Todd McFarlane

Todd McFarlane is a Canadian comic book artist, writer and businessman. He was born in Calgary, Alberta on March 16th, 1961. He is best known for creating the popular horror anti-hero Spawn. Though Canadian by birth, Todd McFarlane is the epitome of the American success story. While working as an in-house comic book artist for DC Comics, and later Marvel Comics, McFarlane began to develop a reputation for his stylistic illustrative techniques, which he employed on titles such as Spider-Man and The Amazing Spider-Man. In 1991, McFarlane and several other disgruntled artists, separated from Marvel to form their own independent publishing company, Image Comics. Image's mission statement was to provide creator-owned projects for staff members, with each creator taking sole ownership of their intellectual properties. The flagship title for Image Comics at the time was Spawn, which is still in print today, which McFarlane wrote and illustrated. Spawn became a runaway success and helped turn the fledgling comic house into a juggernaut that dominated comic book shelves during the 1990s. Spawn spun-out into several offshoot titles and eventually received a video game, a feature film and an animated television series. Todd McFarlane went on to create Todd McFarlane Entertainment, which produced the Spawn feature film and animated series, as well as McFarlane Toys, which licensed several action figure lines for Spawn as well as other franchises.