Chris Samnee is one of the hottest artists working in comics right now. The Daredevil penciler/inker is nominated for an Eisner Award this year for his work on the Mark Waid-scripted Marvel series and has also worked with Waid on IDW’s The Rocketeer: Cargo of Doom. In addition, Chris has been doing variant covers for Dynamite, including The Shadow series, and he recently helped launch DC’s The Adventures of Superman digital comic online with writer Jeff Parker. Two things become perfectly clear when talking to Chris: He’s a huge comics fan and he loves what he’s doing. Toucan talked to the artist in early May. Here’s part one of the interview. (As always, click on the images to see them larger on your screen and view in slide show mode.)

Toucan: What are you working on right now?

Chris: I’m working on the first half of layouts for Daredevil #27.

Toucan: And how far ahead is that in the schedule for you? What month will that be released?

Chris: I can’t even keep track. I just turned in the cover for #30, I guess a week and a half ago. So the covers have to be done three months in advance and the issues are usually done maybe a month or a month and a half. We’re thinking way out already. We’re already talking about what’s going to happen past Daredevil #30. So it’s sort of hard to keep track of all of it. I set reminders on my phone to let me know when issues are coming out so I can Tweet about it, or otherwise I wouldn’t be able to keep track at all. I check Man Without Fear and The Other Murdock Papers online. This is where I get my Daredevil news to help me keep track of what I’m doing.

Toucan: You have to look on the Internet to see what you’re doing next.

Chris: Yeah, pretty much.

Toucan: Are you staying with Daredevil indefinitely?

Chris: Yeah. I’m taking a couple issues off for paternity leave and Javier Rodriguez is going to draw issues #28 and #29 and then I’m on from issue #30 for as long as readers will put up with me.

Toucan: I think that’s going to be a very long time. Have you been drawing all your life?

Chris: Well, as far back as I can remember. I got into comics at about 5 or 6 but I remember drawing before that. It was just stick figures and Muppets and stuff like that, but it was comics that really put me on the right path.

Toucan: Do you remember some of your first comic books as a kid?

Chris: I do, actually. My first comic was Batman when I was either 5 or 6. My grandma bought me one of those three packs that you used to get at grocery stores back in the day, and I was like, “They make comics out of these?!” All I’d known was the Super Friends cartoon and I’d had the toys and stuff, I just didn’t know that they came from anywhere. I didn’t realize that there was source material. I just thought that that was just another cartoon that I liked. I thought it was just like Voltron or Robotech, just the stuff that I liked watching. I didn’t realize that there was more that I could get out of it, and I think it’s one thing to see them moving around on screen, it’s another to sort of experience a comic book. You sort of put yourself into it, and at 6 years old I was like this is what I want to do. I don’t know what you call it, I don’t know what it is, but I want to make these.

Toucan: So you realized at a very early age once you started reading comics that somebody actually sat down and drew this and wrote this . . .

Chris: Well I knew that somebody had to make it, it was drawn. I knew that somebody did it, but it took a few years for me to figure out that it was an actual career that someone could have. I knew that it’s what I wanted to do, but if anybody asked me at 7 or 8 years old what I wanted to do I would just say that I wanted to be a cop, because Batman was friends with cops. That was the closest job that I could make sense of. So probably about 10 I realized that this was a job that I could actually have and I started going for it. I found that there was a local St. Louis convention when I was a kid. I think it was Greater Eastern Convention, GEC, something like that, and I talked my parents into driving me the hour and a half away to the airport Holiday Inn where they had the local convention. I started meeting writers and artists and I would just bombard them with as many questions about how they did what they did as I possibly could. There were a couple of artists that were kind enough to tell me what size paper they drew on, and they looked at my Trapper Keeper binder full of looseleaf copy paper and told me what I really needed to be doing if that’s what I wanted to do. So every three or six months there was a convention that I would go to and pester these guys, and I kept doing it month after month after month, and at 15 I got my first published work.

Toucan: Was there somebody at those conventions who was really helpful who was a pro?

Chris: Yeah, Mike Doherty. He was drawing Conan for I think Marvel at the time, and he was the first one to say, “No, you didn’t draw this.” So I drew a Batman sketch for him at his table and he gave me some Marvel board to take home with me and try and draw on, but I was just so in awe of this piece of blank paper that said “Marvel” on the top of it, I couldn’t draw on it. I was just like, “Oh, my god, this is what people draw on!” So I think I still have it somewhere. There’s one aged old piece of white Bristol that I got.

Toucan: With nothing on it.

Chris: With nothing on it, except for the blue lines and the Marvel logo. That was enough for me. From that I couldn’t draw on it.

Toucan: It’s like the Golden Fleece.

Chris: Yeah, it really was. That was what I needed to try. They didn’t make 11 x 17 paper for kids, so I got 11 x 14. I think that was the closest size they had that was just like poster board, and that’s what I started drawing on when I was a kid and going to shows. That was my portfolio . . . a bunch of Bristol board from—I say Bristol, it was poster board from Wal-Mart—that I was drawing Fantastic Four and Batman and stuff on.

Toucan: Do you remember what the drawing was that you showed Mike Doherty that he said you didn’t draw this?

