Todd McFarlane Talks Spawn in Call of Duty, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 Venom Theories, and More (Exclusive)

ComicBook.com got to sit down and speak with legendary comic book artist and writer Todd McFarlane about Spawn coming to Call of Duty. In case you missed the news, Spawn was added to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Call of Duty: Warzone today as part of the new season 6 update. The new update is Halloween-themed, so a bunch of other spooky characters are also coming to the game. What makes Spawn different, however, is that he is the season’s headlining character in the battle pass. Anyone who purchases the battle pass will be able to level it up and unlock multiple Spawn-related skins.

We interviewed Todd McFarlane, creator of Spawn, about bringing the character into Call of Duty, how the character will be able to reach millions of new people, a new Spawn game, an update on the film, and even, a little bit of Venom’s role in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. You can check out the full interview below and get Spawn in Call of Duty starting today. Spawn will also be usable in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 this November as part of the game’s carry forward program.

When did the conversations about bringing Spawn into Call of Duty begin?

The specific ones came after I received an email and a request on the Activision side. But prior to that, I had done some work with Activision, off and on, over the last 10, 12 years. I’d actually even worked with some of the people that were on the dev team. We had just signed a toy contract with Activision to make figures of some of their other brands, so, I don’t know if somebody just happened to see that across somebody’s desk, and said, “Hey, we’re in the middle of doing this thing…” I don’t know why but, all of a sudden, I got the email. They said, “Hey, we got this thing coming down the pipeline, we’re hoping to tie into our Haunting release that we have around Halloween. We think Spawn would be a perfect fit. Are you interested in talking about it?” And, obviously, anytime you can hitch your wagon to giant AAA brands, not just in the video game world, but just across the globe, period, the answer is always yes. Anytime somebody wants to elevate you, you always get your hooks in, and go, “Yeah, sure, let’s go.”

I was watching an interview with you recently where you said something about, “It’s not necessarily true that if you build it, they will come. You have to put it where people will be. You have to get in their way,” which I think is exactly what Call of Duty is. Hundreds of millions of people have played Warzone.

[There are millions of people who] know nothing about Spawn.[People who have] never heard about Spawn, have never collected Spawn, and don’t even know who Todd is. So yes, in an odd way, Cade, that’s actually the most value to me of saying, “Oh, my gosh, they’re going to give me a landscape in which I can introduce my guy, my character, to this big, big, big array of consumers, fans of the Call of Duty game.” And hope we can make an impression with our character and how he plays in the game.

Who is voicing Spawn in Call of Duty?

There’s a cool guy named Keith David who did a hell of a voice in HBO. And so they took the easy low-hanging fruit because I would’ve done the exact same thing. To me, he’s Mr. Spawn when he talks, so they just went with him. I was just out at the Call of Duty studios on [September 16th]. They said they had just finished recording him. So they played a couple of his lines for me, it was like a throwback to [the HBO animated series]. I’m going, “Oh, man, there’s my boy.”

That’s awesome. It’s good to hear that they recorded new lines too. Because I know, with some previous characters like Bruce Willis from Die Hard, they just reused lines from the movie. It’s awesome to hear that they’re actually using new lines for Keith David.

Yeah, yeah. I had to sign off on all the lines, so it’s weird. The only thing I was looking for is whether he would say something that wouldn’t be really Spawn. But everything else I go, “I assume these are natural things that somebody would say in your game that make complete sense.” So yeah, I love it. I know that Keith will just deliver it with this tone that feels serious and sinister at the same time. That voice of his is like coming around a corner, or being in dark waters and coming face-to-face with a shark. He didn’t have to say a whole heck of a lot to get that he means business.

How involved are you in Spawn’s implementation in Call of Duty? 

Oh yeah, all of it. Like I said, I was just up at the studios going over it, seeing it all in high def. They’re showing me everything. They’re not trying to sneak anything by me. Part of what I’m looking for isn’t to see everything so that it meets any prior continuity. It’s that I’m encouraging them to push the envelope as much as they want so that the character, and some of the other sub characters, can fit into the game without anybody having any knowledge about him. And so you’re going to have characters at one spectrum, like the Lieutenant Colonel Al Simmons, who’s the Spawn character. He was in the military, and in the comic book and as a toy, he’s been in military garb. To me, you play that guy, you won’t even know that he was taken from the outside. I think he just walks seamlessly through the video game.

Spawn, on the other end, when he is in his red cape and whatever else, he’s a little more dramatic, and has a superhero look to him, or whatever else. That’s going to be more of a tell. There are so many fans at the Call of Duty office that go, “No, we had to have our OG guy.” But, again, the OG guy with some battle gear and some packs and some big guns, so he looks cool.

