Batman/Spawn #1 is the most exciting crossover of the year, coming from writer Todd McFarlane and artist Greg Capullo. The 48 page crossover will bring together DC Comics' Dark Knight and Image Comics' Hellspawn for the first time in years. The issue will also reunite McFarlane and Capullo, whose creative talents distinguished Spawn early on, making him arguably the most successful comic character of all time outside of DC and Marvel.

We spoke with Todd McFarlane and Greg Capullo about their collaboration, what distinguishes Batman from Spawn, and what fans can expect from the upcoming crossover, which releases on December 14th, 2022. The story will feature Batman and Spawn teaming up to defeat a Dark Knight villain, the Court of Owls. Additionally, the crossover will feature variant covers by Capullo, McFarlane, Jorge Jiménez, Sean Gordon Murphy, Jason Fabok, Jim Lee, Gabriele Dell'Otto, Francesco Mattina, J. Scott Campbell, and Brett Booth.

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Screen Rant: With this being the third, Batman/Spawn crossover, what makes this one different from the others? And what can fans expect this time around?

Todd McFarlane: This would hopefully build back to what we expected when we bought books when we were kids, or when we did the first crossover, which is get people in our industry to get excited and remind them why they even started collecting anyways. Sometimes it's for moments like this, where you just have these fun, over the top, "what if?" type things that now become reality. So if we can literally replicate some of that enthusiasm that we felt when we were kids collecting, and/or what people hopefully were thinking about the first go around 25 years ago, but it's a new generation. And so it's time for us to basically throw a party for them, the current comic book collector. A fun, cool, great-looking book, that hopefully I can write a story that, you know, is entertaining. That's it, right? And we're not doing anything that's super deep or meaningful. We're just doing a hell of a comic book. What's wrong with that?

Greg Capullo: Fun times.

Screen Rant: I think a lot of what resonates with fans about Spawn is the pure sense of enthusiasm and the spirit of creating a cool-looking book. What does Spawn allow you to express that's different from other characters, including Batman?

Greg Capullo: Speaking for me, Spawn is a lot more freestyle. And granted, there are parts of him that are pain in the ass, like the chains, but because he's so organic, and his costume is alive, he's got the energy, it's a lot like just playing with shapes. I used to tell people, they'd chuckle, and I go, "I just use my favorite shapes," because your hand just likes to do certain things, you know, you got your snap to it, your flow to it, which is cool. And with Spawn I can really get off on that. And so when I'm playing with these little bits of exaggerations and freeform styling [that's] there for Spawn, it's not so much there for Batman. Batman is played a little more straight. Spawn, I get this free, natural, bendy, silly puttiness to him that is a joy.

Screen Rant: We definitely get the sense with your Batman run during New 52, for instance, these very straight, rigid lines. And so it's very exciting to think about just those visual contrasts between Batman and Spawn.

Greg Capullo: Yeah, one is very monolithic. My Batman is very monolithic, as I intended him to be, and Spawn is just wild, you know what I mean? So that's good to have those juxtaposed against each other. If everything's the same volume, the same speed, it's kind of boring, really. I think it's a good, fine mix.

Todd McFarlane: And I'm trying to pull some of those differences out in the writing a bit too. Not only do they have their similarities visually, and their differences, as Greg talked about, but the both those pieces apply to their personalities, too. So do I think they're both badasses and creatures of the night? Yes. Do they both want to destroy evil where it stands? Of course they do. Do they have, at times, completely different methods to get there? Yes. Has it served them both in a fashion that has allowed them to survive a long, long warfare? Yep. So is one a better method than the other? Not really. It's worked for both of them. They're still here fighting. And so I'm going to touch upon that in the story, and some of their conversations without getting too wordy in the book and making it a psych meeting, which I think I could do, literally. I think these two characters up on a debate stage would be fascinating to listen to for an hour. But that may be another book for another day. And Greg is obviously doing it visually. So we'll get to have some fun with it.

Screen Rant: In terms of collaboration, what's it like working together again after all these years? What's been your favorite part of this collaboration?

Greg Capullo: Well, the first, easiest answer: joy. It's a joy.

Todd McFarlane: Happy, happy. Joy joy.

Greg Capullo: Scott Snyder and I have been on multiple panels together. And when I'm asked my favorite time in comics, it drives him insane. But I say, and it's the truth, working with Todd. It's been the most fun I've ever had in comics. Not say I've not had fun with Scott or Fabian Nicieza, or anybody I've worked with, it's all been fun. But work with Todd, maybe because he's a fellow artist, I'm sure that's a component. We have similar personalities, that's a component, we have the same sensibilities with storytelling, that's a component. We're both raised doing things Marvel style, which is not full script, very loose. That's a big component. Todd is a joy to work with. And in all my time and years working with him, there's been never anything where he told me I can't, or "can you change this," or, "do it this way, or do it that way." And no matter what I handed in, he would make it work.

And I look back at some of that Spawn stuff, and I had gotten so out of my mind. It was like an acid trip, how cartoony I got. I look at it now, because I was just playing with shapes and not worrying about draftsmanship as much, and he never blinked, never said, "Hey, can you rein it in." So working with Todd is the easiest, most fun thing. And, we've remained close throughout all these years, and if anything, we've gotten closer, in the years that we've been apart. So coming back together on a character that he created, that I'm very familiar with after drawing so much, and working with my good longtime partner and friend, it's nothing but joy. I mean, the deadlines is the only thing sucking a little bit of the fun out of it, but you can thank the lawyers for that *laughs*. But it's all good, because I think the fans are going to see the joy and the fun on the page. Because when you're in a good mood about what you're doing, and you're happy, I think it shows up. And I definitely think looking at my own pages here, as I'm working, I think that it shows up on these pages, and that the fans are gonna feel it in a visceral way.

