Todd McFarlane Details Medieval Spawn Figure for New Kickstarter

During our trip to Comic Con International in San Diego last month, Spawn creator Todd McFarlane shared a first look at the new Medieval Spawn action figure that he’s currently funding on Kickstarter. The new campaign has broken McFarlane’s prior records, reaching $1 million in pledges in only five hours. That’s a fast turnaround compared to the previous Spawn Kickstarter campaign, which took 23 hours to hit the same milestone. Key to the success is a promised lightning-fast turnaround; McFarlane has already started production on the figures, which McFarlane hopes will set a record for Kickstarter in the action figure category. The hope is to get a lot of the figures shipping by the holiday season, and many will ship directly from Hong Kong, just a few months after the campaign ends.

“People are used to a year or two. I’m going to see if I can do it in 90 days,” McFarlane teased during our conversation, noting that many of the figures were already in production by July. He looked back to a prior success to see how much he could improve on both the original figure and the delivery timetable.

“We did a Kickstarter right at the beginning of the pandemic, just because, when people are doing nothing, do something,” McFarlane explained. “So we came up with sort of a remastered Spawn based on the very first toy we ever made. So, this one is basically going to be a remastered version of, series one, all the way back in 1994….We’ve learned a lot since then, let’s do our upgraded one. This is easily our most detailed figure ever, and it comes with — I’m hoping, if it hits all the levels — you’re going to get dozens of weapons, shield, mask, chests, helmets, you name it — it’s going to come with a ton of stuff.”

The figure features a number of interchangeable elements, including some that will be added as stretch goals are passed in the campaign. McFarlane showed us that a number of those pieces are actually magnetic, so that fans can remove and replace pieces without having to snap them out of sockets or insert tiny pegs into holes.

“We didn’t want people to have to break their toys to change the pieces on it,” he explained.

The campaign (you can see more details and buy the figures here) met its initial $100,000 funding goal in just two minutes, and doubled its goal within four minutes, surpassing the previous campaign’s record of three minutes. The figure — offered in three colors — sold through all 700 Premium 3-Packs within 45 minutes. As of this writing, the campaign has already attracted over 7,000 backers, to raise over $1.45 million, with 26 days to go in the campaign.