There’s stuff like the hybrid, which has been around for 30 years, which is the guy that we call Commando Spawn. Commando Spawn is essentially Spawn when he doesn’t want to use his powers. I’ve created a mythology where he tries not to use those powers. A lot of times, he just straps on his military stuff, takes his cape, wraps it around his face and just goes, “It’s time to just go kick some ass and I’m trained. I have a lot of skills outside of using my gun and my energy that comes shooting out of my eyes and my hands.” I think he’s best when he’s actually in that vibe, either as Al Simmons completely or as Commando Spawn himself. And then there’s just going to be characters that you know from the Call of Duty game that will be painted with some Spawn colors, cosplay visuals and looks. So they’re, for me, offering a couple of other characters too. So there’s going to be a wide range from ultra realistic to the fantastic within the confines of all the various looks that are coming out.

How did you decide which versions of Spawn to use, since there are multiple?

I didn’t set any rules. Arguably, that was the only rule. There are no rules, guys. I didn’t tell them who they should use, other than to say, “I want my characters to feel like they’ve been there for a while. So what is that? What does he have to be? You know your fan base. What do they want to play? What do you think he has to look like? Come back to me with what you think that should entail.” And if it gets bigger than the initial ask, which [was just], “Can we have Spawn, one and done? Then let’s talk about it so that we can make the footprint even bigger.” That’s what they did. During our conversations, I said, “Hey, here’s what he’s looked like in the three decades now of him being out in the public. I don’t know if any of these make any sense to you.” They came back and they just said, “Hey, Todd, can we do this?” “Yeah, sure.” “Can we do this?” “Yeah, sure.” “Can we do this?” “Yeah, sure.”

I wasn’t being corporate on any level. I told them at the beginning to pretend I have given you the trademark and the copyright to my character. I no longer own it. You own it. Now, you can do whatever you want with it. Show me what that looks like. That’s what I want to see. If you could do anything you want, start there and then I’ll tell you whether you’ve gone too far. Usually, what ends up happening is the opposite; people are too reverent to what I’ve done in other games. I think that’s a tail wagging a dog. I don’t like that. I don’t even do that myself. You just make the coolest thing you can with where you’re at. If you do a badass job, and I mean badass in a positive fashion, that people will come. People will go, “Okay, so it’s not exactly like the comic book. But in the comic book he’s a badass, and in the video game he’s a badass.” Then mission accomplished.

Is the freedom that you gave them with choosing which versions to use why he’s a Battle Pass character?

Where and how they implement him, and their business model as to why they made those choices, not really. That’s information and data they’ve collected, I assume, over the last 10 plus years. They made choices and they said, “Hey, we think this would be cool if we did it here. Here’s the looks we’d like to do, and here’s some of the characters. Can we get our hands on a couple of characters over and above Spawn?” It just grew out of, I think, a bit of a simple ask. Then I don’t want to say it got complicated. I want to say that it got more progressive in terms of what we think we could accomplish with all of it. I think once they saw that I was being flexible and I was giving them more options, then they started thinking a little grander. And it was like, “Yeah, cool. You want that character? Yeah, let’s just add it to the contract.”

If Call of Duty players are interested in Spawn, given there will be millions of people who have never heard of him and are coming into this very fresh, where should they start? Is it a specific comic, the animated series?

If somebody, at that moment, just is in a fit of passion and needs to go and get it, we’re just inching towards issue 350. There’s plenty to choose from. What I’m hoping for isn’t that everybody is going to then go run to the local comic store, or go on the internet, or whatever else. It’s that they just will remember the word, remember the brand, remember the character.

As we move forward, if we end up doing more with Call of Duty, then it’ll matter more the second time around because you’ve grown your base. When we get the movie off the ground, and going to movies and watching TV and listening to music, these are things that all of us do anyways naturally in our spare time. Those, to me, are potentially more obvious ways that they might veer off and go, “Man, I played him in the video game with Call of Duty. He was super cool. And now they’re making a movie of that guy. I’m going to go check out the trailer.” Then maybe we can get some more people to help with the success of the movie, and then everything just begins to snowball.

A couple of years ago, when they made that Snake Eyes movie, they had Snake Eyes in Fortnite. I was in a theater seeing a different movie, and the trailer for Snake Eyes came on. I legitimately heard a kid somewhere in the theater say, “That’s the guy from Fortnite.” I’m like, “Well, he’s from G.I. Joe but…”

[laughs] Well, I’ve never been particular about how people enter into the knowledge of your brands and your characters or your ideas. To me, it’s all just one giant house. I try to put as many doors on it as possible to let people enter. I’m not biased to anybody on how they got there. If, all of a sudden, there are a few new recruits, and they came in through the video game door, and then the Call of Duty sub-door, cool. Welcome one and all.

Spawn is appearing in Call of Duty, he’s been in Mortal Kombat. Is it time for a new standalone Spawn game?

Probably, but I’m holding off on that until I know what’s happening definitively with the movie. Because, again, as much as I have a solid fan base, it’s not nearly as big and global as something obviously like Call of Duty. Maybe if we start developing something as the movie’s coming out, and it happens to come out a year after a movie, and there was any success with the movie or a TV show, then, all of a sudden, that video game recognition becomes a little more obvious than just going, “Oh, you have to be a toy or a comic book geek.” I think that’s somewhat limited, obviously.

