Todd McFarlane Draws New Venom Sketch

Venom creator Todd McFarlane has broken out actual paper and a real pen to draw the character that helped propel him to comics superstardom.

This might not seem like a huge deal to most, but when McFarlane, currently directing a film based on his long-running creator-owned comic book Spawn, does art on social media, he most often draws it digitally on a screen. Venom, though, got lined notebook paper and a ball-point pen.

"The thing about him, as opposed to say Violator or some other [monster] is that he's got these big shoulder that come up here," McFarlane narrated.

Violator is a creature that faces off with Spawn, and one of the most popular monsters McFarlane ever designed.

Along the way, he gave fans advice as to how to make Venom's distinctive mouth look good, both from the perspective of drawing background teeth and because "who doesn't love the slobber, right?"

You can see the video below.

During the course of the video, as noted by Border Town artist Ramon Villalobos on Twitter, there is an audible "you've got mail!" sound familiar to older readers as the vile that used to play in the '90s when America Online users received new messages via their AOL e-mail addresses.

"DOES TODD MCFARLANE USE AOL IN 2018?! I DEMAND THE DOJ OPEN AN INVESTIGATION IMMEDIATELY," joked Villalobos on Twitter. "But how is Todd still getting you've got mail alerts? Who emailed him? Was it someone in 1996? Is he still using free minutes from CD rooms? Why are people not demanding answers?"

Venom, created in 1988 by McFarlane and writer David Michelinie, is one of the most popular characters created in comics in the last 30 years and will be getting his own feature film in October starring Mad Max: Fury Road's Tom Hardy.

Created as a way of getting Spider-Man out of the black costume first introduced in 1984, Venom came about after Spidey realized that his costume was in fact an alien symbiote, and worked to free himself of it. After removing it from his body, the symbiote felt rejected and angry. It found a kindred spirit in Eddie Brock, a photojournalist whose biggest story was ruined when Spider-Man revealed that Brock had named the wrong suspect. With Brock hating Spider-Man for ruining his life and the symbiote enraged by his rejection, the two teamed up and became Venom, a jagged-toothed, slime-drooling, brain-eating doppelganger of Spider-Man's black costume.

The character got his first solo miniseries in 1993 and has starred in numerous miniseries and ongoing series since then, appearing in more self-titled issues than most of Marvel's straightforward superheroes.