to discourage you because they
2:07:10 are industry leaders, but eventually they become their
2:07:13 own worst enemy.
2:07:16 Todd, we’re at almost two hours now.
2:07:20 I’ve realized that we’ve barely scratched the service.
2:07:22 We’ve established a lot of the background, of course, the
2:07:27 personality, the rule breaking, the camel bladder, and we
2:07:30 have not even touched upon your personal relationship with
2:07:32 Stanley, which is of great interest to me.
2:07:35 We have not talked about the toy empire.
2:07:39 We have not talked about how any of that started TV, film,
2:07:41 music, spawn.
2:07:43 I mean, there’s a long list of things that I would love to
2:07:44 cover with you.
2:07:47 Would you be open to doing a round two?
2:07:50 I think people would certainly be interested in listening to
2:07:50 one.
2:07:53 Could I convince you to come back for a round two?
2:07:58 Tim, you’ll find that like I’m not shy at opening my mouth
2:08:00 and talking to, you know, to the point I’m always going,
2:08:02 am I, am I boring people?
2:08:04 Because I actually know all these stories because I live
2:08:04 them.
2:08:09 But yeah, I think there are some interesting forks in the
2:08:14 road that may be not interesting for my career, but
2:08:17 just sort of the human condition of what happens when
2:08:19 you get to certain walls.
2:08:25 I’ve been talking about what I had to do in one industry,
2:08:29 but now because of that success, what you just mentioned,
2:08:32 I, and it was able to break into multiple industries and
2:08:41 found some of the same sort of repetition and how you navigate
2:08:43 the sharks when you’re a guppy, right?
2:08:46 So yeah, I’ll come back.
2:08:47 I appreciate you given.
2:08:50 Hopefully we haven’t bored people these two because I’ll
2:08:51 go, why would I want to listen to another two?
2:08:52 So it’s your show.
2:08:54 I’ll let you decide whether that works.
2:09:00 Ultimately, I mean, let’s call it selfish, self-interested.
2:09:03 If I keep it interesting for me, just like you in those 10,
2:09:07 12-hour days, you got to keep your artwork interesting to
2:09:10 you because otherwise, and even maybe still, it can be really
2:09:10 lonely.
2:09:13 So for me, I just try to scratch my own itch and asking
2:09:14 questions about the things I’m interested in.
2:09:15 So I’m very interested.
2:09:18 I’m sure we’ll have plenty of people along for the ride and
2:09:21 people can find you on all the social handles that I mentioned.
2:09:22 Of course.
2:09:24 Are there any other places you’d like to point them?
2:09:26 So we can find you on Instagram at Todd McFarland.
2:09:28 No, Twitter, Todd, underscore McFarland.
2:09:30 You can find it.
2:09:31 These are hipsters, right?
2:09:32 I’m the old guy.
2:09:33 The type in your name.
2:09:33 They’ll find you.
2:09:34 Yeah, whatever.
2:09:36 People, if you’re interested, you can find it.
2:09:39 What I’ll try and endeavor the next time is to answer more
2:09:41 than three questions because I think that’s all you got in.
2:09:46 And I need a temper and get like, Todd, he just asked you
2:09:47 how old you are.
2:09:50 You don’t have to talk about the entire sort of evolution
2:09:52 of humanity to get to that answer.
2:09:59 But but I think that a little bit of backstory to get to the
2:10:03 reasoning why when you make that call at that moment matters.
2:10:04 Oh, yeah.
2:10:05 It’s critical.
2:10:05 Yeah.
2:10:09 So so we’ve now painted hopefully some of the personalities.
2:10:14 So now we can just maybe be a little more varied in the
2:10:17 questions and we can pepper and jump around a bunch of industries.
2:10:20 And I can tell you some silly stories about those ones too.
2:10:23 Yeah, we’ll get into the trenches and we can hear more of your
2:10:24 art of war stories.
2:10:25 Right.
2:10:26 And creative.
2:10:30 They almost killed Eddie Vedder.
2:10:31 We’ll talk about that one.
2:10:33 There we go.
2:10:36 So that’ll be that’ll be the cliffhanger and everybody listening.
2:10:40 As usual, we will put show notes and links to everything in
2:10:46 the show notes at tim.blog/podcast and until next time.
2:10:49 Don’t be afraid of rocking the boat and consider your upside
2:10:51 down side, just like you were talking about those those artists
2:10:54 earlier and image.
2:10:55 It’s human nature.
2:10:56 What a thing.
2:10:57 Todd, thank you for making the time today.
2:11:00 So to be continued and we’ll figure out a time for round two.
2:11:02 Hey guys, this is Tim again.
2:11:06 Just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet
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2:11:38 I’m reading albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of
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2:11:46 including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric
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2:11:51 share them with you.
2:11:54 So if that sounds fun again, it’s very short, a little tiny
2:11:57 bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend.
2:11:58 Something to think about.
2:12:02 If you’d like to try it out, just go to tim.vlog/friday.
2:12:06 Type that into your browser tim.vlog/friday.
2:12:08 Drop in your email and you’ll get the very next one.
2:12:09 Thanks for listening.
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2:16:20 [applause]
2:16:23 [silence]
2:16:26 [silence]
2:16:29 [silence]
2:16:32 [silence]
2:16:35 [silence]
2:16:38 [silence]
2:16:46 [BLANK_AUDIO]
This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited.
The episode features segments from episode #691 “Nassim Nicholas Taleb & Scott Patterson — How Traders Make Billions in The New Age of Crisis, Defending Against Silent Risks, Personal Independence, Skepticism Where It (Really) Counts, The Bishop and The Economist, and Much More” and #639 “Todd McFarlane, Legendary Comic Book Artist — How to Make Iconic Art, Reinvent Spider-Man, Live Life on Your Own Terms, and Meet Every Deadline.”
Please enjoy!
Sponsors:
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Timestamps:
[00:00] Start
[04:51] Notes about this supercombo format.
[05:54] Enter Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Scott Patterson.
[06:32] The joy of writing a preemptive resignation letter.
[07:13] Developing resilience against criticism.
[10:04] Nassim: contrarian, or simply independent?
[12:27] Jiving with skeptical turkeys.
[17:21] Persisting through the polycrisis.
[19:18] Introducing the precautionary principle.
[21:37] Nassim’s preferred legacy.
[23:50] Precautionary principle 101.
[25:14] Fat tails, thin tails, the COVID vaccine, and GMOs.
[32:51] Enter Todd McFarlane.
[33:21] Baseball.
[38:46] Rejection letters.
[42:38] Compelling storytelling and meeting deadlines.
[45:46] Deadlines pre-Internet vs. deadlines today.
[48:36] How industry status quo led to the founding of Image Comic Books.
[1:00:30] The Comics Code and the last straw.
[1:06:52] The Marvel Dream Team exodus.
[1:25:13] How is Todd’s camel bladder a competitive advantage?
[1:31:02] Career bouncing and double-shifting as a penciler and inker.
[1:49:08] The happy accident of Venom.
[1:55:46] De-Rockwelling the company icon and inventing “spaghetti webbing.”
[2:03:31] Bucking the status quo to become the status quo.
[2:07:13] Parting thoughts and a promise for round two.
*
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