{"id":781,"date":"2012-12-26T16:51:00","date_gmt":"2012-12-27T00:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.comic-con.org\/toucan\/?p=781"},"modified":"2023-12-13T14:55:22","modified_gmt":"2023-12-13T22:55:22","slug":"mark-waid-a-banner-year-part-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comic-con.org\/toucan\/mark-waid-a-banner-year-part-two\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Waid: A Banner Year Part Two"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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THE TOUCAN INTERVIEW<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Waid: A Banner Year Part Two
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Click here<\/a> for Part One of the Toucan Interview with Mark Waid!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

\"The<\/figure><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Art by Chris Samnee<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Toucan:<\/em><\/strong> So let\u2019s shift gears a little bit and talk about collaborators. Your new steady collaborator seems to be Chris Samnee on both <\/em>Daredevil and <\/em>Rocketeer, and you continue to work with artist Peter Kraus on<\/em> Insufferable after a long run on <\/em>Irredeemable. What makes a great writer-artist collaboration?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark:<\/strong> Communication and total trust; realizing that it\u2019s a collaborative medium; nobody bringing any ego to the table, is what makes it work. Everybody has a bit of a healthy ego if they\u2019re working in the arts, but with Peter and I from the very first days of Irredeemable<\/em> it was always a give and take, it was always a \u201cHey, have you thought about this?\u201d or \u201cHey, you know maybe there\u2019s another way of doing this,\u201d and that\u2019s fine. The scripts begin with me, but it\u2019s not my story. It is my story until such time as I turn the pages over to an editor or turn them over to a collaborator; at that point it becomes our story, and you have to accept that. You have to accept the fact that there\u2019s going to be stuff sometimes that gets drawn that isn\u2019t quite what you had in mind, and maybe that\u2019s a disappointment on rare occasion, but most of the time instead it\u2019s \u201cHoly crap! I never thought about that before,\u201d or that\u2019s a new wrinkle, or that\u2019s a new way of telling the story that I hadn\u2019t seen before. Chris in particular is very good about breaking stories down in a slightly different pacing then I\u2019m used to, and he\u2019s very good at that. Pete is phenomenal when it comes to the stuff that I tend to gravitate towards anyway, which is facial expressions, which is emotion, which is the human moments. I really think that if you\u2019re a writer in comics and you\u2019re not starting every script with \u201cdear artist, here\u2019s my phone number and email, please contact me,\u201d you\u2019re making a horrible mistake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toucan:<\/em><\/strong> A couple months ago there was kind of a little Twitter controversy about working full script or working \u201cMarvel style.\u201d Which do you do?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark:<\/strong> I tend to work full script, at least until such time as I get enough momentum going with an artist where I start to feel like we know each other\u2019s rhythms and at which point I have no objection to shifting to that sort of Marvel style, because mine is a more modified Marvel style anyway. I don\u2019t just turn in a two-page outline of a plot and expect the artist to do all the heavy lifting; that\u2019s not fair to him. Instead, I put tons and tons and tons of dialogue into my plots, even if it\u2019s just rough suggested dialogue, for two reasons. One is that you want the artist to really sort of understand what the character is saying and feeling and also because I want cues for myself a month from now when I\u2019m fighting a deadline and the letterer is waiting for the pages and I\u2019ve got to turn in those script pages overnight and it gives me something to work with. There\u2019s pluses and minuses to each, but I think that the thing I like about full script\u2014if pressed, if I could only choose one for the rest of my life, it would be full script, with the caveat of getting it to an artist and asking him to treat it like a plot. Asking him to treat it like something that it is his job then to adapt as he sees fit and then I will go back and make alterations and tweaks and repacing and so forth and so on to fit the art. So again, a collaborative medium. And even with Insufferable,<\/em> which is full script, when the pages come in before they go off to lettering, I\u2019m constantly moving balloons to different panels or changing the pacing of this line or eliminating dialogue in places because I\u2019m working off of Pete\u2019s storytelling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toucan:<\/em><\/strong> So is that part of the beauty of digital for you?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark:<\/strong> Yeah, because you can make changes like that in a snap, you make edits in a snap. I no longer have to feel that awful about asking an artist to make a tiny change because it\u2019s not like they have to redraw the entire page\u2014just make a quick fix in Photoshop and you\u2019re off to the races.