Q&A: Comics Legend Mark Waid Still Believes a Man Can Fly
With more than 1,500 comics behind him, from his beloved Superman to the iconic ‘Kingdom Come’ series, the writer reflects on his 40-year career and the state of superheroes today
Comic books were as much a part of my childhood as cinema was — and my life revolved around cinema — but something happened in the mid-Nineties that dramatically changed my relationship to the medium. First, I had spent half of a decade obsessively studying illustration, convinced I was destined to become a comic book artist, but right around nineteen it became obvious to me that, while I could get there — meaning, I could bring a story to life on the page, even do so with interesting composition and occasionally innovative flourishes (or so I thought) — it would never come as easily and naturally to me as it did my artist heroes. It was only then that I shifted all of my creative energy to the written word. The other thing that happened was a kind of mass fracturing that took place in almost every corner of the industry. Many creators launched Image Comics and then the two major publishers, DC Comics and Marvel Comics, exponentially expanded their title output to such a degree that my available reading time, bank account, and eventually interest just…