Todd McFarlane: Just to add to that, Greg sort of gave away the simple formula. As somebody who's lived in the trenches of drawing and known how hard it is, if you can keep your artist engaged, and entertained and happy – the easiest way to do that is to lean on them from time to time and say, "What do you want to draw? What gets you excited?" Not, "My story all the time. I'm the writer, I'm the writer on the writer." But asking, "Who's your two favorite villains of this character?" I wish some of the writers I worked with in the past would have asked me those questions. Just give me one for every four of yours, right? Just sort of say, "Hey, Todd, what bad guy would you have wanted to put in on Spider-Man, or the Hulk, or whatever." Because Greg said it: if you're enjoying it, it should show up on the page. And at the end of the day, that's all you want. Because if it's showing up on the page, in theory, it should be a cooler comic book. That's all we're in business of trying to sell, exciting, cool comic books, interesting comic books. So and we're in a visual medium, right?

So the story I understand, plays a big, giant component on it. But never ever and maybe, I'm biased because I'm an artist, never underestimate the value of what the art is. And I've said it before, this is an easy formula, right? You got two choices. I'm gonna give you two choices: you can either buy the comic book that's got the cover and interior artwork by Michelangelo, and it's written by my mom, or you can have the comic book that's written by William Shakespeare, and it's drawn by my mom. I don't know, if you can only pick one, I'm betting 99.99%, other than William's mom, is going to take a good looking book, and be a little bit bummed out that Mom didn't write to the standard of the artwork. But if you've got a great story and mediocre to bad artwork, it hurts. It hurts. It hurts the story. So Greg, being happy and enthusiastic will just show on the pages and here we go.

Screen Rant: Absolutely. Going back to characters and villains, why did you decide to go with a Batman villain for this crossover? Because Spawn has this very interesting mix of both the demonic but then also the human.

Todd McFarlane: My decision was that the mythology of Batman, and his world, and DC and its universe, AND the characters of the last 30 years that have been growing in Spawn, if you add that all up together, it's overwhelming. And, I stopped and went, "What do we want to put in the book?" and ultimately, what I wanted to put in the book was what the title of the book was: Batman and Spawn. And if we start running three of the biggest villains from Spawn's side and three of the biggest villains from the Batman side, and then maybe do Lex Luthor in there, or whatever, it's gonna get complicated. And we knew that we only had 48 pages in one issue. Maybe we would have written a different story, Greg would have drawn a different story, if we knew we were going to do three issues.

We had one shot at telling one story, and I didn't want to complicate it. So we either have Batman come over onto the side of the fence, which is the Spawn universe, or Spawn comes over and jumps into the DC Universe. And I chose that jump over there and have no regrets for it. It's obviously a longer, more historic side of the fence anyways, so go on that side. And then we wink at both sides of the fence throughout the story. And come up with a group of villains, the Court of Owls, that work fairly flawlessly in both the universes, because Spawn's have been around a long time, and Court of Owls have been around for a long time. So good choice, Greg. And oh, by the way, the choice of Court of Owls was Greg's. So that was that. Greg and I would go mad if we could just draw all of our favorite Spawn and Batman characters, but it wouldn't be the book that we could tell in one sitting. We got one crack at Batman/Spawn, let's tell Batman/Spawn as much as possible.

Greg Capullo: Yeah, there was only one other character I thought to recommend and that was the Batman Who Laughs. It was never going to be Joker. You know, because there's so much Joker out there, and I love the Joker, and I loved doing Death of the Family and all that, and everything else that I've done with the Joker on Batman. But the other character that Scott and I co-created was the Batman Who Laughs, and that turned out to be really a popular character who I felt was dark and had the perfect– I mean, he's got the spikes like Spawn, he's got the Batman elements. You go wow, that one really melds them, but to me doesn't have the mystique that the Court has. And so I felt that Todd would probably be able to come up with something really cool, and my consolation was that I still have the Talons to play with. So I still get to get somebody who can hang in this kind of environment with these other trained fighters. So I just go, "Yeah, that's the cooler mix."

And you've been seeing too much, I think, already of the Batman Who Laughs. The Court, to me, is the coolest thing that Scott Snyder created when we were on Batman, and I tell him it all the time. I go, "The fact that you injected this into the Batman mythos, after all these decades of Batman, and you give him this thing that's been under your nose for four hundred years, I just think that was just the most brilliant thing he's ever done. And so now to be able to include them in the story, it's hats off to Scott, for sure. And it feels good and comfortable. And it's just fun. You know, it's great.

Todd McFarlane: Just to touch on that for a moment, the Batman Who Laughs is a visual masterpiece that Greg had. I think that it actually is a smarter move, inadvertently, that Greg chose the Court of Owls. Because if we went with the Joker, or the Batman Who Laughs, it would have been like dark on dark on dark. Right? gothic on gothic on gothic, and we would have been hitting the same drumbeat a little bit. The Court of Owls, sort of society, is a little more grounded, to just give us a bit of a break in the storytelling, instead of it being all fantastic. I think Batman and Gotham need normality from time to time, even though it's this fantastic group here, but I think it helps.

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Batman/Spawn #1 will be released by DC Comics on December 14th, 2022.