In what's become something of a regular occurrence, Todd McFarlane spoke with the Arizona Republic earlier this week on a number of subjects, including the current status of the "Spawn" comic book, the next "Spawn" film, graphic novels as well as McFarlane's interest in doing his own comic strip.
Regarding the "Spawn" comic, McFarlane told the Republic, "I sort of let 'Spawn' the comic book go on autopilot, and we've got issue 150 coming up (146 is on the stands now) and I want to shake things up here so I just had a two-hour conversation with somebody overseas who might come on board in a creative capacity in bringing on a new editor and sort of go in a different direction, I'm sort of saying, 'Hey it's time to shake the dust off this guy a little bit, and get people excited about the comic book.' Why? Because the book has been around 150 issues which is a tremendous number for an independent comic, and also we're currently working on the return of 'Spawn' in animation form, and this summer I'll be writing the screenplay for a movie that I'll be directing that I hope I can get started in December or January."
Regarding Spawn's return to film and animation, McFarlane said fans should definitely expect to see an animated "Spawn" in 2006 and he's hopeful a film directed by himself will also see its release in 2006, but don't expect it to be a follow-up to the 1997. When asked if it would be a sequel, McFarlane responded, "No, I wouldn't use that word. A reinvention. If everything goes good there'll be a movie next year, and the animation is definitely coming next year. And then all of a sudden we've reinvigorated the direction of the comic book, I mean each will happen of their own voice, but all of sudden it's like, oh cool, Spawn is back to sort of being to the forefront of comic books and comic book pop culture like Spider-Man, Superman and Batman have taken their rightful place there.
"And the thing is too, as I've gotten older the things in traditional superhero comic books, I could say I creatively (outgrew them) and that was what the conversation was for two hours, it can sort of look like the dressings of superhero stuff, but the story and the concepts and all the things people are going through need to be, in my mind, a lot more sophisticated and have a deeper meaning to it. It means maybe I don't have an 8-year-old audience for the book but his is the next evolution to me saying I'm older what else you got for me, so you can still stay in that collecting mode but you're not necessarily collecting 'Thor' and 'Hulk,' you move into other stuff that becomes 'Road to Perdition,' or 'Sin City' there's lots of them out there."
For more with McFarlane, including some hints as to the direction of the next film, check out the full interview here.
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