The always entertaining, always busy Mark Waid took some time out of what you will see is a very hectic work schedule to talk to us about his current projects. He dishes on Daredevil and Hulk at Marvel, as well as his digital comics website Thrillbent, his upcoming take on the Green Hornet, and the Gender Through Comics MOOC he will be part of come April. As if that wasn’t enough, he even gives his thoughts on The Private Eye digital comic by Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin.
Mark Waid: I think you’re right that it got rapped by some people as fun and lighthearted, and in fact I don’t think that’s the case. It’s not that I am writing a book that is in tone fun and lighthearted. What I am doing is concentrating on a character who is at heart fun and lighthearted. That doesn’t mean the world around him doesn’t have to stay in the consequence-free Silver Age utopia that other characters are used to dealing with.
The trick for me is no matter how dark I make the consequences or the stories or the climax of the action, Matt has got to stay hopeful. Matt has got to stay true to his integrity and not fall down the rabbit hole of cynicism and darkness again. It’s a constant struggle for him. He deals with depression issues, he deals with having lived a lot of his life recently in a deep dark hole, and now he’s clawed his way out of it and now he can feel its magnetic attraction.
It would be so easy sometimes to just fall back into darkness and let it swamp you, where it’s an effort to get up and live a life that he wants to live rather than a life that he feels is thrust upon him. Even as things get dark around him, he’s aware of the life he wants to live.
IGN: A big part of keeping him from that darkness has been his best pal Foggy. They had a rift between them which was recently made all better, but after that came even darker news that Foggy has cancer. That’s a topic that’s really heavy for superheroes in general because while they can stop bank robberies and fight robots, they can’t fight cancer in the same way. Can you comment on what made you add that element to your story?
Waid: I was hesitant at first because it seemed like such a dark way to go. And I also didn’t want to do the 800th “Oh he has cancer in a superhero book! What will the superhero do? Surely there’s a way to fix it! Oh wait, you can’t beat cancer.” I don’t want to do that kind of story. You know, the story where Daredevil walks around the Marvel Universe for an issue trying to get people to cure cancer for him and being told, “We can go to the Negative Zone, Daredevil, but we can’t cure cancer.” So that’s the first trap you have to avoid when doing that kind of story. And second, it’s so dark a circumstance, and I like Foggy.
So I was on the fence. But what this does is, Matt has been dealing with his depression issues and Foggy has been his constant. The thing he sort of clings to and his best friend. And if you give Foggy a similar chronic disease, something that is equally as debilitating to Foggy, now you’ve got a whole new take on their friendship. Now you’ve got two guys dealing with two huge, huge problems, and now how they rely on each other sort of balances the friendship. It’s no longer Daredevil and sidekick, it’s two guys in this together who are going to help each other out as best they can.
I’m not interested in writing a story where Foggy just gets cancer and dies the next issue and it’s sad all for shock value. I don’t think anybody who has read my body of work would think that I would want to do that. I don’t write stories about despair. I write stories about hope. And I can’t say what the outcome of Foggy’s situation will be but I will say that what this story is to me is not a doom and gloom one but how you cope with something like that and how you find your inner heroism through fighting something like that, which is something Daredevil has done all his life. This gives Foggy a chance to mirror that same circumstance. Does that make any sense?
IGN: Yeah, totally. It's difficult material but it sounds like you're taking a wise approach.
To segue from one dark thing to another, Daredevil: End of Days by Brian Michael Bendis started up not too long ago. That book is about as dark as things can go given what happens in the first issue alone. Does having such a different take on Daredevil coming out alongside your book have any effect on you?
Waid: Nah! First off, it’s good. Secondly, it’s not my toybox. 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.
IGN: Understood. So issue #23 was Daredevil’s first issue where it joined Marvel NOW!
Waid: Right. That’s why we did those opening sequences recapping his origin but not really. The Marvel NOW! issue is going to be a lot of people’s jumping on point, so I wanted to do a quick up-to-speed for brand new readers and at the same time I didn’t want to just rehash the origin, so that’s why we did it the way we did.
