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Nobody does capes like Todd McFarlane.

Since his work began in the 1980s, McFarlane has been redefining the most iconic aspect of superhero costuming. Fans of his creator-owned character Spawn are, of course, familiar with Al Simmons's hellish cloak, but I'll remind you that McFarlane's capes were making waves (heh) even before that, such as in a Batman design that still remains a favorite among Gothamites. But even before that 'even before,' McFarlane was spending time developing his skill in superhero fashion, and in a recent conversation, I got a special window into that era.

McFarlane and I were chatting in advance of his latest Spawn project, Spawn '77, which takes aspects of his prototype for the Spawn character and works it into an all-new, Hellspawn-adjacent antihero. Naturally, the character currently known as Spawn '77 is rocking a badass red number not dissimilar from his modern-day counterpart, and this inspired McFarlane to bring up why his capes stood out so much in the superhero landscape.

"If you're going to do a cape and there's 200 characters that have a cape," the iconic artist said of his early days, "How do you distinguish yours? So I go, 'Okay, we better try something a little bit different.' I was always a big Batman fan anyway; he's got a big cape. So I just took the things that I liked and then just put them on steroids, essentially."

For Spawn in particular, that philosophy boiled down to McFarlane going, "'Yeah, well, Batman's got a big cape. My guy's got a bigger cape.'" Even more specifically, though, McFarlane recalled one particular era of his beloved DC hero that his designs were inspired by.

"The first cape I ever saw," McFarlane said, "That I went, 'How does that work when he's not moving?' was from an artist named Marshall Rogers. He was doing a short run on Detective Comics, and he drew these fantastic capes that I just went. 'Oh, man, look at how big it is!' It was bigger than anything - it still might be bigger than anything that anybody's drawn on Batman. I never forgot that. I just went, 'Oh, dude, if I ever if I ever get to draw a comic book, I'm going to do like Marshall Rogers meets John Byrne.'"

"John Byrne had really good capes that were alive," he continued, "There was a lot of motion in when they were flying. It felt like they were being stretched from the wind. If they were, you know, pounding somebody or getting caught in explosion, it felt like the cape was billowing. I thought that the cape was part of the art. So I just went, 'Man, someday, when I do capes, I'm going to I'm going to combine all this cool stuff that I like."

Todd McFarlane's Spawn is available now wherever you get your comics. Spawn '77 arrives on shelves September 9.

Interested? Here's where to find your closest local comic store, courtesy of Sweet, and here's a guide to how (and where) to read comics online.