Todd McFarlane will tell you that his dream of playing in the big leagues died in Medicine Hat.

Hogwash.

The ex-Toronto Blue Jay farmhand may not have made it in baseball but he’s a big leaguer, all right.

As an artist and entrepreneur, the Calgary-born McFarlane has been toiling in the big leagues of business for years through his multi-faceted McFarlane Companies.

The gifted 41-year-old graduate of William Aberhart High School is creator of the Spawn comic books and movie, an Emmy Award-winning producer, a marketer of sports and entertainment action figures, a part-owner of the Edmonton Oilers hockey club and the only man in the history of the world to pay $3 million US for a used baseball.

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McFarlane: A ‘little skinny crazy man’ who doesn’t mind shaking things up.

The Todd McFarlane Companies boasted sales of about $60 million US last year on the strength of a burgeoning toy and collectible market. Yet, the CEO strikes you as someone who would rather be spending his days playing catch in the sunshine than playing hardball in the boardrooms of a cut-throat entertainment industry.

On this day, the no-nonsense, funny, controversial, outrageous, hard- throwing lefty is in fine form on the phone from his office in Tempe, Ariz., serving up an assortment of pitches. Watch out for the high, hard one. 1. Who were your boyhood heroes?

“My dad (Bob McFarlane) was my hero. He just showed you how to be a decent, hard-working citizen and a good neighbour. In sports, it was Steve Carlton (baseball pitcher). In 1972, he won 27 games for a last-place club (Philadelphia Phillies). To me, it was a mind-bending accomplishment. And I was a left- hander, too, so I patterned my windup after him. I’m now 41 and I still have the Steve Carlton windup.”

2. Have you come to terms yet with the fact that you won’t realize your dream to play major league baseball?

“I’m over 40. So, dammit, when you hit 40, you start getting a little mature. So it’s only been in the last year-and-a-half that I’ve actually said: ‘It’s not going to happen, Todd. Get over it and be content with what you didn’t do and be happy with what you’re doing, and try to figure out the back door into the sports world without having to bat cleanup for the St. Louis Cardinals.’ But I just wish I’d had a crack at it for one day. That would be my only sorta, ya know, grunt in life. Yeah, I’d trade my company for one season (in the major leagues) because I’ve already run my company for 10 years. If some team invited me to spring training, I’d say: ‘Thanks everybody, I’m outta here.’ I’d put a new CEO in place and I’d be gonzo. I still play centre field in the men’s league here. I haven’t gotten any bigger. I’m still only 160 pounds. No, I’m not on the juice (steroids).”

3. Was not making it in baseball a catalyst in driving you to succeed as an artist and entrepreneur?

“It taught me how to focus on a goal. I had some bad coaches in sports, I thought. My first year at junior college, I had a coach who just wouldn’t play me. At practice, I’d outhit/throw/run everybody, but I had no chance because I wasn’t one of his personal scholarship picks. The other coaches even asked me why I’d win every race in practice. I said: ‘I’ll slow down the day I want to slow down and I don’t give a f--- if he doesn’t play me.’ Because of sports, I also was able to differentiate between playing a game and not playing a game. I could practise all week with a smile on my face, but once the game started, I’d go complete deadpan. I could hit the game-winning homer in the bottom of the ninth inning and you wouldn’t see any smile or elation. Why? Because my job was to succeed. To me, I was only doing my job.”

4. What about your business game face?

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“In business, I can come into the office from nine to five, which is my game, and I can put on the toughest game face you want. And if you want to get your lawyers on the phone and you want to negotiate contracts and you want to start pissing around with my company, then let’s go, buddy! I’ll go toe-to-toe with anybody. I don’t care how big the corporation is. If I believe there’s an injustice or someone is being just out-and-out rude, I’ll take on all comers. What I’m hoping for, actually, is that the guy that I’m yelling at on the other end is so riled up that he can’t let it go. Strategically, I actually try to do my best confrontations starting at about 4 o’clock in the afternoon on a Friday and let him go for about an hour. At 5:01, I shut it down and have a nice weekend with my family. Then, on Monday I pick up the phone at 9:01 and I start yelling again. I’m hoping the other guy had a bleeding ulcer over the weekend and by Monday, I’m mentally stronger than him.”