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toucan:<\/em><\/strong> When we first started talking, you mentioned having to sit down at 11:30 PM and get a script ready for Peter Kraus and you said for a \u201cbook.\u201d Do you look at digital comics as books? I mean, is your long-term plan to publish this later on, or is it only going to exist in the digital world?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark:<\/strong> I think there\u2019s room to have it published down the road. I think that my original concept for digital comics was trying to hedge my bets and make it friendly to both digital and print. In other words, when we originally picked the Thrillbent format, we deliberately picked that 4 x 3 ratio of a horizontal screen, specifically following the DC Zuda imprint and Ron Perazza and those guys who came up with that sort of stuff. If you stack one 4 x 3 page on top of another, you\u2019ve got something that\u2019s roughly proportionate to what an American comic page is. So the idea is, \u201cOh we can always just stack our screens one on top of the other and we\u2019ve got printed pages\u201d and we\u2019re off to go. Now as I got into it and we started developing new digital storytelling tools that involve things like repetition and screen swiping to get a different image in or balloons popping in and out and so forth, it becomes obvious that to go to print from that is going to take some interesting production tricks, so we will get there eventually. If there\u2019s a demand for it, I\u2019m fine with publishing these fetish objects that people call books, of which I\u2019m a big fan obviously. I think there\u2019s plenty of room for that. I just want to go digital first, do it that way, play with those tools and then retrofit into print.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u00a9 2012 Thrillbent<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Toucan:<\/em><\/strong> In a recent interview with <\/em>Pace Magazine you stated \u201cthe future is all about digital for me.\u201d Why do you feel that way, and what made you start your own digital comics portal in <\/em>Thrillbent?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark:<\/strong> I\u2019ll take the second question first. What made me start was looking at the cost of print. This is back when I was doing the BOOM! editor-in-chief stuff and BOOM! creative chief officer a few years ago and looking at print costs across the board for all publishers and how insane they were unless you\u2019re one of the top two or three publishers and you\u2019ve got 50% of the market share and your per unit cost is feasible. But if you\u2019re anybody else and you\u2019re doing a comic and it\u2019s got a print run of 5,000 or 6,000 copies and you\u2019re doing a color comic, you\u2019re paying more in printing then you are in everything else put together including editorial and overhead\u2014that\u2019s ridiculous. I\u2019m selling my $4 comic to Diamond for about $1.60 and I\u2019m having to pay a dollar in print costs; that is not a feasible business model. The idea was okay, well we still want to do comics, we still want to do print, but how about we go digital first, try to monetize that enough to make our production costs back, and once we made our production costs back then we can afford to go and print, because we\u2019ll have created a product for which there is now a demand and then issue it that way. So that\u2019s still sort of the long-term business model. Let\u2019s just make our money back in digital. I mean, it would be great to be filthy rich in digital, but I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s going to happen. All I really want to do is break even with Thrillbent<\/em> material so that I\u2019ve made my money back in production costs, and then if I go to print, that becomes straight profit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toucan:<\/em><\/strong> But right now <\/em>Thrillbent is free.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark:<\/strong> Yeah, I know. So you\u2019ve sussed out the flaw in my plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toucan:<\/em><\/strong> So what if you take those comics and turn them into a digital book and in turn you sell that on comiXology or any of the other platforms, as an interim step before going to print?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark:<\/strong> That\u2019s one of several options we have available to us. Obviously, the reason we were free going out is because we wanted to make noise, we wanted to get hits, we wanted to draw eyes to what we were doing, and it\u2019s been very, very successful, and believe me if I had one-tenth the number of people looking at every issue of Daredevil<\/em> as I do every installment of the Thrillbent<\/em> stuff, I would be happy as can be. What\u2019s exciting is by the time we get to late fall, the plan is to have something new every day on Thrillbent. Right now it\u2019s just my strip with Pete, Insufferable,<\/em> but ideally John Rogers, my partner in this, will be doing his series in the new few weeks. We\u2019ll be launching Gail Simone\u2019s thing or something by James Tynion IV or whatever; we\u2019ve got a bunch of things that are in various stages of development with an idea towards getting to a point where there\u2019s something new up everyday. And once that happens, we can experiment with revenue streams. I\u2019m not looking for a one-size-fits-all solution to how you monetize all things Thrillbent.