We had an extensive and luxurious chat on the phone with Todd McFarlane, creator of the line and writer of the Dragons story, new chapters of which pack out with each new assortment.  We talked about the Dragons line, the backstory, life, death, and a host of other things relating to the Dragons story, sometimes drifting far and wide of the subject of the toys and deep into esoteric territory. Here on these two pages, we hope to convey some of the meaning that was gained from those two conversations, and to shed some light on the darker corners of the McFarlane’s Dragons figure line. 
     

    

     With something as fantastical as a Dragons line, perhaps the last thing you’d expect as inspiration for it would be something totally practical in a business sense. What it all boiled down to, at least initially, was an attempt to get the kind of product Todd McFarlane wanted to do into stores.
    “In its simplest form, we had a pretty good run on doing monsters, and that word is near and dear to my heart,” said McFarlane.  “But with Movie Maniacs, and Terminator and things like that, with R-ratings, you’re somewhat limited to where you can put the product up on the shelf.  So the question became, how do we continue to do monsters and find shelf space for it?  For me, Dragons sort of fits that bill, where you can do cool and crazy stuff, but call it a Dragon – it’s fairly innocuous and you can put it anywhere, anytime, any place -- whether it’s Wal-Mart or a specialty store that deals with nothing but fantasy and crystals and stuff like that.   So, that was sort of the genesis of us putting the line together.”



     If you’re an attentive reader, the elaborately detailed back story, written entirely by Todd McFarlane, might strike you as something like Planet of the Apes meets Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World meets the Bible.   It’s about a world dominated by Dragons — they’re the intelligent species on the planet, the ones at the top of the food chain.  When humans are introduced into the scenario they are “the pets” as McFarlane calls them, and for the Dragons the humans are the “bad guys,” not the other way around.  By Chapter 5 of the Dragons story, where we’re at now, the humans, along with the extreme tribalism of the Dragons themselves, are becoming a real threat to the continuance of Dragon “civilization.”  When the first meaningful encounters between humans and Dragonkind are made, it’s all suddenly a bit like Charleton Heston looking up from the dragnet and there’s the ape on top of the horse, with the gun, speaking English.  It’s a lot like that in fact.    
   


     So, what’s the message here? What’s the author driving at ultimately?  “I think we, and by that I mean the human race, have a fairly big ego,” said McFarlane.  “It’s always about us, and about the Id.  So what I’ve done is just taken a one-piece of what we are as humans, which is communication, and asked — what if it wasn’t us teaching the communication?  What if we were the pets?  What if they talked and we didn’t?  And what if, over time, these savages somehow were the creatures that actually had more smarts than we did?  When things go according to the rules we set up and what we know to be true, we’re comfortable.  We’re comfortable until somebody comes along and throws us a curve ball.  Not that I’m saying I mean for people who read the story to be uncomfortable, but maybe we shouldn’t be so full of ourselves at all times [chuckles].  We are always the beginning, the middle, and the end of every single conversation, not only in a world sense but also on an infinity level.  All that we see is because of us — okay — that’s a pretty big ego.”  
     The fall of the Hydra is a huge turning point early in the story of Dragonkind, and is very reminiscent of the fall of Lucifer in the Bible.  Each had a deep and abiding interests in the welfare of their own kind, albeit somewhat at the expense of other kinds, but their views were decidedly different from an opposing faction which ultimately won out. For opposing the winners they were cast out of their domains, literally and figuratively.   This sets up an interesting subplot within the larger context of the Dragons story, and becomes a seething cauldron of food for thought if you’re game for such things.  “If you don’t conform you become an outcast,” said McFarlane.  “And, just because you’re an outcast, that doesn’t necessarily diminish what you may or may not have to offer others.  We have that as sort of a subtext in this story, but you don’t want to be heavy handed with it, because then it becomes like preaching.  You can take these big ideas and render them in different forms, but it still has to be a cool fantasy or comic book story.  That’s the basis of what keeps people coming back I think.”   
    



