Mark Waid Quotes
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Anyone can write a detective story about a detective who fails, for Pete's sake. That's pretty unambitious.
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What I've found over the years working on various projects is, you can have a clever book or clever tagline, but there has to be a story to go along with it that leads to something bigger. Something with a little more texture to it.
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There are other ways to create tension and drama than to have somebody stabbed through the back with a sword.
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We want the reading experience of digital comics to be as simple as tapping a tablet or an arrow key or mouse button to move forward or back.
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It's always an amazing gift to be able to work with storytellers who 'get it' and who can not only draw anything but can draw it better and more dynamically than you'd ever envisioned.
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The beauty of Captain America is that you didn't have to come from a distant planet, like Superman, or he didn't have to be born into a family of billionaires like Bruce Wayne. He happened to be in the right place at the right time, and someone gave him a magic potion, and he grew muscles and became a superhero.
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Know what your characters want, know what they need most, know what they fear most, and don't be fearful of facing it, no matter how unpleasant it may be.
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Captain America is an interesting character because it makes you ask those questions in yourself as a writer. What do we want as a nation, what do we mean as a nation, what is our role in the world as a nation? What are our strengths and weaknesses as a country?
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I knew I really wanted to work in comics in 1979.
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Each time I think I've made a connection with someone... once they find out what I can do, whether it's hours or days later, everything changes. Invariably they freak. They get retroactively paranoid, wondering what else Clark Kent is hiding from them.
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Years ago, I was asked to come up to do a store signing in Vermont. The short version is the two younger guys who own the store pick me up at the airport and start driving me around Vermont, showing me the sights and the textile mills and the restaurants, and the punchline is there's no store. There is no store!
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Hulk fans are impossible to please.
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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.
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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.'
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Real science is the greatest, most exciting springboard I have available to me as a writer, and I don't feel the least bit constrained by it.
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Juggling a huge cast is a bear.
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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.
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The problem with most digital comics is that you're simply taking print material and adapting it. It's like reading through a cardboard tube.
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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.
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The nice thing about working with BOOM! on 'Irredeemable' and 'Incorruptible,' man, was they let me have my head. No one said boo about anything.
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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.
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I genuinely enjoy the puzzle put before me with a crossover - how do I use this bigger piece of the Marvel Universe to tell a character-based tale I wouldn't normally think to tell?
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I love what Max Landis is doing with 'Superman: American Alien.' That's a really good book.
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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.