Chris: Gosh, I think it was mostly Batman. I was Batman crazy from—well, I still kind of am—but I started at 6 and I was just way into anything that was Batman related. But I was copying Tom Mandrake and Jim Aparo, Alan Davis, a lot of the 80s guys, because that’s when I was reading. I got a bunch of beat-up old copies of Gene Colan Batman comics from the flea market. There wasn’t really a whole lot of places to get new comics when I was a kid, so the flea market was my resource for comics. I think it was Batman. It must have been something Batman. I remember drawing a Batman head sketch for him at his table. I think there was the Owl from Daredevil in there, and I can’t remember what else. It was all just on typing paper. I was saying copy paper earlier, but I called it typing paper back then. We didn’t have a computer. We just had a typewriter. Did I just age myself?

Toucan: No, I don’t think so. I noticed doing research for this that you cite a lot of comic strip artists as some of your influences, such as Milton Caniff and particularly Frank Robbins, who I don’t think a lot of artists in your generation really look to as an influence. Where and when did you discover all this great newspaper stuff?

Chris: Well, it was probably around I’d say ’89, ’90, right around there. Again it was my grandma who sort of tried to get me on to new things. She said you like Batman, what about Dick Tracy? What’s Dick Tracy? There was a collection of Dick Tracy strips at the local library near her that she had borrowed and wanted me to take a look at. So, wait . . . it’s not just comics, there are comic strips and comic strips came before comics? I started looking at that, and it was just sort of reverse engineering. I was reading a lot of interviews with pros ever since I was way too little to be reading all these interviews and The Comics Journal. I used to get secondhand copies of Comics Journal and stuff like that, and Jim Aparo said that a big influence on him was Milt Caniff. So I started going backwards from artists that I really loved. What is it about this artist that I really loved, and it turns out they loved something before them, so I would research Jim Aparo’s influences. I really got into Caniff through Aparo. I can’t remember where I came across Frank Robbins. I think I read some of the Invaders stuff that he did and it was really wonky, but I was way into it.

Toucan:  And he also did a lot of Batman stuff too.

Chris: Well maybe it’s from Batman. Yeah, well I have one of the early Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told that has the old Man-Bat story that Robbins did. It was sort of like Ditko when I first saw it. Oh, this is perfect . . . this is exactly what comic books are supposed to look like. So I sort of started trying to track down as much of that as I could. There were knowledgeable guys at the flea market. The guy who ran the booth that had all the secondhand comics, he was knowledgeable in old-school stuff. So if I wanted to track anything down, he was able to say if you like that, you should try this. He also got me way into a whole bunch of manga that sort of took my style on a bit of a sideways path there for a few years, but I finally came back around to old-school comics again in the 2000s.

Toucan: You mentioned earlier going to these conventions and getting your first work at 15. What was that?

Chris: It was for Gary Carlson. It was an Image book, I think it was Big Bang Comics. It was like a Silver Age DC throwback, which would be perfect for me now, but at the time I was way into anime and manga. They asked me, do you want to do a Silver Age Batman-like story and I was yes, yeah, all right, I mean, I’ll draw anything. If it’s comics I’ll draw it, but I was still sort of entrenched in all of that. But it was still something. You know, “Hey, do you want to draw eight pages for free?” Comics are that kind of job where you can’t draw them unless you’ve drawn them. So even for free that still meant the world to me. If it wasn’t for my wife, I’d probably still be drawing a bunch of stuff for free. I do this stuff for the love of it and sometimes have to be reminded that it’s also what we do for a living.

Toucan:  With all these influences that you have that are comic strip artists, do you have any ambition to actually do a newspaper strip? I mean, the day of the adventure strips seems to have passed, but I think you’d do a pretty great Tarzan.

Chris: I think syndicated strips are hard to get into and are also on their way out. I don’t think that I’d try to get into print newspaper strips, but in the back of mind I have an adventure story that I’d like to do in the strip format, but maybe do digitally. Get people into the idea of what adventure strips like Terry and the Pirates were back in the day, but have it for our generation where anybody can get a hold of it nowadays, the way that they were able to get a hold of a newspaper back in the day, but for the iPad. I mean, nearly everybody has an iPad nowadays. That’s the easiest way to go about it, I think. Mark Waid doing Thrillbent is making it even easier for pros to jump in and test the waters on stuff like that. So one of these days when I have a bit of free time. We have our second baby due in about a month. So free time is in short supply at the moment. So somewhere down the line I’ll try and do some creator-owned work.

Toucan: The first time I saw your art was on the Oni Press graphic novel Capote in Kansas. Was that one of the first things you did after Big Bang?

Chris: I’d done a few things for AC Comics. It’s not in my bio, but I actually did a few issues of FemForce. So that was more free work that I was just trying to climb my way up the rungs. For a while I was a barista at Borders. I’ve had loads of crummy jobs. I was a flea market caricature artist, a pizza cook, a cable guy, and a half a dozen other things in between, but all the while, I didn’t want to take on a career, I just wanted some sort of job to keep me in clothes while I was making comics. So, yeah . . . I was a barista at Borders while I was working on FemForce and while I was working on Capote as well. I worked on that from 2004 or 2005. It came out in 2006, I think, somewhere around there. A lot of long nights, but Capote was probably the biggest blip that my career had had in all those years. I guess I was 23 when Capote came out. And then it sort of snowballed from there.

