Robserecaps Ten – episode 40 the DC Comics Detour
by Joe
A busy weekend means I’m behind on Robservations, so lets dive right into Friday’s episode:
- the Rob starts out talking about the passing of Eddie Van Halen, likening it to how he felt when George Michael, David Bowie and Tom Petty passed as well
- Says a piece of his masculinity was ripped out with Eddie’s passing, no one is gonna call Taylor Swifts music “macho”
- the Rob worries about a new Deadpool movie being at least four years away would mean Ryan Reynolds may age out of the role
- the Rob kinda oversells the popularity of Shatterstar in 1991/1992/today
- the Rob WANTED to write/draw Fantastic Four, but there was too much demand from retailers for his new characters and ideas
- a lot of comparing the Fantastic Four universe to the Youngblood/Prophet universe
- the Rob affectionately calls letterers “balloon stuffers”
- the big X-Summit was coming up and the Rob was leery as he didn’t want to share his best ideas with everyone else, saw it as sharing or conceding control to others
- With Front Row trading cards not getting off the ground, Todd McFarlane has un-retired from comics
- Royalties from a book reaches a creator in 10 months, while the money is sitting in escrow, with Marvel making interest on it, if the Rob had gotten that X-Force #1 money sooner, he would have left Marvel sooner
- the Rob was not contracted with Marvel at this time, still getting freelancer creator royalty rate
- the Rob’s dad advised him not to leave Marvel, but the Rob had to bet on himself, was only getting five to thirty cents an issue at Marvel, where a creator owned book would net him a dollar to a dollar twenty five an issue, but states it was never about the money, it was about control
- McFarlane was afraid to go the independent route, felt he could make a bigger splash doing Batman again (Todd drew Year Two)
- while Jim Lee and Todd were fighting over Batman, the Rob wanted to do Titans, stating when at DC with Hawk & Dove, he pitched (what would become) Youngblood as TEAM Titans
- however, the Rob requested $150,000 an issue for ten issues (taking a pay cut) to work at DC, knowing if he sells 100,000 issues a month, he’ll clear $400,000 with royalties included
- Paul Levitz said they couldn’t meet that number for the Rob, but the Rob knew if he and Jim and Todd were marketed as a ‘movement’, they could be huge at DC
- the Rob states Youngblood #1 sold 1.1 million copies, but Spawn #1 sold 1.2 million copies, that extra bump was due to a separate side deal Todd cut with Harold (the head of the company?) to put Spawn #1 in Wal-Marts
- the Rob calls Paul Levitz a bad manager for costing DC millions of dollars and all the headlines that Image would end up getting
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