5. Is that the real Todd McFarlane or is that role-playing?

“It’s a survival tactic. When I give talks, people say: ‘Todd, tell us about your secrets.’ But I don’t know if I’d even want to encourage some of these secrets because, (a) you have to be a bit of a cold fish at times, and (b) you have to be somewhat stubborn and immature. I don’t even know if I want my kid to be me, ya know, because you have to draw a line in the sand and say, ‘if you cross that line, we’re going.’ I’ll compromise to a certain point, but once that line gets drawn, it’s war after that.”

6. Do you deal with personal confrontations in the same manner?

“Yeah, if somebody starts talking wrong to my wife (Wanda), the same thing happens. You could be six-foot-four and 280 pounds but, buddy, look into my eyes and you’ll see a little, skinny crazy man. I have no fear of size. It’s a chemical that I seem to be sorta lacking, being unafraid of things. Am I uncomfortable with it? Not really. I can’t succeed if I allow people or companies to push my company around, because I’ve got 120 employees counting on me to be the good general for the army. At any moment, the enemy could walk through the door.”

7. What’s it like being your wife’s boss (Wanda McFarlane is the chief operating officer)?

“I think she gets more frustrated by me than I do by her. I don’t know if she’s completely comfortable with the tough Todd by day and the guy who comes home and says: ‘Let it go.’ She says: ‘You’re going to turn on me some day.’ I say: ‘Never, never, I only fight the enemy.’ I’m the opposite with her. I actually let her win every fight. She’s not the bad guy (although McFarlane once fired his wife as editor of Spawn). I fired her ’cause she wouldn’t listen. She says she quit. I say I fired her two minutes before she quit. It was a disagreement over some story content in one of the comics. I said: ‘Well, if you can’t endorse it, you need to get off the boat because we’re moving forward.’ ”

8. How do you explain your success in business?

“I make a lot of products and do a lot of things for myself, and I think my tastes and likes are very average. And, luckily, there are a lot of very average people like me out there. I’m not lookin’ to do somethin’ for the lowest common denominator and I’m not lookin’ to do something for the elitist. I look at Joe Canada and ask what he wants in his life. Luckily, it’s what I want. I’m not doing semiconductors and trying to sell them to big corporations. I’m making cheap product and trying to do as good a job as I can at selling at a cheap price to the consumer that has the same qualities as I do.”

9. What are your hottest toys?

“Right now, our biggest growth is in the sports area with baseball and football being the most popular. In Canada, the hockey stuff is crazy.”

10. What’s your biggest project right now?

“We’ve got the licence to do the Matrix toy (adult collectibles). For the first time in film history, (Warner Bros.) is coming out with two movies in one year – one in May (Matrix Reloaded) and one in November (Matrix Revolution). And they’re going to sneak a DVD in between there. So that’s going to be a billion-dollar baby this year for them. It’s an R-rated movie aimed at an older audience, but in terms of adding credibility to the audience that we sell to, they’re going to go: ‘Wow, of course Todd had to do Matrix because nobody else understands that category and that age group.’ We’ve also got three movies in the works, but tomorrow they could pull the trigger on one, or I could die before they pull the trigger on anything.”

11. What’s your vision for your company for 2010 and beyond?

“Obviously, we’ll try to keep up the momentum . . . that we’ve created so far. We’ve been good to this point in taking that momentum and turning it left or right at any given time, to basically just take what the tastes of society are or what the economics are or what the retail market wants. Hopefully, I’m smart enough, and I’m not saying I am, so that I can create enough momentum so that I can get hit by a bus and it wouldn’t affect the company. It’s the (Walt) Disney theory. So, long before I get hit by the bus, I might want to kick back, retire, spend time with my family and travel the world.”