Any updates on the movie?

Yeah, we were in the middle of writing the script and then the writers strike came. So, that basically came to a screeching halt, if you will.They were pretty far along in it, so I’m assuming that they’ve given it a lot of thought during the strike. They know what they’re going to write, the last 30 pages, which is all they need to finish. As soon as the strike’s over, I’m assuming they’re going to quickly finish that up. We will do some rewrites. We’ll go to Hollywood. We’ll find a buyer, maybe we’ll find a couple of buyers, get into a bidding war. We’ll come back out and make the announcement that says, “We’ve got the funding, the studio, and the production date all lined up. It’s go time.”

We were hoping, minus the strike, that was going to happen this summer, at the latest, this fall. That we would be able to, in a perfect world, have the movie and the Call of Duty news at New York Comic Con. There would just be a one, two, and we would’ve owned the news cycle at New York Comic Con. Spawn coming in Call of Duty is going to be a giant piece anyways on its own. Hopefully, in quick order, if we can follow it up with some movie noise, then it will just keep the ball rolling. For that reason, I’m hoping for Activision to have enough success with having Spawn [in Call of Duty] that they’ll say, “Hey, Todd, you got a bunch of characters in that universe, talk about them.” Let’s see if we can’t go back to the well. 

Any other superhero characters you think would fit in the Call of Duty universe, whether they be your own or someone else?

Maybe Punisher. He walks around normally with a gun. The problem is that there are weapons, obviously. Some of the big corporations are pretty sensitive about their heroes and weapons.

Are you much of a gamer yourself?

Oh, no, I’m an old man. Just when video games were starting to get somewhat complicated, I was getting on with life. By the time I came back, they were light years ahead of how fast my thumbs could move. So, I watched with jealousy, my young kids doing it. My son plays Call of Duty all the time. I’ve got a little bit of dexterity, but you would never want me on your team. I’ve got my boomer slowness with it that I’m not built for button pushing at the rate that these kids can do it now. I’d get slaughtered. I usually watch, like at lunchtime, a lot of my employees play video games, especially all the hot ones that come out. I just sit and enjoy watching over their shoulders like they were a Twitch channel or a YouTube channel. I just watch them play.

In Call of Duty, they have these finisher moves, where if you sneak up behind someone, you press a button. You do crazy stuff to them. What kind of finishing moves will Spawn have in Call of Duty?

Yeah, just like some of the other ones, it’s pretty harsh and then tricked it out. They tricked it out a little bit. There’s a little bit of a supernatural little bent in there at the very end. Just to tip your hat that he’s not like everybody else on the battlefield.

The new Spider-Man game comes out next month, and Venom is pretty much the antagonist of the game. The speculation is that Harry Osborn will be Venom. What do you think about Harry Osborn possibly taking on the Venom mantle?

I’m a fan. As the guy who created the visual look of Venom, I’m biased to it. One, I think Venom is a villain. In my mind, I can’t quite get my head wrapped around that he’s a quasi good guy. Because, to me, your heroes are only as good as the bad guys. The more severe your villains are, the more heroic the deed is if you win and you’re the good guy. If Harry Osborn, that character on his best recanting, is really almost on the verge of insane, and you put that character into the suit of Venom, then I think you’ve got a pretty badass version. I think that’s a heck of a combo.

Will they go to that extreme? I don’t know. My head always goes dark first, and then I bring a little bit of light on top of it. I just like those characters. The corporation sometimes when they go, “Oh yeah, we’re going to make something dark.” It’s like 5% darker than what it was before. I don’t know what they will do, but I’d make Harry Osborn insane, put the costume on him, and then he would just be a wrecking ball at that point. It would be very hard for Spider-Man to stop him at that point.

I’m looking forward to seeing Spawn in Call of Duty. One of my friends who doesn’t really know anything about Spawn, he saw one of the rumors going around and was like, “Who is this guy? He’s so cool looking.” I said to him, “That’s Spawn. You should go check out the animated series on HBO and catch up.”

The one thing that I’m happy that the Call of Duty dev team did was they gave a pretty wide range of offerings. If somebody wants that badass looking guy that looks a little bit like a superhero with some cool bazookas on his back or something, then you can go and get that. On the other side, is just Al Simmons, who looks military and looks real. It’s like, “Oh, hey, there’s a character in here, Al Simmons. I can play his alter ego or I can play him. I can play the hybrid. I can play the paint job cosplay of some of the existing ones.”

I’m hoping, fingers crossed, whatever the consumer likes best themselves, there will be one option that might fit their play mode, if you will. Instead of having a “One size fits all. You either have to like this or you don’t.” That was part of the flexibility I wanted to give them. That your friend goes, “Oh my God, he looks cool. I like him.” Other people might go, “What are superheroes doing in Call of Duty? That’s bulls**t.” Well, then you can go over to the Al Simmons character.” Boom, done, simple.