Creativity Quote by Todd McFarlane

McFarlane’s line lands like a creator who’s already lived through one industry earthquake and can hear the aftershocks in today’s contracts. When he says “It can’t really happen today the way it did back then,” he’s invoking the early-’90s moment when superstar artists could flip the power dynamic and build creator-owned empires (including his own) off the back of a booming market and a hungry audience. The phrase is nostalgic, but it’s also a warning: the conditions that allowed insurgents to break away have been engineered out of the system.

The key tell is “competitive scare.” He’s not accusing Marvel and DC of creative timidity so much as corporate risk management. The subtext is that the Big Two don’t merely compete with each other; they compete with the possibility of another McFarlane - a brand-rich artist who takes fan attention, style, and sales elsewhere. Exclusive contracts become less a perk than a preemptive strike, a way to keep talent from building equity outside the company’s intellectual property.

“Lock guys up” is deliberately blunt. It frames exclusivity as containment, not partnership, and it taps into a long-running comics labor tension: publishers own the characters; creators often rent their own reputations. McFarlane’s intent is clear: to argue that today’s marketplace isn’t lacking rebels, it’s structured to prevent rebellions from scaling. In an era where superhero IP feeds film and streaming pipelines, control of talent becomes another layer of controlling risk - and of controlling who gets to become the next institution.