12. How much money did you make last year?

“I gave a lot away to government, so we did OK. The banks like us. We pay off all our loans. We make a cheap product at a fairly inexpensive price. I don’t think we’re too sensitive to the whims of what’s happening in the (economic downturn). It’s not like somebody cutting back on a big-screen TV or a $2,000 computer. It’s a $10 item, like a movie ticket. We made about $60 million last year. That’s about what we did for a couple of years (before that). It (growth) is a little flat.”

13. When you play catch with your kids, do you use the $3-million US baseball that Mark McGwire broke the home-run record with?

“(Laughing) No. But they know at any time I can bring it out, and they have to start catching the damn ball then. I’ve threatened them with it. It’s obviously not worth what I paid for it (since Barry Bonds broke McGwire’s single-season home-run record), but it’s still a piece of folklore in the sports community and it was one of the things that allowed me to build up momentum in sports for the company. It added credibility to me being a diehard, blue-collar fan. I spend millions of dollars a year advertising and showing off our company anyway, so this was just another way of doing it. I keep telling people that if I’m in the sports business for 10 years and I make $20 million in profit and I back out $3 million for the ball, I’m still up $17 million. It depends on how you want to play the poker game. You guys are looking at it too simple.”

14. What’s your best advice for a young entrepreneur?

“A couple of easier ones are to stick to what you know and pay attention to details. You’ve got to pay attention to your job to make sure that it gets to the point where it’s bullet-proof. We are now more capable of surviving some bad decisions, even my own, than we were early on in the game.”

15. What is your life’s proudest achievement?

“A young woman. When she (wife Wanda) was 13 years old, I somehow convinced her to put up with me, which she has done for 25 years. I see a lot of instability in business, but I also see a ton of instability at the end of the business day. I’m fighting not only to try to keep stability in my company, but even more so to keep stability at home. I’d like to have the love of the same woman for a long time, and I’d like my (three) kids to like me for a long time. If I sort of get too selfish, and at times that happens when you’re running your own businesses . . . well, let me just tell you, I say no to a lot of things in business because I know it would eat up too much time that would come at the expense of my family.”

16. What do you say to people who accuse you of twisting the minds of children with the dark world of Spawn?

“Ultimately, I can’t really say I worry about it. I’m only here to expose ideas and then it’s up to the consumer to decide whether it’s successful or unsuccessful. To say that it shouldn’t exist is censorship. I’m not doing pornography. I think I should have the right to expose the idea like all the vegetables at the supermarket and then you as a family have a choice once you see these thousands of vegetables in front of you. So just take home what it is that you think is healthy and good for your family and walk away from the rest. If more people think like you do, eventually I’ll get the message ’cause I’m not that dumb of a businessman that I’ll keep making stuff that’s not selling. The reality of it is that, (a) there are people who actually don’t mind consuming that idea, or they think it’s not harmful and tastes yucky; or (b)s your kid is buying it. And, if you can’t control your kid, I’m not here to parent your damn children. I’ve got three kids of my own. I keep them away from some things, even my own products. One of my daughters did the voices for one of the characters (in an animated show). She says: ‘Daddy, how come I don’t get to see it?’ I say, ‘It’s not appropriate.’ She’s eight and it’s an R-rated show. I have to make parental decisions with my three kids even within what I do from nine to five, because most of my stuff is aimed to 15- to 40-year-olds and mostly male.”

17. God taps you on the shoulder and says you can change one thing about the world. What would it be?

“One, I’d like to get rid of the concept of God so we don’t have to have the fights over it. So I’d stop the tapping on the shoulder. I’d just like world peace, dammit. To me, it sort of goes hand in hand because, if I was God, and I hate to say it, I would have let the ants understand my plans in life instead of having them confused for the rest of eternity. I don’t get it. I’m sort of confused about the concept. I could come up with a better plan: I’m God, everybody understands it and everybody gets along. Done. Then there’s the other plan which is, you don’t understand and go kill each other.”

