Todd McFarlane's Spawn Writing and Art Techniques - Comic Tropes (Episode 33)

Comments · 622

• HT

  @Htownblokhedz · 8 years ago (edited)

  To everyone sayin Rorschach was homeless, he had a landlord that complained about the smell of his apt

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• GO

  @gotohellaaron · 8 years ago

  Todd Mcfarlane said he'd send his art to comic book companies and sometimes they'd send him back constructive criticism and that's how he improved a lot.

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• DE

  @DerekMoore82 · 8 years ago (edited)

  Stan Lee came up with the idea for Overkill and coined the name. Rob Leifeld designed the look of the character. Todd McFarlane came up with the logo. Stan joked how somebody might try to take credit, and emphasized that it was his idea. The character was never meant to be taken seriously, it was really just some impromptu goofing around. Then McFarlane, just to be funny I suppose, stole the silly character without giving any credit to anyone as Stan had jokingly predicted someone would do, but nobody expected anyone would ever really want to steal such a ridiculous character. So it was kind of an inside joke.

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• NA

  @Naedlus · 7 years ago

  I'm guessing they used "Overtkill" as a way of saying "Not only does he take his violence to an extreme, he's very out in the open about it."

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• LA

  @LAVATORR · 7 years ago

  So I&apos;m an actual homeless guy that does homeless guy things, and I&apos;d like to answer your question about when and why we move.<br><br>I personally lucked out. I have a nice, isolated spot all to myself that&apos;s in an alley in an upper-class suburban neighborhood. My neighbors that live in the apartment next door are super nice and like my presence because I&apos;m non-threatening and friendly and funny. More importantly, I keep the crackheads away, so as a token of goodwill, they keep a lot of my stuff safe behind their gate, which allows me to freely walk around town.<br><br>You have to understand that how transient people set up camp is largely determined by the odds and regularity of being raided. In the nice parts of town, they can get away with setting up camp overnight near fancy government buildings so long as they aren&apos;t blocking anyone. But in industrial areas? With broken glass coating every inch of the painful, broken gravel surrounding a desolate urban hellscape? Camp wherever. Shit where you please. Shoot up dope with one hand and slug your girlfriend with the other. It doesn&apos;t matter. They don&apos;t care. Cops sure as hell don&apos;t. They know there&apos;s a 50/50 chance a homeless person&apos;s 911 call is incoherent gibberish about the Federal Reserve and their ex-wife. Even if there is a serious crime being commit, they simply don&apos;t care. And the property owners of those quasi-abandoned buildings? You think they hire someone just to shoo the homeless away, knowing they&apos;ll be back in an hour?<br><br>My point is that, in an urban hellscape, people simply give up. On both sides. And I think that was part of what MacFarlane was trying to convey.

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• JS

  @jsagers2008 · 7 years ago

  Todd co-created Venom so it&apos;s not like he&apos;s totally unoriginal with Spawn&apos;s symbiote similarities.

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• CH

  @checkpoint3260 · 7 years ago (edited)

  The Teenage mutant ninja turtles seem pretty homeless...<br><br>Imagine, your first day of work for the City&apos;s Bureau of Water Supply, they send you to the old maintenance room to open some valve... then you hear something. You shine your flashlight over and as you turn, you see a giant four foot tall rat wearing a kimono.

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• KI

  @Kikilang60 · 8 years ago

  If Spawn wants to camp behind your store, Spawn will camp behind your store.

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• VI

  @vicentenavarro1190 · 7 years ago

  I really love how silly Spawn can get at times. The issue with Houdini is a lot of fun

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• NR

  @nrcallender · 9 years ago (edited)

  The character of Overkill/Overtkill was originally drawn in collaboration with Rob Liefield on a comic creator VHS series that Stan Lee hosted (I forget the name now but you can find them in YouTube). I imagine the change from Overkill to Overtkill was to fend off any ownership claims by Lee or whoever produced the videos. I thought that as a pretty neat bit of comic history when I first saw it.

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• MI

  @MichaelKerr71 · 6 years ago

  Spawn Comic: &quot;His name is literally &apos;Overt-Kill&apos; but sometimes some are known to call him Overkill&quot;<br>ComicTropes: &quot;I don&apos;t understand what the comic is trying to tell us.&quot;

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• RO

  @Rometiklan · 9 years ago

  I was a fan of Spawn for a bit until McFarlane stopped pencilling duties. I was driven to collect titles based primarily on who was pencilling. I&apos;m also a huge hockey fan and recognized immediately the Tony Twist character was a lawsuit waiting to happen. Stuff from the 90&apos;s was just so overt-the-top fun. A lot of it didn&apos;t make sense but I look back and realize how much fun I had reading that stuff. Love the vid, Chris and thanks for the trip down memory lane.

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