In a 22-page comic, figuring an average of four to five panels a page and a couple of full-page shots, a writer has maybe a hundred panels at most to tell a story, so every panel he wastes conveying a.) something I already know, b.) something that's a cute gag but does nothing to reveal plot or character, or c.) something I don't need to know is a demonstration of lousy craft.
Mark WaidWhen you give me something that I love, then I spend a long time drilling down on it and figuring out what it is I love about it.
Mark WaidA superhero is someone who, at some point or in some way, inspires hope or is the enemy of cynicism. Even if you bog it down with political allegory, or even if you're doing celebrity allegory. You still need to take the cynical out of it.
Mark WaidIt's not often that I get to remember and use phrases like "on out my farm" or "powerful ugly" in modern scripts.
Mark WaidI was a teenager, and I went to see the Superman movie, and up to the point I walked into that movie, I was a kid with no direction and no real purpose and no strong parental figures, and kind of aimless. I walked out of that movie knowing that whatever my life was going to be from then on, it had to have something to do with Superman, because something touched me emotionally with Christopher Reeve's performance.
Mark Waid