18. Has fame and fortune changed you?

“I would say that the byproduct has to be yes. I’d like to deny it, but you’re just in a different position and you don’t have the luxury of doing everything or acting completely the way you would if I was just a nine-to-five employee on a conveyor belt. Whether it’s better or worse, I’ll leave that for the outside people to determine. At the funeral, there are going to be two sides. Hopefully, my kids can see that you don’t let the money spoil you, you don’t have to be insincere because you’re making money and you stand up to what you believe in. But the counterpunch to all of that is that you’re only two inches away from going from genius to egomaniac. In the big picture, I only need the approval from one person, my wife. As long as my wife says, ‘I love you in spite of your flaws,’ I don’t get too worked up over anybody else too much.”

19. If you had a second life as a comic-book hero, who would it be?

“Superman. Because he’s the strongest guy. I mean, somewhere along the line, and maybe it’s a testosterone answer, but you could use your might to prove certain points and you could get Saddam Hussein without starting a war, right? I’ve got X-ray vision so I’ll find him in the bunker, I’ll go get him, put him in the corner and run him into court. If you want to get rid of Saddam Hussein, why do we have to involve millions of other people? There’s a simple way here. Get the rotten apple out of the cart. I look at the (Iraq situation) much the same way as I look at business. You crap or get off the pot. If you’re gonna go, then do it and go big. And don’t do it half-assed. Don’t be mamby-pamby here.”

20. Can you picture Todd McFarlane at 60?

“Hopefully, I’ll be a good husband and everyone will think I’m a curmudgeon or something like that. I want to be a curmudgeon. That’s actually my goal when I retire. I’d like to live to be 104 and be a curmudgeon and give these people who wanted me to die at 70 bleeding ulcers. I want to be like a chihuahua to these people. They’ll be asking: ‘When are you going to shut up, when are you going to go away?’ And I’ll say, ‘I’m not.’ Just out of spite, I’m going to stay in shape, eat healthy and make sure they die before I do. I don’t know what it means in the big picture, but you know what? Revenge in moderation is actually not a bad thing.”

IN PROFILE: Todd McFarlane
* Born/raised/age: Calgary, 41.
* Title: CEO, McFarlane Companies.
* Education: William Aberhart High School, Calgary; Eastern Washington University (general studies degree).
* Family: Wife Wanda, three children.
* Career: McFarlane caught his first break as an artist in
1984 with an assignment penciling for Marvel/Epic Comics, and worked his way to the top of the talent roster before helping found Image Comics with four other artists in 1991. McFarlane then introduced his own character, Spawn, a comic book that made its debut with sales of 1.7 million copies, an unprecedented feat in independent comics. In 1994, he founded McFarlane Toys. Besides the McFarlane Companies, McFarlane's investments include the Mark McGwire 70th home-run baseball, which he bought in 1998 for $3 million US, and a minority interest in the Edmonton Oilers’ hockey club.
* Awards: 1998 Ernst & Young Arizona Entrepreneur of the Year (communications, entertainment category).
* Heroes: Father Bob McFarlane, a Calgarian; and baseball pitcher Steve Carlton.
* Passions: Playing baseball, watching Wayne Gretzky highlight reels.
IN PROFILE: McFarlane Companies
* Brass: Todd McFarlane, CEO; Larry Marder, president; Steve Peterson, chief financial officer.
* Profile: The McFarlane Companies are a multi-faceted range of entertainment organizations, including McFarlane Toys, McFarlane Toys Canada, Todd McFarlane Productions, Todd McFarlane Entertainment, McFarlane Collector’s Club and McFarlane Worldwide.
* Accolades: Todd McFarlane’s Spawn, the
animated TV series on HBO, won an Emmy in 1998 for best animated programming. Korn’s ‘Freak on a Leash’ video, co-directed by McFarlane, won a 2000 Grammy for best music video.
* Web site: www.spawn.com
* Headquarters: 1711 W. Greentree Drive, Ste. 208, Tempe, Arizona 85284.
* Phone: 480-491-7070.