Toucan:  And amazingly your style seemed to be pretty much in full force. You can look at Capote in Kansas and while you’re a much better artist now, you can see who you are now in that work too. It’s like your style was pretty much fully developed.

Chris: Well, up until that point I just wanted to be a penciler and my style had a lot more lines in it. I was way into guys who could do really detailed stuff. I can’t even imagine trying to be that sort of artist nowadays, but I still look at Bryan Hitch and Geof Darrow, guys that are super detailed or really rendered. That stuff is amazing to me, but it’s something that I just can’t do or don’t have the patience for. But when I took on the job I didn’t realized that I wasn’t going to have an inker. They were like, “Oh, no we don’t have a budget for an inker,” so it was just baptism by fire. If that book was going to get done, I had to ink it. So I had to learn real fast. I went out, I bought India ink and a bunch of the wrong brushes and just had to start figuring it out. I had a bunch of wedge tipped brushes that I thought would make it look like an old comic and it didn’t look right. But 128 pages will definitely make you figure out how to ink. My style sort of came from being super nervous and I was judging every single line that I put down on the paper, because having Ande [Parks, the writer of Capote in Kansas] being such a big name inker, I was just afraid to screw it up. I didn’t want him to see me do a bad job. So that’s where I started blowing out the one side, where the light source would come from, sort of the chiaroscuro. I was looking at David Lloyd and Jim Steranko and some of the stuff that they could do with just the shadows and I started trying to do some of that because that meant that was one less line that I had to screw up on a page. And that’s sort of what my style is built on. It’s just . . . it’s just fear (laughs). I was just afraid of screwing it up, but it became my style.

Toucan: And because of that, now do you prefer to ink your own stuff?

Chris: Oh yeah. My pencils are just awful. I can’t imagine anybody else inking me nowadays because most of the work is done in the ink.

Toucan: After Capote you did Queen and Country, which I think was at the very end of that series.

Chris: Actually, after I did Capote I was still at Borders and I signed on to do a Vertigo graphic novel. But they plan things so far ahead at DC/Vertigo that I’d signed my contract and I was waiting for like six months to get scripts while the writer was still working on it. So while I was waiting on scripts for the graphic novel—I didn’t know how slow things worked in comics at the time—I kept on emailing my editor and saying while I’m waiting, do you have anything? So I did a couple of short stories and American Splendor when Vertigo was still doing it with Harvey Pekar and an issue of Exterminators that Tony Moore recommended me for, because that’s what he was working on at the time. I did three issues of Queen and Country and then Greg Rucka did 52. So in the year that he was doing 52, I did Area 10 for Vertigo and then came back and did the last issue of Queen and Country after.

Toucan: So Area 10 was the graphic novel for Vertigo?

Chris: Yeah. It was for Vertigo Prime, but it didn’t come out until 2008, 2009. So when it came out I was like here’s a book that I did several years ago everybody.

Toucan: And somewhere in there you did The Mighty for DC too?

Chris: Yeah, I think that was 2009. I actually just met Pete Tomasi in person at a convention this past weekend. We worked together on eight issues of The Mighty and a couple of short stories for Blackest Night in the Green Lantern series that he recommended me for because he’s a good guy. I think he just found me through my blog of all things. Five days a week I was doing a sketch on my blog because I’m always trying to get better, and whenever I have free time, I’ll sketch. And he just liked what he saw in there and said that he had a creator-owned book at DC and the current artist, Peter Snejbjerg, wasn’t able to continue on it—he was going to go do I think Battlegrounds, one of the war books that Garth Ennis was doing at the time. Pete needed someone to come in and finish the series for him. So I jumped in and did some proper superhero comics for a while.

Toucan: So probably the thing that really put you on the map though, superhero wise, was the Marvel’s Thor the Mighty Avenger series with Roger Langridge, which was kind of an all-ages book but actually seemed more like an adult superhero series with kind of an indie sensibility. That book went away pretty suddenly and it’s still kind of sadly missed. What are your memories about working on that?

Chris: Oh gosh, it was so much fun. I was offered the job by Nate Cosby and at the time I just thought “Thor book, no.” I mean I wasn’t in the position to ever say no to anything. So I said sure, but I remember thinking Thor doesn’t seem like the right book for me, and then I started reading Roger’s synopsis and almost right away it was like, oh, well this isn’t the hot-headed Thor that I remember from when I was a kid. And it was a lot more, there was more heart to it. It felt personal as opposed to just gods and monsters. There was some of that too, but it just felt like . . . I don’t know it could be a novel that you would read and it just happened to have a little bit of the superhero in it. It was a really good time. I’m still friends with Roger. I emailed him a couple of weeks ago. Matt Wilson, my colorist on it, is still one of my best friends, and any time that I have something pop up that needs to be colored Matt’s always my go-to guy. He did some Planet of the Apes for me, a cover two months ago ,and he just colored the Adventures of Superman story I did. It still tears me up that we didn’t get to finish our run on Thor the Mighty Avenger. But you know, we got canceled and I was getting ready to move on to Ultimate Spider-Man and I managed to squeeze out that Free Comic Book Day issue right before I did Ultimate Spider-Man. It was a tight deadline, but I begged for Free Comic Book Day book and we got our ninth issue. But yeah, man, it was a hell of a time.

