Mark Waid
By coincidence and not design, 'Everstar' is written and drawn by an all-female creative team, and it makes me smile to think that there may be young female readers out there, future writers and artists, who get to see that comics doesn't have to be a 'boys' club.'Collection: Smile
Especially in the digital age, people want everything now, now, now.Collection: Age
A superhero is someone who, at some point or in some way, inspires hope or is the enemy of cynicism.
Everyone knows what it's like to make the wrong decision for the right reasons. For me, wrong decisions are the heart of drama - a character who's always making the right decisions is boring.
I love the challenge of taking established, iconic comics characters and showing readers why they remain contemporary.
Heroism is heroism, regardless of the timeframe or the backdrop.
The first rule of new media is nobody gets rich, but everybody gets paid, in a perfect world. Maybe you don't get fabulously wealthy doing your webcomic, but as long as you can make a decent living.
In Marvel Comics, the worst thing was always that your loved ones could be attacked, or you could be horribly beaten in a knock-down, drag-out fight, but in the Superman comics, you would be run out of town with people throwing rotten vegetables at you and waving a sign that said, 'Superman, Who Needs You?'
There is a reductive nature to the Internet, and it's not limited to comic book news sites and stuff: it's everybody. There is a reductive nature of it, by which anything that's said very quickly gets reduced down to the next. Reduced, reduced, reduced to the point where rumors with some sense of nuance to them just become fact.
All of us who grew up reading comics love the memory of sitting under an apple tree with a comic book in one hand and a peanut butter sandwich in the other; the tactile sensation of the paper on the skin and so forth is part of the experience.
Younger characters are just much more emotional.
Maybe this is because I'm a comics historian as much as anything else, but I really have a deep-seated respect for the characters that have been around since before I was born and are probably going to outlive me.
I don't write stories about despair. I write stories about hope.
I do like Hank Pym.
It's Marvel's toybox; I'm just glad I'm able to play with the toys and have some impact on what goes on. I didn't create Daredevil, so I'm not about to stand here and say that I'm the only one who gets to play with the toy.
Indestructible does not mean utterly invincible.
What sets 'Archie' apart from the many, many times I've reworked and rebooted long-standing characters is that this time, it was really scary.
The idea of lasting consequences isn't your usual 'Archie' trope.
Juggling a huge cast is a bear.
I love Jughead. I love his one-step-removed perspective on everything in Riverdale. And I love the fact that he wears that stupid hat.
I knew I really wanted to work in comics in 1979.
I broke into comics by working as a press reporter for the industry, for a trade press in comics, and reporting on events and reporting on books and so forth, and I got to know some of the editors at DC Comics in the mid-'80s.
I think superheroes are about flying. They're not about moping.
You don't want to hit readers over the head like they're completely incapable of picking up on subtlety.
Find me anybody in comics who has a longer history of yanking defeat from the jaws of victory than Bruce Banner.
When they first asked me to do 'Hulk,' my first instinct was to say no because I didn't think I had anything to say with the character, especially when they said, 'Please do what you did with 'Daredevil,' whatever that was.'
If you go back and look at the first issue of 'Indestructible Hulk,' if you have a sharp eye, you'll catch something that I totally forgot to put in there. In my horror, I only realized after the fact that I took totally for granted that everyone in the world knows what triggers the transformation.
I love 'Archie' comics.
If I wanted to write a bunch of comics about 50-year-olds sitting around having a conversation about politics, that would be realistic, but it'd be the dullest comic in the world.
What's interesting is that younger characters just have a more vibrant, exciting point of view on the world. They are more emotional, they are more dramatic, and they are just electric.
I wouldn't mind taking a stab at... I'd love to take a shot at 'Doctor Strange' at some point.
I like being able to have a conversation. I like being able to do a vocal interview.
I know my 'Archie' history.
Certainly, your characters - whether they are superheroes are not - should have foibles. They should have problems; they should have things that their powers can't solve. That's what makes them nuanced, interesting characters. They can have intense motivations. They should have intense motivations to do what they do.
I'm a big veteran of being able to, in one comic, explain to you everything that you need to know to get forward in the story without you having to refer back to years of continuity and a universe in these superhero comics.
I respect people of faith, but I'm not one.
When I was a kid, what captivated me about detective fiction were the puzzles more than the detectives or their enemies. And as I've gotten older, I see a lot of merit in setting your investigative sights higher than figuring out how someone stole Encyclopedia Brown's bicycle.
Anyone can write a detective story about a detective who fails, for Pete's sake. That's pretty unambitious.
Every ongoing character has to start somewhere.
Hulk fans are impossible to please.
I don't know if you'd do a Marvel story on Ferguson, because it trivializes what the real flesh-and-blood people on the ground are doing there. But you can make an allegory and deal with the bigger questions.
I'm a big fan of when you model a character as someone with a biological origin, doing deep dives and a lot of research.
We have a lot of supergeniuses in the Marvel universe, but very few of them are women.
When you're a kid, regardless of the age you grew up, everything is high opera. With hormones raging, you have to fight external and internal battles that you've never had to deal with before. Unlike Tony Stark and Steve Rogers, who have seen it all and been through it all, everything heightens the drama.
I love writing comedy.
I'm not a big fan of the George Lucas school of meddling and tinkering. That's a slippery slope.
I'm a great salesman when I believe in a product that somebody else is producing, but I always feel very awkward and clumsy asking for money for my work.
If you're ruling the world, you can't trust anybody. Because even those who profess to be working in your interest - those are also villains in and of their own right.
When I first did 'Empire,' it was a severe break from everything I'd written up to that point, which is all very continuity-driven, super-heroic, and ethics and morals-infused. 'Empire' was a chance to break away from that.
To my mind, a mix of veterans and rookies is number one on the list of 'things that make a good Avengers team.'