<\/em> I think it\u2019s more exciting and more interesting to say, \u201cOkay, Gail . . . why don\u2019t you try something where it\u2019s free, but if someone wants next month\u2019s installments ahead of time every month for 99 cents, we\u2019ll email them next month\u2019s installment.\u201d And John, what if you try the model by which it\u2019s barebones free to read on the site but if someone wants additional material like pencils or layouts or colors or script pages or behind-the-scenes stuff then for 99 cents they can download it, that sort of thing; or for me just a plain vanilla tip jar. If you like what we\u2019re doing with Insufferable<\/em> and you want to see more of it, please pay me what you think it\u2019s worth and see what that gets us, because we can afford to do that at this point. Doing comics is not insanely expensive. It ain\u2019t cheap. I\u2019m certainly paying more for a month\u2019s worth of Irredeemable <\/em>material than I do on my mortgage, but I sold all my comics to do this. I can carry this for a few more months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So like I said what excites me about that is it\u2019s not that expensive. So I think we\u2019re smart to play with different types of revenue streams and see what works for us. In the meantime, continue to network as we have with the Blind Ferret<\/em> guys, the Penny Arcade<\/em> guys, the PVP<\/em> crew, and talk to the webcomics guys out there who are also creating revenue streams themselves so they can keep doing what they\u2019re doing and mix and match ideas. One of the greatest things about working in digital is the sheer disconnect between comic book professionals and webcomic professionals\u2014this gargantuan gulf I had no idea existed. Because the myth among us comic book folk is that webcomics guys, ah, yeah there\u2019s a couple of them making a little bit of money, but by and large they\u2019re all losing their shirts. You know: little kids doing their little thing on the side, that\u2019s the myth. And the reality of it is, no, actually a lot of guys are making a decent living doing this, a lot of guys. And it doesn\u2019t mean everybody can, but it means that there\u2019s a lot more to that, there\u2019s a lot more money in that ecosphere than you dreamed, and some guys are making really good money doing that stuff. And while making really good money is for me not the goal, it\u2019s just to make enough money to keep doing it, the idea that it can be done is great. And what\u2019s also great about the webcomic community is that I have yet to encounter any sense of selfishness, any sense of proprietary ownership, any sense of trade secrets and people being very hush hush with what they\u2019re doing, because that\u2019s stupid. Comic books tend to do that because we\u2019re selling to an audience of 90,000 people, but among the webcomics guys they seem to get the fact that the potential audience is 6 billion people. There\u2019s room for all of us out there. We\u2019re not worried about competition yet among each other. So that\u2019s the long answer to the question about monetization. So we\u2019ll play with stuff. We\u2019re going to roll out some more stuff in the next couple of months, some more material and play with some different sort of revenue streams, some different ways of monetizing, and just see what works. Pay attention to the feedback from the fans, pay attention to the social networking of it, and see where the needles start to hit the red zone and follow through on that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toucan:<\/em><\/strong> Let\u2019s go back to the first part of that question, which was the quote from another interview you did that said the future is all about digital for me.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark:<\/strong> Yeah it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toucan:<\/em><\/strong> Do you see a point in time when you\u2019re not going to do print comics, not be working for the big publishers?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark:<\/strong> I can\u2019t imagine not being involved in print comics as long as they exist, if for no other reason that it\u2019s the only job I\u2019ve ever had in my life that\u2019s meant anything. If I had a choice, if it was put down to me that I could only do the Thrillbent<\/em> stuff or only do print comics, I\u2019d have to go with Thrillbent<\/em>, because I think that really is the future. I think that there\u2019s your audience. With the spiraling, escalating costs of print and selling 32-page comics or 28-page comics (I guess self-covered 32 pages now) for $4 and you get five minutes of entertainment out of that, I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s a working model, whereas digital is because we can reach everybody who\u2019s got Internet access.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toucan:<\/em><\/strong> You were a special guest at both Comic-Con and WonderCon this past year. What do you enjoy about doing conventions?