Toucan: The great thing about that series—you’re talking about it as being almost like a novel. It was very romantic, too, which you don’t see in a lot of superhero books.

Chris: Yeah. I think there are just as many female fans of Thor the Mighty Avenger as there are male, and a lot of kids. Folks like to send me pictures of their kids reading a copy of Thor the Mighty Avenger. It’s great to see kids reading it but it’s sort of heartbreaking because there aren’t a whole lot of comics that kids can read these days. There’s so many uberviolent or monsters throwing up blood, or just so many things that I just don’t think are appropriate for kids. I may be thinking more of that because I have a second on the way. I want the market to be inclusive of more readers, and we need to have a keener eye towards younger readers because they’re going to be the adult readers in a few years. There’s only so long that we can keep catering to 40- and 50-year old men. They’re going to age out eventually.

Toucan: You’ve worked with some really great writers so far in your career, Mark Waid, Roger Langridge, Greg Rucka. The first interview we did for Toucan was with Mark Waid and we asked him what makes a great writer/artist team and his answer was “communication and total trust, realizing that it’s collaborative medium and nobody bringing any ego to the table is what makes it work.” What do you think makes a great writer/artist team?

Chris: Oh, my gosh, can I just cut and paste that one, that’s perfect. That’s almost exactly what I’ve said in the past. You have to be able to trust your writer and the writer has to be able to trust you; and Mark and I, that’s the sort of relationship we have. We talk on the phone before every issue starts and we email each other and talk once or twice a week just to touch base. Sometimes I’ll think of a different layout or I’ll need to add a couple of panels; right now we’re doing issue #27 and I still don’t know where it’s going to end. We were talking at the convention this past weekend on how the issue was going to end, but we didn’t know how to get there. And I’m working on page 10 and Mark’s writing 11 to 20 at home right now and we’re supposed to talk about the rest of the beats for the issue tonight. I don’t think we’d be able to do that if we didn’t trust each other. He trusts me that I’m going to try and make him look good, and he makes me look good. So yeah . . . everything that Mark said is spot on.

Toucan: What’s your working procedure like with him? Obviously, if he’s still working on the back half of that issue you don’t get a full script in advance.

Chris: Well, ideally I’d get a full script, and I’ve gotten a few full scripts in the past 12 issues or so that I’ve done now, but he’s a busy guy. I mean between Thrillbent and Hulk and the Marvel digital stuff that he’s doing and Daredevil, he’s spinning a lot of plates, not to mention he also has the two issues that Javier is drawing that have to be done while I’m working on mine. So he’s trying to write #27, #28, and #29 all at the same time. Javier and I are both getting scripts piecemeal so that he can keep us both working. So this issue isn’t common. This is a little different than usual. But usually I get a full script and . . . well, let’s go back a little bit. He’ll come up with an idea or we’ll spitball a little bit of something on the phone and then he goes off and writes it. He sends me nearly a full script, and then I take a couple of days and do a layout. Two days minimum, 5 days tops, for 20 pages, and I tighten up whatever I need to in pencil and then ink that and send it off to everybody. But along the way we chat on the phone. I’ll email him any questions that I have about the script or changes that I think we need for pacing, and most of the time the trust comes in and I trust him, he trusts me, and we just say, okay we’ll make it work.

Toucan: Is there a lot of descriptive information in his scripts? Daredevil swinging over the city or something like that?

Chris: It’s usually just the right amount. Some guys will try to dictate camera angle and that’s all a little bit too much, I think. I just need the bare minimum. The dialogue helps me know the emotion of the character. and if there’s just a sentence or so describing the panel, like whenever we start a new location, it’s a couple of sentences to set things up, but usually it’s just “back on Daredevil,” or “over Daredevil’s shoulder” and then just something short and sweet just so I know what needs to be in each panel and I can keep on going. But I’m supposed to be the cinematographer and the choreographer and all that stuff. So he leaves all that stuff up to me.

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Click here to read part two of our interview with Eisner Award-nominated penciler/inker Chris Samnee!

Toucan: So let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about collaborators. Your new steady collaborator seems to be Chris Samnee on both Daredevil and Rocketeer, and you continue to work with artist Peter Kraus on Insufferable after a long run on Irredeemable. What makes a great writer-artist collaboration?

