Since Todd McFarlane’s Spawn’s debut in Spawn #1 back in May of 1992, McFarlane has tried to make his character as big as his Marvel creations. Within just a few years, Spawn launched into television–-winning two Emmy Awards in the process–a feature film, and video games. Spawn has now been featured in nine video games, four of those being non-Spawn titles including Mortal Kombat 11 as a DLC addition. Spawn will soon be a part of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II with operators having Spawn-themed skins in the Season 6 battle pass–rather than being sold as a separate bundle, as is usually the case with crossovers like The Boys and Godzilla. And that might be due in part to just how good of a match Spawn is for Call of Duty, as Todd McFarlane told GameSpot.
McFarlane created the hellish mercenary when he was a teenager and is the key figure in the Todd McFarlane brand–-even the logo of this company is a stylized version of Spawn’s mask. McFarlane talked about how Spawn has been seen as just a video game character instead of a comic book character by the younger generation, but it doesn’t bother him how you found the character.
“The malleable part of Spawn is also part of my sinister master plan because I don’t care how you get into the door to the world of Spawn. If it’s cool because you saw something cool in the comics? Cool. If it’s something you saw from video games? Cool. ‘Oh I saw the HBO show!’ Fine! I don’t care,” McFarlane explained.
“We started from humble beginnings with the goal to see if we could make cooler looking toys for an older audience and if we could, if it was successful, others should follow the blueprint,” McFarlane said. “We got a lot of good press early because we were the only ones in the pool at that point. Fast forward now and if you walk around the floor here now, there are maybe 80 companies of all sizes that do what we do: make nice, high-end, cool, detailed stuff for the majority of customers over the age of 15. They’re buying this for themselves. It’s phenomenal with what you see now.”