Best 36 quotes of Mark Waid on MyQuotes

Artists are not helper monkeys; they’re not in it to visualize 'your' story, because it stopped being 'your' story the moment you engaged in a collaborative medium. From here on in, it’s also the artist’s story, and if you’re working with an illustrator who’s any good at all, you as a writer have to tamp down any control-freak tendencies you suffer under and relax into the process.

A 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.

Comics are expensive. Don’t make me resent the money I spend buying yours. Every single moment in your script must either move the story along or demonstrate something important about the characters — preferably both — and every panel that does neither is a sloppy waste of space.

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.

Gillen and McKelvie shared their upcoming The Wicked + The Divine with me, and its amazing. Please tell your retailer this week to order!

I like the brighter, shinier, happier comic-book material on a personal level, but I also think the best stories are told where you just don't know from page to page or moment to moment when the sucker-punches are coming.

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.

In the long run, the quality of your work is all that matters. That is your only resumé. Be professional. Make sure your editor or publisher can always reach you. Do what's asked of you if your conscience can bear it. But know that, five years from now, as fans or prospective employers are looking over your published pages, no one will care that this story sucks because the publisher moved the deadline up or because the editor made you work an android cow into the story. All they will care about is what they see in front of them, and they will hold you responsible for it, no one else.

In the long run, the quality of your work is all that matters. That is your only resumé. Be professional. Make sure your editor or publisher can always reach you. Do what's asked of you if your conscience can bear it.

In the world of comics, Jack Kirby and Will Eisner may have been more influential artists, but Joe Kubert was its most influential man. Even if he were to be remembered solely for his body of illustration work, he’d still be one of the greats, but by opening the Kubert School in 1976, he was able to personally mentor and educate literally thousands of successful artists who owe their careers to his teachings.

It's not often that I get to remember and use phrases like "on out my farm" or "powerful ugly" in modern scripts.

I 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.

Marvel has always been to a large extent the world around us. It has to be evocative of the world around us, the feelings people are feeling. You take real-world concerns and you put a Marvel face on it.

Never forget that at the end of the day, as a creative person, your résumé is all you've got.

One of the greatest sins in any story is false suspense. The kind of 'suspense' that disintegrates the moment you give your reader one second to think about it. And it's an easy trap to fall into, so watch carefully for it. If your story hinges on the question, 'Will Superman be pushed so far in his battle against Lex Luthor that he'll have to kill him?', or if your big cliffhanger moment is, 'Wow, is Spider-Man really dead this time?', then I understand Food Lion is hiring.

Super-heroes were created to represent the best in all of us. We should aspire to match their nobility, not their ability to shoot big chrome guns.

The best comics editors have the smallest egos. The worst ones feel like they have to justify their salaries by making changes just so they can leave their fingerprints. Every creative medium has those guys, and they're all loathsome.

The most basic definition of a story is 'Somebody wants something and something's in his way,' and I'm more likely to be engaged if I at least think I know what those two 'somethings' are. They can be simple, they can be complex, but - particularly if you're a beginning writer - I'd rather you err on the side of revealing too much than too little.

Twenty-two pages is not a lot of space. Believe me. Having written a bazillion comics, I still find myself more often than nine pages into a script and realizing to my horror that I'm only about a quarter of the way through the story I wanted to tell, and the next thing you know, I'm making fresh coffee and tearing up the floorboards to rewrite.

What makes a good editor is staying the hell out of the way as much as possible. ... If you're a DC or Marvel or Dark Horse or BOOM! editor who's assigning work, then if you did your job properly to begin with, then the people you've hired can be trusted to do what they do without excessive meddling. The ideal situation you're shooting for as an editor is to groom a collaborative creative team to the point where their work sails effortlessly through production and the most you have to do is fix the spelling and the commas.

When 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.

You're a superhero. Shut up and enjoy having superpowers. This makes me crazy. This is why the Marvel movies kick DC movies' asses right and left. Because, I'm not paying $15 for a movie to go watch people being morose about lives that are much more interesting and exciting than mine and they hate them. I'm paying my money to see people sort of revel in doing things that I can't do.

Does Batman ever NOT have a plan...?

If I'm not 100% comfortable in her world and she's not 100% comfortable in mine...then we'll make our own world.

If you're going to survive in this world, here's what you need to know: you are who you are, not what people think you are.

I know this is scary. You're hungry and cold and you want to give up! But you can't turn on each other! Not now! Show me how brave you can be by pulling together! Do it for each other! That's the trick! Because when you reach out--when you extend yourself for other people-- that's when you're without fear!

I'm a master of story. Almost a living fiction myself, so resilient am I! Spider-Man beats me down, I rise! Daredevil imprisons me, I escape! That's because stories have power! He who controls the narrative controls the audience, and you're all the audience, every one of you. As they say, the world's a stage...

Mystic grimoirs, walking corpses... I'm so far out of my wheelhouse that I might as well be on the moon.

New York City is a tinderbox. The Sons of the Serpent - a white supremacist group with a twisted history, deep pockets, and long reach - declared it a combat zone. As they have many times before, they're unashamedly ginning bigotry and hatred into violence and bloodshed. But this time, they've gotten smart about it. Instead of parading through the streets in hoods and robes... they've gone undercover. Dozens upon dozens of them, hiding inside the New York justice system so they can control the law. Control the people. And as God is my witness, I will drive them out and strike them down... no matter what the cost.

Right now, I've got the weight of several worlds on my shoulders. My best friend is living in a cancer ward, and there's nothing I can do for him. The Serpents have hired the Jester to spark race riots with faked news stories, and I don't know how to smoke him out. My enemies are hiding all around, watching everything I do, and I can't find them. For the first time in months I find myself in the familiar, paralyzing grip of overwhelming depression.

R is for Riverdale. Relatable. Right Stuff. Ravishing.

Socrates should have written comics.

The Sons of the Serpent - they want you angry. At the world. They need us all to feel like victims. And it's an easy get, because times suck. Every day is a battle. We all feel like we're on the wrong end of the wrecking ball. We feel at the mercy of forces beyond our control, and that makes us scared. And that's rocket fuel for S.O.B.'s like the Serpents. They prey on us when we're frightened. They tell us our enemies are the immigrants down the street, or the food stamp family next door. They encourage us to turn our fear into rage, and we fall for it because it's 'empowering.' Except it's not. We don't become 'empowered.' We become weaponized.

Whenever I think I've had an uphill battle, I remember Matt Murdock. Not just because he's blind, although even with his other senses hyper-enhanced, that is a climb. And not because he's become a world famous lawyer despite his impairment. But because being Daredevil has cost him everything more than once, more than twice and yet he still suits up any time there's trouble. Because he is a man without fear. Spider-Man

When most dullards hear the words 'the theater,' they envision a twelve-screen multiplex where disaster porn entertains the culturally witless for 90 minutes at a time. Pfaugh. The word 'theater' has grandeur. Power. Back to its ancient Grecian origins, it means 'the seeing place.' A stage upon which actors and actresses use fiction to show us truths.

You need your own strength in this life. Your own purpose. You can't simply live for others.