Mark: Communication and total trust; realizing that it’s a collaborative medium; nobody bringing any ego to the table, is what makes it work. Everybody has a bit of a healthy ego if they’re working in the arts, but with Peter and I from the very first days of Irredeemable it was always a give and take, it was always a “Hey, have you thought about this?” or “Hey, you know maybe there’s another way of doing this,” and that’s fine. The scripts begin with me, but it’s not my story. It is my story until such time as I turn the pages over to an editor or turn them over to a collaborator; at that point it becomes our story, and you have to accept that. You have to accept the fact that there’s going to be stuff sometimes that gets drawn that isn’t quite what you had in mind, and maybe that’s a disappointment on rare occasion, but most of the time instead it’s “Holy crap! I never thought about that before,” or that’s a new wrinkle, or that’s a new way of telling the story that I hadn’t seen before. Chris in particular is very good about breaking stories down in a slightly different pacing then I’m used to, and he’s very good at that. Pete is phenomenal when it comes to the stuff that I tend to gravitate towards anyway, which is facial expressions, which is emotion, which is the human moments. I really think that if you’re a writer in comics and you’re not starting every script with “dear artist, here’s my phone number and email, please contact me,” you’re making a horrible mistake.

Toucan: A couple months ago there was kind of a little Twitter controversy about working full script or working “Marvel style.” Which do you do?

Mark: I tend to work full script, at least until such time as I get enough momentum going with an artist where I start to feel like we know each other’s rhythms and at which point I have no objection to shifting to that sort of Marvel style, because mine is a more modified Marvel style anyway. I don’t just turn in a two-page outline of a plot and expect the artist to do all the heavy lifting; that’s not fair to him. Instead, I put tons and tons and tons of dialogue into my plots, even if it’s just rough suggested dialogue, for two reasons. One is that you want the artist to really sort of understand what the character is saying and feeling and also because I want cues for myself a month from now when I’m fighting a deadline and the letterer is waiting for the pages and I’ve got to turn in those script pages overnight and it gives me something to work with. There’s pluses and minuses to each, but I think that the thing I like about full script—if pressed, if I could only choose one for the rest of my life, it would be full script, with the caveat of getting it to an artist and asking him to treat it like a plot. Asking him to treat it like something that it is his job then to adapt as he sees fit and then I will go back and make alterations and tweaks and repacing and so forth and so on to fit the art. So again, a collaborative medium. And even with Insufferable, which is full script, when the pages come in before they go off to lettering, I’m constantly moving balloons to different panels or changing the pacing of this line or eliminating dialogue in places because I’m working off of Pete’s storytelling.

Toucan: So is that part of the beauty of digital for you?

Mark: Yeah, because you can make changes like that in a snap, you make edits in a snap. I no longer have to feel that awful about asking an artist to make a tiny change because it’s not like they have to redraw the entire page—just make a quick fix in Photoshop and you’re off to the races.

Toucan: When we first started talking, you mentioned having to sit down at 11:30 PM and get a script ready for Peter Kraus and you said for a “book.” Do you look at digital comics as books? I mean, is your long-term plan to publish this later on, or is it only going to exist in the digital world?

Mark: I think there’s room to have it published down the road. I think that my original concept for digital comics was trying to hedge my bets and make it friendly to both digital and print. In other words, when we originally picked the Thrillbent format, we deliberately picked that 4 x 3 ratio of a horizontal screen, specifically following the DC Zuda imprint and Ron Perazza and those guys who came up with that sort of stuff. If you stack one 4 x 3 page on top of another, you’ve got something that’s roughly proportionate to what an American comic page is. So the idea is, “Oh we can always just stack our screens one on top of the other and we’ve got printed pages” and we’re off to go. Now as I got into it and we started developing new digital storytelling tools that involve things like repetition and screen swiping to get a different image in or balloons popping in and out and so forth, it becomes obvious that to go to print from that is going to take some interesting production tricks, so we will get there eventually. If there’s a demand for it, I’m fine with publishing these fetish objects that people call books, of which I’m a big fan obviously. I think there’s plenty of room for that. I just want to go digital first, do it that way, play with those tools and then retrofit into print.

Toucan: In a recent interview with Pace Magazine you stated “the future is all about digital for me.” Why do you feel that way, and what made you start your own digital comics portal in Thrillbent?

Mark: I’ll take the second question first. What made me start was looking at the cost of print. This is back when I was doing the BOOM! editor-in-chief stuff and BOOM! creative chief officer a few years ago and looking at print costs across the board for all publishers and how insane they were unless you’re one of the top two or three publishers and you’ve got 50% of the market share and your per unit cost is feasible. But if you’re anybody else and you’re doing a comic and it’s got a print run of 5,000 or 6,000 copies and you’re doing a color comic, you’re paying more in printing then you are in everything else put together including editorial and overhead—that’s ridiculous. I’m selling my $4 comic to Diamond for about $1.60 and I’m having to pay a dollar in print costs; that is not a feasible business model. The idea was okay, well we still want to do comics, we still want to do print, but how about we go digital first, try to monetize that enough to make our production costs back, and once we made our production costs back then we can afford to go and print, because we’ll have created a product for which there is now a demand and then issue it that way. So that’s still sort of the long-term business model. Let’s just make our money back in digital. I mean, it would be great to be filthy rich in digital, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen. All I really want to do is break even with Thrillbent material so that I’ve made my money back in production costs, and then if I go to print, that becomes straight profit.

Toucan: But right now Thrillbent is free.

Mark: Yeah, I know. So you’ve sussed out the flaw in my plan.

Toucan: So what if you take those comics and turn them into a digital book and in turn you sell that on comiXology or any of the other platforms, as an interim step before going to print?

