Time & Perspective Quote by Todd McFarlane

There’s a quiet flex hiding inside McFarlane’s humility. He frames his Marvel and DC years as “put[ting] in my time,” the phrasing you’d use for an apprenticeship or a shift at a job you’ve outgrown. It’s not nostalgia; it’s credentialing. He’s reminding you that before he became the loud, swaggering auteur-brand of Spawn and the toy empire, he did the institutional reps inside the Big Two, where the house style and the monthly grind function like a finishing school and a factory line at once.

The key tell is “proper fashion.” McFarlane isn’t simply talking about anatomy drills or panel composition. He’s signaling the existence of a gate-kept grammar: how to pace action, hit deadlines, serve an editor, land a cliffhanger, make characters readable at a glance. “Proper” is doing double duty here. It acknowledges that comics have craft rules you can’t skip, while also hinting at how arbitrary and policed those rules can be. In the subtext, you can hear the tension between learning the form and being disciplined by it.

This is a creator speaking from the post-Image era, when artists fought to be seen as authors, not just stylists. By casting his corporate period as training, he positions his later independence as earned rather than naïve: he didn’t reject the system out of impatience; he mastered it, then chose something else. It’s the origin story of legitimacy, told like a work log.