     If you’ve been paying attention to the line at all up to this point, you’re well aware that there are multiple “clans” that make up the whole of Dragonkind — there are the Water Clan, the Fire Clan, the Komodo Clan, the Berserker Clan, the Sorcerer Clan, and several others — and there’ll be more, both in the story and in the toy line going forward.  Revolution is imminent in the story line – Dragon faction vs. Dragon faction, with human "pets" being used to gather intelligence by one side against the other.  This sets up the impending “Fall of Dragonkind.”  One wonders at this point if the fall will come at the hands of the up-and-coming humans or the Dragons themselves?  Who’s really in control, and who’s not?
     “If we look at it all as we are today, and as if we have the history we have today, then we live in a world where dragons are considered complete and utter fantasy.  That is the danger of losing control.  All of a sudden, not only aren’t you in control, but at some point the bad guys, in this case the humans, will make it seem like you never even existed.   Forget about something being as simple as "might makes right," it goes beyond that, to point where the loser becomes not only physically gone, but becomes a figment of the imagination.  They’ll make it seem like you’re loopy if you even want to think dragons ever existed,” said McFarlane.  It’s often been repeated by students of world history that the winner gets to write the history.  “That’s it, absolutely,” said McFarlane.  “They get to write the history and you get to keep the books they want you to keep.  You’re done buddy.”
     The Dragons are quintessentially tribal, in the best and worst senses of the word, and the story’s author seems to project humanity’s innate and ceaseless intellectual push toward separatism, in everything they do, onto Dragonkind in an attempt to drag that dark-dwelling human foible up into the light of day and to wrestle with it.  “I see, on some level, any being with intelligence, and obviously we humans are at the top of that food chain, that no matter what you do or no matter how you start your utopia, the thought process will start to cut it apart,” said McFarlane.  “The way the Dragons story starts is there’s utopia.  For me, utopia on some levels says that everybody is sort of the same.  As soon as you say ‘we’re Dragon Green and we’re Dragon Orange,’ as soon as you even start that, no matter how friendly everybody is, at that moment segregation is begun.  It may take a million years, or ten thousand, but once you’ve said that you and I are not alike, that we don’t look the same, don’t think the same, don’t talk the same, act the same, that we’re not the same across the board — fwoosh — you’ve divided — fwoosh — it begins.”            
    


     The story line begs for a return of the outcast Hydra, and according to McFarlane he will be back.  And yes there’ll be a Hydra figure.  “And let me tell you,” said McFarlane, “minus all the philosophizing and rhetoric here, this thing just looks cool as hell.”
    Indeed, despite the completely competent craftsmanship of the story and the thoughtfulness it provokes, it’s probably the “look” of the line that most people are responding so well to.  These are clearly the best-looking dragon figures for the buck you’re ever going to get your hands on.  You owe the immensity of their coolness to the McFarlane Design team, based in northern New Jersey, headed up by brothers Ed and Andy Frank.   Ed Frank oversees product design and development of figures from prototype form to decoration, and monitors overseas production.  He’s been with McFarlane Toys since Spawn Series 1.   He directs some fifty in-house designers and approximately fifteen regular outside contractors on projects such as Dragons.  We wanted to know what he and the McFarlane Design team were looking to for inspiration on Dragons.  How are they achieving the look we’re all drooling over?  
    


     “We look at lots of things,” said Frank.  “There’ve been lots of dragon movies, and we look at a lot of dragon art.  We’ve got a lot of reference material on dinosaurs, and reptiles and live animals, and fantasy art, and we look at it and it all just sort of goes into your memory banks.  You try to forget about particular references and draw on all of it collectively.  That’s really how it goes.”
    From its inception, the Water Clan has always featured some of the most interesting and eye-grabbing dragons of the line, and we wanted to know specifically about where those ideas came from.  “I think for the first one we did we were looking at a lot of dinosaur reference, and bits of reference from the Loch Ness type monsters, like the plesiosaurs,” said Frank.  “If you remember that first Water Clan Dragon, it had sort of a tadpole’s tail.  We were really just looking at a lot of aquatic creature reference material, like dinosaurs, reptiles, amphibians, and fish and things with a dinosaur or dragon type feel.”  
   



     Frank confirmed the impending return of the Hydra and its addition to the figure lineup.  “The Hydra will be part of a stand alone boxed set, as I understand it, and won’t technically be part of either Series 7 (late August) or 8 (beginning of November).   It was actually developed separately from it.  It’ll hit sometime in late August.  It’s significantly bigger than the previously released boxed sets,” he said.  And what of the newer clans just introduced into the story line.  Will we see figures of those too, and will they differ in any significant way from what we’ve already seen from the Dragons line?  “I don’t think they’d be noticeably different from the standpoint where you’d look at them and say these are radically different from any of the dragons we’ve already done – they won’t be,” said Frank.  “They’ll fit right in with the previous line in terms of style and decoration.  You’ll notice simply that their features and poses will indicate what their names are.”   



     In Dragons Series 4 and 5, McFarlane decided to introduce scale into the line with the introduction of a lot of human figures on the display bases — not just scale as we came to find out, but the seed of something more.  We dared to wonder outside of the current Dragons box, and asked if any of the human characters in the story rise up to become heroes, and if so, could Todd see including them in the line as 7-inch figures?  “Yes, I think so,” he said, “and here’s why.  I think if we continue to do nothing but Dragons, which I love, we may be sort of shorting ourselves a little bit in the sense that if you like dragons you’ll look at it, but if you don’t you’re out.  The story has a lot of different layers, so we want to broaden the subject matter so that it’s not so much about dragons as it is fantasy lore.   That comes with all the other pieces that we all know like trolls, and giants, and elves and ogres and humans and wizards and fairies and those kinds of words that we all have in the backs of our heads.”