Time & Perspective Quote by Todd McFarlane

McFarlane’s sentence reads like a creator’s war story, but it’s really a diagnosis of an industry caught between artistic adolescence and a retail fever dream. He’s pinpointing that early-’90s hinge moment when comics stopped behaving like a quirky corner of pop culture and started acting like a miniature stock market. “Big time” isn’t praise so much as a warning flare: the stakes got louder, the money got dumber, and the whole ecosystem had to react.

The intent is practical and self-justifying at once. By framing the era as a breakout into “independent stuff,” he aligns himself with a liberation narrative: creators seizing control, escaping corporate gravity. Then he undercuts the romance with the other half of the truth: a market “choked with speculators.” That verb matters. It suggests not merely hype, but suffocation - readers crowded out by buyers who weren’t there for stories at all.

“Trick covers” lands as the punchline and the indictment. It’s McFarlane admitting how the business tried to monetize attention before anyone called it “engagement”: foil stamping, holograms, variants, collectible gimmicks designed to sell the idea of value rather than the work itself. The subtext is that innovation and exploitation were happening in the same breath. Independence wasn’t just an artistic movement; it was a response to a collapsing signal-to-noise ratio, where the cover became a financial instrument and the comic inside was almost incidental.

He’s describing a boom that contained its own bust, and a creative revolt that was, inevitably, also a brand strategy.