By single-handedly derailing the comic book industry do you mean founding Image and finally giving the comic book industry a major publisher who will publish creators' material without robbing them of their rights?

Pacific, Comico and Eclipse are defunct. Fantagraphics and Mirage are both minor players in terms of actually publishing creator owned series. Dark Horse focuses on licensed material as much as creator owned and its creator owned focus came after Image anyway.

None of these publishers are major the way Image is. Image is a company that only publishes creator owned material and over the last five years especially they have been revolutionizing the industry.

I'm not saying Image invented indie comics, but there is no company that caters to the indie creators like Image does.

They didn't survive because they didn't give people what they wanted. It was too much too soon with no real market in place for it. This is why Image triumphed.

In hindsight that was the best move they could have done. They used their star power and delivered what people liked to read, giving the company stability and a legitimate presence in the industry. When the fads wore out they were able to expand their business, opening their doors to all creators.

I don't see that as a problem. He can like what he wants to. All that matters is that he (and his comrades) founded a company that is now the #1 home for creators looking to publish their own properties. The 90s stunk but is that such a bad thing if it resulted in an actual stable publishing house for indie creators? If Image had never moved on from the trend and had failed then we could slag on McFarlane all we want. But the man deserves credit for helping to reshape the industry in such a positive way.

By catering to the lowest common denominator, they spear-headed the industry into an era where appearance and hype were all that mattered. Story-telling and original concepts were dead. It's why the industry went boom half a decade later, leaving the industry decimated -- a loss it's only beginning to recover from today.




What McFarlane did to dismantle the comic industry:

1. Pushed for artists to gain creative control over titles at Marvel. He got his own Spiderman title and near limitless creative control over it when people like Romita had been begging for editorial freedom for years. Indirectly, this is what pushed Chris Claremont out of X-Men as Jim Lee soon followed his lead, demanding creative control over character and content because his drawings were cool.

2. Once Marvel had bent over backward, totally alienating its existing talent and compromising its visions across the board to cater to these folks, McFarlane led them all away to form Image ("F--- you, company who did everything for me!") and reaffirmed with a more powerful voice than ever that appearance and hype mattered more than substance.

3. Screwed a number of people out of their creative rights (Venom and Angela immediately come to mind)


There's more that I can infer he did, but it's pretty much a matter of fact that the above three were done by him.

Speaking of which, the hype and variant covers surrounding Spidey #1 was the beginning of all of this. How much of that was directly due to McFarlane is (to the best of my knowledge) an unanswered question, but it would have been very consistent of him to have pitched the idea and gotten that ball rolling.


To be fair, the true blame lies with the editors, critics, and (above all else) consumers who bought the snake oil Todd was selling, but I still blame him for introducing his poisons into the industry in the first place.