Creativity Quote by Todd McFarlane

“Image has to be its own fortress” lands like a mission statement disguised as a gripe, which is exactly McFarlane’s style: blunt, practical, built for a medium where ownership and identity get messy fast. He’s not talking about “image” as vibe or PR. He means Image Comics as an institution, a brand, a legal and cultural container that can’t be dragged around by the moods, scandals, or ego-projects of its founders.

The key knife twist is “in spite of the owners.” Image was founded on the promise of creator control, a rebellious alternative to corporate comics. McFarlane admits the paradox: the same star creators who gave Image its legitimacy can also endanger it if the public treats the company as a personality cult. A “fortress” implies walls, separation, discipline - not the romantic freedom of artists doing whatever they want, but a structure that protects the work and the marketplace from the creators’ chaos.

When he says people “can’t separate that,” he’s diagnosing a common media failure: audiences (and press) collapse a label into its loudest face. McFarlane’s “turn that on and off” is pure operator talk. He wants a switchboard: Image the publisher can be trusted regardless of which “entity” (individual creator, imprint, series) is currently generating headlines. Subtext: if Image doesn’t become bigger than its founders, it risks becoming a nostalgia act - or worse, collateral damage from them.