IGN: Yeah, that was very well done. Even though people who know Daredevil have seen it before, it was still an interesting read thanks to how you executed it. Has the status quo changed at all because this is Marvel NOW!?
Waid: Nothing changes except the branding on the cover. If you remember, there were only a tiny handful of titles that didn’t relaunch with a new #1 when the Marvel NOW! initiative came along, and Daredevil was one of the very few that didn’t. We could have done that and gotten a sales bump, but it would have felt cheap because we were only 23 issues in. So nothing changes, it just brings us in line with the rest of the Marvel line. The cover layout is different with the Marvel NOW! banner, but nothing changes. It’s just a way of getting a little more attention for us.
IGN: With the character now in Marvel NOW!, where are you taking Daredevil next?
Waid: I will confess that it does get a little darker before it gets lighter. But you will see some guest stars. I do like Hank Pym. I like the Hank Pym/Daredevil dynamic so you’ll see more of him. By the time people read this they’ll see issue #24, and in there it doesn’t make things easier for Matt. Then in issue #25 Matt starts to piece together the clues to who is behind these attacks all this time. And also you see Matt against an all-new villain who is his equal in every way, and that’s all I’ll say about that villain. He is Matt’s equal in every way.
Waid: I had to give them all back stories in my own head, and the most important part of them was the thing that unites them that they don’t realize unites them, that S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn’t realize unites them, that Bruce does realize unites them, and that is that all of them have a secret. All of them have either a secret held inside of them that’s yearning to get out, and that will manifest that in certain ways.
In issue #6 and #7 you’ll see more of that with one of the cast members but we’ll also cycle through the other ones and see what the secrets are and how Bruce can maybe help them. In a way that parallels the way he’s always wanted to cure himself when he’s the Hulk and how he can’t figure out how to do that, but that doesn’t mean he can’t help other damaged people.
IGN: So he’s surrounded himself with a bunch of people who have a similar inner demon like he does?
Waid: Right.
IGN: That’s so cool.
Waid: Thanks!
IGN: What’s it like coming up with conflicts that are a genuine threat to him? In the issue where Hulk was pulled down under water -- and even though I know he’s indestructible, as the title reminds us -- I was legit worried that he was going to drown. Would he have drowned?
Waid: I’m not sure if he would have drowned, but he would have been at the bottom of the Marianas Trench until the end of time. Indestructible does not mean utterly invincible. The thing about having him under water being pulled down by an alien monster tentacle, he can be as strong as you want but if you have no leverage it’s not going to do you any good.
That said, it’s really hard. That is the hardest thing about writing this book, coming up with things big enough for Hulk to punch whenever Hulk Hulks out. It is virtually impossible to throw stuff at him that he can’t deal with, and that’s the fun of it. Nobody wants to read Hulk where he’s not smashing stuff at least for a few pages.
There’s an upcoming Daredevil guest star two-parter and rather than have Daredevil enter the Hulk’s world I decided to go for the opposite. So for those two issues it’s the Hulk and Daredevil in Hell’s Kitchen with Daredevil trying to solve a crime that’s very street level -- and he’s got the Hulk behind him. It’s Hulk in a much different milieu. Hulk is actually looking for things to smash. This is a much smaller story and you’re putting someone as big as the Hulk in it.
IGN: You can’t smash a mystery.
Waid: Yeah. He wants to smash everything but Daredevil has to say, “You’re in a city, you don’t smash things, that will not help us.” This is something you need a scalpel not a sledgehammer, and yet you’ve got a sledgehammer behind him. I’m making it sound funnier than it is. It’s more serious than that, but still it’s an interesting place to put the Hulk. You put the bull in a china shop and see what happens next.
For more with Mark Waid on his digital comics initiative, Green Hornet, and his role in Gender Through Comics, head over to Page 2!
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