Mark: That’s one of several options we have available to us. Obviously, the reason we were free going out is because we wanted to make noise, we wanted to get hits, we wanted to draw eyes to what we were doing, and it’s been very, very successful, and believe me if I had one-tenth the number of people looking at every issue of Daredevil as I do every installment of the Thrillbent stuff, I would be happy as can be. What’s exciting is by the time we get to late fall, the plan is to have something new every day on Thrillbent. Right now it’s just my strip with Pete, Insufferable, but ideally John Rogers, my partner in this, will be doing his series in the new few weeks. We’ll be launching Gail Simone’s thing or something by James Tynion IV or whatever; we’ve got a bunch of things that are in various stages of development with an idea towards getting to a point where there’s something new up everyday. And once that happens, we can experiment with revenue streams. I’m not looking for a one-size-fits-all solution to how you monetize all things Thrillbent. I think it’s more exciting and more interesting to say, “Okay, Gail . . . why don’t you try something where it’s free, but if someone wants next month’s installments ahead of time every month for 99 cents, we’ll email them next month’s installment.” And John, what if you try the model by which it’s barebones free to read on the site but if someone wants additional material like pencils or layouts or colors or script pages or behind-the-scenes stuff then for 99 cents they can download it, that sort of thing; or for me just a plain vanilla tip jar. If you like what we’re doing with Insufferable and you want to see more of it, please pay me what you think it’s worth and see what that gets us, because we can afford to do that at this point. Doing comics is not insanely expensive. It ain’t cheap. I’m certainly paying more for a month’s worth of Irredeemable material than I do on my mortgage, but I sold all my comics to do this. I can carry this for a few more months.

So like I said what excites me about that is it’s not that expensive. So I think we’re smart to play with different types of revenue streams and see what works for us. In the meantime, continue to network as we have with the Blind Ferret guys, the Penny Arcade guys, the PVP crew, and talk to the webcomics guys out there who are also creating revenue streams themselves so they can keep doing what they’re doing and mix and match ideas. One of the greatest things about working in digital is the sheer disconnect between comic book professionals and webcomic professionals—this gargantuan gulf I had no idea existed. Because the myth among us comic book folk is that webcomics guys, ah, yeah there’s a couple of them making a little bit of money, but by and large they’re all losing their shirts. You know: little kids doing their little thing on the side, that’s the myth. And the reality of it is, no, actually a lot of guys are making a decent living doing this, a lot of guys. And it doesn’t mean everybody can, but it means that there’s a lot more to that, there’s a lot more money in that ecosphere than you dreamed, and some guys are making really good money doing that stuff. And while making really good money is for me not the goal, it’s just to make enough money to keep doing it, the idea that it can be done is great. And what’s also great about the webcomic community is that I have yet to encounter any sense of selfishness, any sense of proprietary ownership, any sense of trade secrets and people being very hush hush with what they’re doing, because that’s stupid. Comic books tend to do that because we’re selling to an audience of 90,000 people, but among the webcomics guys they seem to get the fact that the potential audience is 6 billion people. There’s room for all of us out there. We’re not worried about competition yet among each other. So that’s the long answer to the question about monetization. So we’ll play with stuff. We’re going to roll out some more stuff in the next couple of months, some more material and play with some different sort of revenue streams, some different ways of monetizing, and just see what works. Pay attention to the feedback from the fans, pay attention to the social networking of it, and see where the needles start to hit the red zone and follow through on that.

Toucan: Let’s go back to the first part of that question, which was the quote from another interview you did that said the future is all about digital for me.

Mark: Yeah it is.

Toucan: Do you see a point in time when you’re not going to do print comics, not be working for the big publishers?

Mark: I can’t imagine not being involved in print comics as long as they exist, if for no other reason that it’s the only job I’ve ever had in my life that’s meant anything. If I had a choice, if it was put down to me that I could only do the Thrillbent stuff or only do print comics, I’d have to go with Thrillbent, because I think that really is the future. I think that there’s your audience. With the spiraling, escalating costs of print and selling 32-page comics or 28-page comics (I guess self-covered 32 pages now) for $4 and you get five minutes of entertainment out of that, I don’t know if that’s a working model, whereas digital is because we can reach everybody who’s got Internet access.

Toucan: You were a special guest at both Comic-Con and WonderCon this past year. What do you enjoy about doing conventions?

Mark: It’s changed. It’s funny—if you’d asked me 15 years ago, my secret answer would have been I just love getting in the dealers room and diving through the comic books like a porpoise, like Uncle Scrooge and his money bin. I find now that I don’t buy as much at conventions, if anything. So I’ve had to adapt, and what I really enjoy is—it’s a typical answer but it’s true—I like meeting the fans. I like talking to people. I like hearing what they’ve got to say. I like hearing what they’re interested in. And I also like connecting with other professionals. I like being able to talk shop late at night over at the bar. I like being able to grab breakfast with a guy and talk about story and talk about craft. Those are things I really enjoy and it’s great. Again, I can’t thank you guys enough for bringing me out to both shows this year, and I also love the sound of my own voice, so I’m happy to do any panels, any moderation anytime, and actually that’s a big part of it, too. I enjoy doing it. It’s not just because I enjoy the performing aspect of it, it’s that I really enjoy not only talking craft with the creators but doing it in front of an audience. I have many shortcomings as a human being, trust me. I could spend the rest of the morning listing them, but I am a decent interviewer, and this is where my knowledge of comics history, I think, comes in handy in ways that it oddly doesn’t seem to when I go out in the real world. I enjoy having those conversations and being able to ask the Stan Lees and the John Romitas of the world questions that they have not necessarily been asked before.

