Toddfather Talk

COMIKAZE PANEL HIGHLIGHTS

November 27, 2015

About a month ago, I attended Comikaze and one of my FAVORITE parts of the day (besides meeting with my AWESOME fans), was the panel with me, Jim Lee, Mark Silvestri, and of course the GREAT Stan Lee!!

Well… someone in the audience shouted a question for Stan to answer. The question was, “Who is your favorite superhero”?
I have video PROOF of Stan’s answer and it’s a GOOD ONE! And if you haven’t been back to my Facebook page to watch the video… do it… NOW!

In fact, I’VE watched this video a few dozen times because I still can’t believe he said that!!!

Anyways… there was SO much good stuff that came out of the panel, I wanted to make sure you good people get to read about the highlights!

Jim Lee (who’s now a big shot at DC Comics), started on Alpha Flight back in the day. That was the FIRST comic he worked on. And being Canadian…it was one of my FAVORITE comics. When I started at Marvel, I was working on Coyote. It was the ‘mail room’ (the place where most entry level jobs start) of comics. NO one wanted to work on it…in fact I ended working on a 10 page BACKUP story..not even the actual comic!! But as Jim and I both agreed, you gotta start somewhere. Even Jim said he would’ve been a janitor at Marvel if it got him in the door.

There is some good advice in that. There is NEVER a job too small to take if it gets your foot in the door!! For me, Coyote was MY foot in the door. And you’ve heard me say this MANY times… but after hundreds and hundreds of rejections, all it just took was ONE yes. AND those 2-3 years of rejections I got were what I needed to hone my abilities.

My other favorite highlight was about how Stan SAVED the comic book industry. How? At the time, all his editor wanted was FIGHT SCENES! He was told to forget anything about dialogue and characterization. He wanted to quit. He said to his wife, “I want to quit!” She said, “why don’t you do ONE book the way YOU want to do it. You want to quit so if you’re fired..oh well!” So Stan created Fantastic 4 with his OWN speech pattern, personality and put STORY in it… not just fighting. Stan’s publisher loved it and was told to do more of THAT. And from there, he went on to create all kinds of other memorable characters (the list is too long to list here).

It kinda felt like the same for me (I didn’t save the industry), but I wanted to tell MY own story. And part of what I think makes Spawn so great, is it’s dialogue and characterization. It takes MORE work to write the boring scenes than the fight scenes. When I created Spawn, I did it MY way and 258 issues later, it’s still going strong!!

And just for fun, here are some pictures from the panel! Lots of laughing, good stories and good FRIENDS!

Enjoy.