Calgary Expo 2024 Todd McFarlane Panel

May 1, 2024 at 8:32pm
By Jason Stettner

At the Calgary Expo 2024 there was a Todd McFarlane panel at the BMO Center main stage where he went over his career. It was mostly focused on a Q&A style presentation, with lots of questions and some good answers along the way.

This was honestly one of the strangest panels I’ve ever visited, well outside of the bizarre Gina Carano panel that came afterwards I guess. Anyways, McFarlane is a bit of a heavy hitter here in Calgary. He commands the crowd well and was very liked the last time I saw him at the Expo many years prior. For whatever reason, I’m assuming someone bothered him ahead of the show about it or something but he came on and blabbed about NFTs for fifteen minutes straight. It was really and rather odd, I saw some folks from the crowd leave after awhile into this.

There was this whole caveman analogy about how the older generations find the younger generations lazy which was great, but really didn’t help with his whole NFT thing. He went on about comparing to being of about the same value as a photo of someone’s grandchild which was kind of insane? I’m sorry, a picture of a moment in time of someone’s life has more real value than that of a virtual toy.

Or, at least it should. He also went on about how people in other countries that can’t afford the great toys he makes can own them virtually, which also isn’t the same. He does have a good point that if you don’t like it, don’t consume it. I wish I could have opted out about hearing about NFTs for fifteen minutes of my life, it was bizarre and honestly uncomfortable.

After the whole Todd McFarlane lives for the NFTs phase that killed the crowd he did really kick into high gear. He started to showcase various toys he’s been making and ones that he signed for the people asking questions which was awesome. He went on about the creation of the original Spawn design here in Calgary around Crowchild.

That he married him and his wife are both from Calgary, having been together since they were thirteen. That right from high school he went and got hired at Marvel due to inspiration from John Burn, the number one comic artist ever who did some stellar X-Men efforts. This stuff all really worked up the audience and was interesting, just like the prior time I saw him on the Calgary Expo stage here many years ago.

Past that, about how Marvel doesn’t give raises but will trick folks into maybe accepting work on characters they’re passionate about and how you need to leave jobs to go higher. He really got tired of Marvel trying to interrupt his work as his Spider-Man comics were the top sellers. He left for DC after being disappointed by Marvel’s disruption of his work on comics. It was specifically a comic where someone had a knife in Juggernaut’s eye that Marvel removed, issue seventeen where he quit.

With that he celebrated thirty years of Spawn, the longest running self owned comic book and that you shouldn’t even try to compete or have a dream of doing so as you can’t beat him. Don’t follow your dreams for decades, pick easier goals Todd mentioned. Be sure to advocate for yourself as well. That about sums everything up, we have additional panel and other coverage from the show in our hub.

View our Cameron Monaghan Panel Coverage
View our Calgary Expo 2024 Hub