Toucan: Since you are a comics trivia expert, one of the panels you’ve done for us in the past is “Stump Mark Waid.” So has anyone ever asked a question that stumped you?

Mark: A couple of times. It happens. Generally, it happens when they ask me about my own work, which is the last thing I remember. But you know what, if you stump me, the best thing you can do is not tell me the answer, because then I will be like a junkyard dog. Some guy asked me the other day what was the first time Superman used heat vision in comics? Now, diehard Superman aficionados and of course everybody reading this interview already knows the answer to this, so I apologize for being repetitious. But for the longest time Superman just had X-ray vision, up until the 1960s. His heat vision power was just X-ray vision, because we didn’t know anything about radiation in 1945; we just thought, oh, if he uses his X-rays more, he’ll set things on fire. So at some point science comes into play in the ’60s and they realize well, maybe we should split that off into its own separate power. So the question from a fan was, what was the first time he used heat vision, and I popped off an answer: Lois Lane #10, everybody knows this, come on. Thank you, by the way, for not interrupting my story . . .

Toucan: I didn’t want to give it away.

Mark: Exactly. So I say this and he comes back, he sends me an email a couple of days later going actually I don’t think that’s right, and I went and looked and I was completely wrong. And most ordinary men would be able to say, “Oh well, that’s a shame, I think I’ll go play ball with my kids or I think I’ll go out and buy the groceries, or I think I’ll go out and work at a soup kitchen, I think I’ll go out and do something to make the world a better place.” But me, no, no, no, no, I spent the next afternoon going through every Superman comic of that era in chronological order until I found the first time Superman uses heat vision. So that’s the best thing . . . if you stump me, just watch me dig and dig and dig until I find the answer. It’ll be entertaining for you.

Toucan: So what’s the answer? You can’t leave people hanging here.

Mark: Action Comics #275 would be the first time heat vision was its own separate discrete superpower. See—you read the Toucan Interview and you learn.

Toucan: So here’s a trivia question for you.

Mark: Hit me.

Toucan: What was Stan Lee’s nickname in high school?

Mark: I don’t know. You have stumped the man, but since you can’t leave people hanging . . .

Toucan: It was Gabby. And I know this because Sean Howe’s book, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, is out and he has a great Tumblr thing that he does, which he updates every day, and there was a photo of Stan from his high school yearbook.

Mark: Oh, I’ve got that on my RSS feed, exactly. I missed that one though. That’s great. I love Stan. One of the great experiences I’ve had in the last five years and one of the biggest, the most lasting things to come out of my relationship with BOOM! was not Irredeemable or Incorruptible, it was the fact that because we did a bunch of superhero comics with Stan I was able to genuinely become friends with Stan. And I mean not convention friends, and not oh look, he vaguely remembers my name. No it’s kind of cool. I mean he seeks me out at conventions. We’ll sit down and we’ll have a drink, we’ll talk about stuff that’s not I’m a big “True Believer” conversation. We’ll have real conversations about craft and about editorial and about the world at large and it’s just, man it’s great, but oh, my God can he talk.

Toucan: How do you top this year? You won three Eisner Awards, you got the Comic-Con Inkpot, you just came back from the Harveys in Baltimore and you won three or four awards there.

Mark: Yes, four counting the Inking Award for Joe Rivera, yeah.

Toucan: At the Eisners you won Best Writer, Best Continuing Series for Daredevil, and Best Single Issue, also for Daredevil (#7), and you started Thrillbent this year, you’re doing a ton of projects, how do you top this year?

Mark: Apparently, I have to go after the Oscar now. I don’t know. I have resigned myself to the notion that I can’t top this year in terms of the accolades, in terms of all that stuff, because if you start thinking that way then you will just . . . I’ve got enough on my plate without having to worry about how I’m going to top it, because then I really will burn out. I’m just going to put my nose down to the grindstone and just put my head down and just do the work and hope for the best. I don’t know how to top it. I’m sure there’s some glib flip funny answer to that question, but I don’t have it.

Toucan: After 25 years as a comics pro and a lifelong love of comics, what still excites you about the medium?

Mark: Finding new ways to tell stories. That’s the thing, the simplest little thing. When you come up with a way of doing stuff that nobody has done before, the simplest little stuff. I hate doing this, but I don’t know any other way to do it except by example. I believe I can take credit for being the guy who changed whisper balloons from being dotted lines around standard balloons to sort of gray tone faded back—you know, fainter stuff. I suggested that like 15 years ago with something, and just that moment of discovering that idea of here’s a way of doing something in comics that we’ve not done before, I lived off that for six months, that excitement for six months. And now with digital we do it all the time. You know, how do you do a rack focus in comics, a static medium that you can now do with digital? That sort of thing just keeps me pumped up and keeps me excited. It’s not so much what I buy at the comic store that gets me excited, it’s watching how I and others are learning new storytelling things.

