BRM Masters is a series about people who turned relationships into leverage — not by being agreeable, but by being deliberate. First up: the comic-book renegade who spent thirty years proving that fierce independence and deep alliances were never opposites.
You know the moment. You’ve built something — a practice, a product, a name people trust — and someone bigger sits across the table with an offer. Sign here, hand over a little of what’s yours, and we’ll take it from here. They make it sound like the only road that leads anywhere: give up a piece of control, and in return you get the machine. Most people sign. The deal feels like growing up.
Todd McFarlane heard that pitch at the very top of his industry — and said no. Then he built an empire anyway.
The interesting part isn’t the refusal. Plenty of people say no and end up small and alone. The interesting part is what he did instead. The man who would not surrender a single character spent the next three decades multiplying through other people — rivals, legends, shopkeepers, factory managers, the biggest brands on earth. He treated relationships as the one thing he was happy to depend on, precisely because he refused to depend on a corporation.
That instinct has a name. I’ve started calling it Business Relationship Management — the deliberate work of building and using the relationships that decide whether your effort ever turns into results. McFarlane is the first master of it I want to study, because he disproves the lie most founders quietly believe: that you have to choose between owning your work and building on other people. He did both. Here’s how.
The refusal that started a company
In the early 1990s, McFarlane was the highest-paid artist in comics, redrawing Spider-Man for Marvel and reportedly earning around two million dollars a year. And he was miserable about one thing: no matter how many millions of copies he sold, the characters belonged to the company. He was a star renting his own talent.
So in 1991 he walked. But he didn’t walk alone — and that’s the move. In February 1992 he and six other top Marvel artists founded Image Comics on one non-negotiable rule: every creator keeps one hundred percent of what they make. Image would handle printing and logistics and take no ownership of anyone’s characters.
Look closely at what he actually did. He didn’t just quit; he turned six fierce competitors into partners by pointing all of them at the same shared frustration. Rivals who might have spent the decade fighting each other for shelf space instead built an industry-shaking company together. A single artist, however talented, could never have done that. A coalition did it in a year. The first lesson of his career is that the fastest way to make allies of rivals is to name the thing all of you are tired of.
Owning the house meant inviting the best people into it
Here’s where most independent operators go wrong. They win their freedom and then guard it so jealously that no one else is allowed in. McFarlane did the opposite.
His creation, Spawn, launched in May 1992 and sold 1.7 million copies — still a record for an independent comic. He owned it outright. And then he handed the keys, issue by issue, to the most celebrated writers alive: Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Dave Sim, Frank Miller. He invited the legends to play in his house.
Think about the confidence that takes. He wasn’t worried that a bigger name would overshadow him, because he owned the building they were all working in. Ownership didn’t make him isolated; it made him generous, because generosity cost him nothing he was afraid to lose. The lesson: when you’re secure about what’s yours, collaboration stops feeling like a threat and starts working like a multiplier.
He turned the people who sold his work into believers
A great product still has to get to a shelf, and the people who control the shelf have their own pressures. McFarlane understood that better than almost anyone.
In the comic-shop era, he spent real time with independent retailers, learning where their money actually came from and shaping how his books reached them so their shelves stayed stocked with high-margin product. Protect a partner’s economics and they stop being a distributor and start being an evangelist — comic-shop owners pushed his work because his work paid their rent.
Then he did the harder thing: he got collector-grade figures into Walmart and Target, stores that had only ever stocked toys for children. He didn’t ask to fit into their categories. He argued that the adult collector with disposable income was already walking their aisles, unserved — and he held his pricing rather than cheapen the product to hit a discount bracket. He gave the retailers a new customer instead of a lower margin. They made room. The lesson: the strongest relationships aren’t built by asking for a favor; they’re built by solving the other side’s problem better than they could solve it themselves.
He lent his craft to giants
The relationship that may have meant the most to him was the one he didn’t profit from at all. As a Canadian teenager who’d collected hundreds of rejection letters, McFarlane wandered into a comic convention at a Florida hotel and found Stan Lee sitting at a small table. Lee waved him into a chair and talked craft with him for hours. Decades later, McFarlane still called him a mentor — and when Lee built a superhero project around the musician Yoshiki, Blood Red Dragon, McFarlane showed up as its creative director. He lent his name and his eye to someone else’s vision because the relationship had earned it.
That same posture scaled into a business. McFarlane Toys, founded in 1994, made figures so detailed they reset the industry’s standard, and he built it into a company with more than 150 licenses — sports, music, video games like Fortnite, and eventually the master DC Comics license, the 7-inch DC Multiverse line that has run as the collector standard for years and continues through the end of 2026. He didn’t compete with Disney or Warner Bros. or Epic Games. He positioned himself as the premium craftsman they wanted to work with, and every license cross-pollinated a new audience into his own. The lesson: you don’t have to out-muscle the giants. You can become the person they can’t build without.
Even a master breaks a relationship
I promised this wouldn’t be a hagiography, and the honest part matters most, because it’s the part you can actually learn from.
For all his mastery, McFarlane’s most famous relationship ended in a courtroom. When Neil Gaiman wrote Spawn #9 in 1993, he created characters — Angela, Medieval Spawn, Cogliostro — that McFarlane kept using for years. The two never nailed down, in clear and durable terms, who owned what. A handshake-era deal to swap rights fell apart when it turned out McFarlane didn’t fully own what he was offering. Gaiman sued in 2002. The fight ground on for a decade; courts ruled largely in Gaiman’s favor, and they finally settled in 2012, with Gaiman confirmed as a co-owner and McFarlane paying him a reported $382,000.
Here’s the uncomfortable symmetry. The very instinct that built McFarlane’s empire — own everything, surrender nothing— became the fault line in his most creative partnership. Fierce ownership is a strength right up until two people who built something together never agree, in writing, on whose it is. A relationship is a multiplier only as long as the terms are clear and the trust holds. When they don’t, the same energy that compounds your success will compound the damage.
The relationship is the multiplier
Strip away the comics and the action figures and one idea is left standing. Todd McFarlane never gave up control — and he still built almost nothing alone. Rivals became co-founders. Legends became collaborators. Shopkeepers became evangelists. Giants became clients. A mentor became a debt he repaid in kind. Even his hardest rupture taught the rule by breaking it.
Effort has a ceiling. You can only out-work so much. The relationship is the multiplier — and the people who master it don’t choose between independence and alliance. They build the alliances that multiply them, on terms that keep what’s theirs.
Which leaves the only question that matters for you: are you walking into your relationships prepared to make them count, or just hoping they go well?
The people across your table decide whether your work turns into results. Prepare for them the way McFarlane prepared for every deal he ever made — knowing exactly who he was dealing with before he sat down.
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