Mark Waid Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“It's not often that I get to remember and use phrases like "on out my farm" or "powerful ugly" in modern scripts.”
-- Mark Waid -
“Not since Walter Gibson has anyone been better suited to The Shadow than Howard Chaykin”
-- Mark Waid -
“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.”
-- Mark Waid -
“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.”
-- Mark Waid -
“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.”
-- Mark Waid -
“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.”
-- Mark Waid -
“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 Waid -
“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.”
-- Mark Waid -
“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.”
-- Mark Waid -
“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.”
-- Mark Waid -
“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.”
-- Mark Waid -
“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.”
-- Mark Waid -
“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.”
-- Mark Waid -
“Gillen and McKelvie shared their upcoming The Wicked + The Divine with me, and its amazing. Please tell your retailer this week to order!”
-- Mark Waid -
“You're a superhero. Shut up and enjoy having superpowers. This makes me crazy. This is why the Marvel movies kick DC movies' ***** 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.”
-- Mark Waid -
“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.”
-- Mark Waid -
“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.”
-- Mark Waid
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