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark:<\/strong> It\u2019s changed. It\u2019s funny\u2014if you\u2019d asked me 15 years ago, my secret answer would have been I just love getting in the dealers room and diving through the comic books like a porpoise, like Uncle Scrooge and his money bin. I find now that I don\u2019t buy as much at conventions, if anything. So I\u2019ve had to adapt, and what I really enjoy is\u2014it\u2019s a typical answer but it\u2019s true\u2014I like meeting the fans. I like talking to people. I like hearing what they\u2019ve got to say. I like hearing what they\u2019re interested in. And I also like connecting with other professionals. I like being able to talk shop late at night over at the bar. I like being able to grab breakfast with a guy and talk about story and talk about craft. Those are things I really enjoy and it\u2019s great. Again, I can\u2019t thank you guys enough for bringing me out to both shows this year, and I also love the sound of my own voice, so I\u2019m happy to do any panels, any moderation anytime, and actually that\u2019s a big part of it, too. I enjoy doing it. It\u2019s not just because I enjoy the performing aspect of it, it\u2019s that I really enjoy not only talking craft with the creators but doing it in front of an audience. I have many shortcomings as a human being, trust me. I could spend the rest of the morning listing them, but I am a decent interviewer, and this is where my knowledge of comics history, I think, comes in handy in ways that it oddly doesn\u2019t seem to when I go out in the real world. I enjoy having those conversations and being able to ask the Stan Lees and the John Romitas of the world questions that they have not necessarily been asked before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Mark Waid takes on trivia questions during “Stump Mark Waid” at WonderCon Anaheim 2012.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Toucan:<\/em><\/strong> Since you are a comics trivia expert, one of the panels you\u2019ve done for us in the past is \u201cStump Mark Waid.\u201d So has anyone ever asked a question that stumped you?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark:<\/strong> A couple of times. It happens. Generally, it happens when they ask me about my own work, which is the last thing I remember. But you know what, if you stump me, the best thing you can do is not tell me the answer, because then I will be like a junkyard dog. Some guy asked me the other day what was the first time Superman used heat vision in comics? Now, diehard Superman aficionados and of course everybody reading this interview already knows the answer to this, so I apologize for being repetitious. But for the longest time Superman just had X-ray vision, up until the 1960s. His heat vision power was just X-ray vision, because we didn\u2019t know anything about radiation in 1945; we just thought, oh, if he uses his X-rays more, he\u2019ll set things on fire. So at some point science comes into play in the \u201960s and they realize well, maybe we should split that off into its own separate power. So the question from a fan was, what was the first time he used heat vision, and I popped off an answer: Lois Lane<\/em> #10, everybody knows this, come on. Thank you, by the way, for not interrupting my story . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toucan:<\/em><\/strong> I didn\u2019t want to give it away.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark:<\/strong> Exactly. So I say this and he comes back, he sends me an email a couple of days later going actually I don\u2019t think that\u2019s right, and I went and looked and I was completely wrong. And most ordinary men would be able to say, \u201cOh well, that\u2019s a shame, I think I\u2019ll go play ball with my kids or I think I\u2019ll go out and buy the groceries, or I think I\u2019ll go out and work at a soup kitchen, I think I\u2019ll go out and do something to make the world a better place.\u201d But me, no, no, no, no, I spent the next afternoon going through every Superman comic of that era in chronological order until I found the first time Superman uses heat vision. So that\u2019s the best thing . . . if you stump me, just watch me dig and dig and dig until I find the answer. It\u2019ll be entertaining for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toucan:<\/em><\/strong> So what\u2019s the answer? You can\u2019t leave people hanging here.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark:<\/strong> Action Comics<\/em> #275 would be the first time heat vision was its own separate discrete superpower. See\u2014you read the Toucan Interview and you learn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toucan:<\/em><\/strong> So here\u2019s a trivia question for you<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark:<\/strong> Hit me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toucan:<\/em><\/strong> What was Stan Lee\u2019s nickname in high school?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark:<\/strong> I don\u2019t know. You have stumped the man, but since you can\u2019t leave people hanging . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toucan:<\/em><\/strong> It was Gabby. And I know this because Sean Howe\u2019s book, <\/em>Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, is out and he has a great Tumblr thing that he does, which he updates every day, and there was a photo of Stan from his high school yearbook.