Todd McFarlane Quotes

With Marvel, I obviously don't own the characters, so there are levels of approval to go through. But I'm very seldom told no, and never without reason. Maybe I've just been lucky; I don't know, but I don't think it's as frustrating as people generally imagine. I act as though I own it all while I'm writing, I think. I hope, anyway.

I think that one of the most useful applications of the Creator's Bill of Rights is that it clearly indicates for creators what rights they have at the outset.

People at Marvel and DC, we're rooting for each other. And when we're friends, like me and Jeff Lemire, or Charles Soule, or even Dan Slott - it doesn't matter if you're Marvel or DC. You'll talk story with each other, and there's like an agreement that you're just helping each other out.

In 'Comedy Nights With Kapil,' we had fixed characters and we were under a contract that we could not work for other channels. But it's not the same with 'TKSS.' I can do shows on any channel.

We need to create technologies - and a culture of respect, and an updated legal doctrine, too - that allow creative folks to make money from their own efforts.

The fights that I had with DC and Marvel, I won. And guess what? They profited by it.

In some films it wouldn't be surprising to see the United States envisioned as a significant but not primary dominant marketplace, and treated accordingly. But in comics, that's for the governing minds at each of the companies and corporations to find out for themselves.

Don't sell your publishing.

We're always looking for ways to extend all of our intellectual property. We've seen that's what happened with 'Harry Potter' and 'The Lord of the Rings.'

The approach that the music industry took to fight piracy was the wrong strategy.

I thought I had a great opportunity when I started doing my comic book in 1972. I thought there was so much territory to work in.

When you do a studio picture, all the paperwork and legal stuff is already taken care of!

Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.

It is quite clear that compelling content, which is made available on economic terms that respect the intellectual rights of owners, can be a tremendous spur to the growth of broadband networks.

Part of running DC Comics is that it's much larger than Image Comics is, or was. There's a challenge to being one of the industry leaders in that everything you do is scrutinized and watched.

The best way to really make the VPN issue a completely nonissue is through global licensing that we are continuing to pursue with our partners.

I started working with Timely in 1946. Stan Lee hired me.

SOPA has been described as hitting a carpet tack with a sledgehammer. But technology was a sledgehammer to the music industry, one that allowed digital distributors like Apple to grow rich.

The decision to work with Marvel for a while isn't any sort of denigration of DC. I had a fantastic time there, I was treated extremely well, I have strong positive feelings about all of my editors and the DC universe of characters, and I look forward to hopefully working with them at some point down the road.

When I got back from shooting 'Deception,' I was under contract with NBC, so I can't really do anything.

It may be true that the only reason the comic book industry now exists is for this purpose, to create characters for movies, board games and other types of merchandise.

As you know, in America there's no rights for the artist, so whatever films I've made kind of belong to the studio, so if they want to remake it they can.

I've done work for hire. I've worked for DC and Dark Horse.

No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.

This is a profession for me, but I started off as a self-publisher working on my own schedule and my own stuff before moving on to graphic novels with First Second Books, where there was definitely a schedule, but it was very different from monthly comics.