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark:<\/strong> Oh, I\u2019ve got that on my RSS feed, exactly. I missed that one though. That\u2019s great. I love Stan. One of the great experiences I\u2019ve had in the last five years and one of the biggest, the most lasting things to come out of my relationship with BOOM! was not Irredeemable<\/em> or Incorruptible,<\/em> it was the fact that because we did a bunch of superhero comics with Stan I was able to genuinely become friends with Stan. And I mean not convention friends, and not oh look, he vaguely remembers my name. No it\u2019s kind of cool. I mean he seeks me out at conventions. We\u2019ll sit down and we\u2019ll have a drink, we\u2019ll talk about stuff that\u2019s not I\u2019m a big \u201cTrue Believer\u201d conversation. We\u2019ll have real conversations about craft and about editorial and about the world at large and it\u2019s just, man it\u2019s great, but oh, my God can he talk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toucan:<\/em><\/strong> How do you top this year? You won three Eisner Awards, you got the Comic-Con Inkpot, you just came back from the Harveys in Baltimore and you won three or four awards there.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark:<\/strong> Yes, four counting the Inking Award for Joe Rivera, yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toucan:<\/em><\/strong> At the Eisners you won Best Writer, Best Continuing Series for <\/em>Daredevil, and Best Single Issue, also for <\/em>Daredevil (#7), and you started <\/em>Thrillbent this year, you\u2019re doing a ton of projects, how do you top this year?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark:<\/strong> Apparently, I have to go after the Oscar now. I don\u2019t know. I have resigned myself to the notion that I can\u2019t top this year in terms of the accolades, in terms of all that stuff, because if you start thinking that way then you will just . . . I\u2019ve got enough on my plate without having to worry about how I\u2019m going to top it, because then I really will burn out. I\u2019m just going to put my nose down to the grindstone and just put my head down and just do the work and hope for the best. I don\u2019t know how to top it. I\u2019m sure there\u2019s some glib flip funny answer to that question, but I don\u2019t have it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toucan:<\/em><\/strong> After 25 years as a comics pro and a lifelong love of comics, what still excites you about the medium?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark:<\/strong> Finding new ways to tell stories. That\u2019s the thing, the simplest little thing. When you come up with a way of doing stuff that nobody has done before, the simplest little stuff. I hate doing this, but I don\u2019t know any other way to do it except by example. I believe I can take credit for being the guy who changed whisper balloons from being dotted lines around standard balloons to sort of gray tone faded back\u2014you know, fainter stuff. I suggested that like 15 years ago with something, and just that moment of discovering that idea of here\u2019s a way of doing something in comics that we\u2019ve not done before, I lived off that for six months, that excitement for six months. And now with digital we do it all the time. You know, how do you do a rack focus in comics, a static medium that you can now do with digital? That sort of thing just keeps me pumped up and keeps me excited. It\u2019s not so much what I buy at the comic store that gets me excited, it\u2019s watching how I and others are learning new storytelling things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a kid at Baltimore. Kid, he\u2019s probably 35. He comes up to me with this app. He\u2019s done his own comic and he\u2019s going to sell it as an app, a digital comic and it looks pretty good, but he\u2019s done this thing with it that is phenomenal, which is if you\u2019re scrolling left to right that\u2019s how you change pages. But if you scroll up and down that\u2019s when you start to see different levels of the work. In other words, if you scroll down, you peel the lettering away and then you peel the coloring away to see the pencils and then you peel the pencils away to see the layout, for a process junkie or for anybody who wants additional information about how it\u2019s done. It\u2019s a simple little thing, but I didn\u2019t think of that, and that is brilliant and honestly that\u2019s got me chopped all week long. I\u2019m talking to this guy about oh my God get a patent on that and I will license it because that\u2019s great. It\u2019s just that sort of stuff, whether I come across it or whether you come across it, or some random guy at some convention comes up and says look what I did, that\u2019s great, and that\u2019s where digital gives me the chance to find all new stuff to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toucan:<\/em><\/strong> But in a sense it\u2019s almost like it\u2019s 1935 again, when people started doing comics for the first time that weren\u2019t reprints from comic strips and they didn\u2019t know how to do it and they just made it up as they went along, it\u2019s the same thing with digital.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark:<\/strong> That\u2019s a good point, and I think you\u2019re absolutely right and that\u2019s what makes it exciting and that\u2019s how you break ground, man. You just get in there and you don\u2019t know how it works, so you\u2019re just going to figure out on the fly.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Written by<\/p>\n\n\n

Comic-Con International<\/div>\n\n\n

Published<\/p>\n\n\n