There was a kid at Baltimore. Kid, he’s probably 35. He comes up to me with this app. He’s done his own comic and he’s going to sell it as an app, a digital comic and it looks pretty good, but he’s done this thing with it that is phenomenal, which is if you’re scrolling left to right that’s how you change pages. But if you scroll up and down that’s when you start to see different levels of the work. In other words, if you scroll down, you peel the lettering away and then you peel the coloring away to see the pencils and then you peel the pencils away to see the layout, for a process junkie or for anybody who wants additional information about how it’s done. It’s a simple little thing, but I didn’t think of that, and that is brilliant and honestly that’s got me chopped all week long. I’m talking to this guy about oh my God get a patent on that and I will license it because that’s great. It’s just that sort of stuff, whether I come across it or whether you come across it, or some random guy at some convention comes up and says look what I did, that’s great, and that’s where digital gives me the chance to find all new stuff to do.

Toucan: But in a sense it’s almost like it’s 1935 again, when people started doing comics for the first time that weren’t reprints from comic strips and they didn’t know how to do it and they just made it up as they went along, it’s the same thing with digital.

Mark: That’s a good point, and I think you’re absolutely right and that’s what makes it exciting and that’s how you break ground, man. You just get in there and you don’t know how it works, so you’re just going to figure out on the fly.

2012 was a “Banner Year” for Mark Waid in more ways than one. The writer celebrated his 25th year working in comics (as writer, associate editor, editor, editor-in-chief, colorist, and probably a few other job titles we’re forgetting). In addition to his continuing work on fan-favorite Daredevil at Marvel, he launched The Indestructible Hulk (“Banner Year” . . . get it?) at that company, Steed and Mrs. Peel at BOOM!, The Rocketeer: Cargo of Doom at IDW, and his own online comics site, Thrillbent.com, which features his and other creators’ work. As if that wasn’t enough, this summer Waid won three Eisner Awards (surprisingly, the first three of his career) for Best Writer, Best Continuing Series (Daredevil), and Best Single Issue (Daredevil #7), plus Comic-Con’s prestigious Inkpot Award. We sat down with Mark in late September to discuss his career with him, in this interview, the first in a series with Comic-Con, WonderCon Anaheim, and APE special guests for our new Toucan blog. (As always, click on the photos and art for a closer look!)

Toucan: You’re currently writing Daredevil for Marvel, and Indestructible Hulk just launched late last month. The Rocketeer: Cargo of Doom miniseries from IDW has just finished up. You’re also doing Steed and Mrs. Peel for BOOM!. On the digital comics front you have Insufferable ongoing at Thrillbent.com, your own website, and at Comic-Con 2012 you announced you’re doing a new graphic novel with artist Shane Davis for Legendary Comics. Did I miss anything?

Mark: No that seems like a good Monday.

Toucan: So my first question is, when do you sleep and eat?

Mark: You know what, I have a very patient family and very patient friends who understand that there are many times that I’m just going to have to hole up in my office for hours and hours and hours at a time. It’s a good problem to have. I can never complain about having too much work. I hope that the work itself doesn’t suffer with the amount of over-committing and stuff, but the thing is—to some degree—it all uses different muscles. I mean Hulk, Daredevil, that’s playing in somebody else’s sandbox, same with Steed and Mrs. Peel really. And those are fun stories to tell, but to some degree I’ve been with those characters since I was a kid, so they’ve always been percolating in the back of my mind. With the Thrillbent stuff obviously, it’s a lot more having to be out of my own imagination. In that sense it’s a lot more work, but at the same time I’m being able to invent new ways of telling stories along with Peter Krause and Nolan Woodard and Troy Petrie, the creative team on the book, and that energizes me.

I’ll give you an example. Here’s the thing about weekly webcomics that I just didn’t take into account. I know so well after 20 years in the business the panic that comes with the deadline for every script. I know it well. It’s a monthly ritual for every book. I’m never hideously late, but I’m always pushing it to the last second. And so I know about that creeping dread every month when I’m doing a monthly series. This is weekly, so I have that every week. Last night at about 11:30—when honestly, I’d been hit with a sinus infection, I’d been up since 7:00, I literally had not left the house yesterday, not even to go get mail, nothing and I’d been behind the keyboard and I was exhausted—but Pete Kraus needed the next chapter for Insufferable for this morning so he could get moving. And I dragged myself to the keyboard. But I got to tell you, the moment I started coming up with “Oh well, here’s something we haven’t done in digital before,” or “Oh well, here’s a way of telling that story,” or here’s something that I can interject personally about my own experience into this thing, I got my energy back. Time flew and I looked up and it was about 1:00, 1:30 and I finished the chapter and I got a good night’s sleep.

Toucan: So that kind of dovetails into my next question, which is obviously to juggle the kind of workload you have, you have to have some kind of discipline. What do you do to get working each day?

Mark: There is no discipline. You would think there’s discipline. No, no, no it’s not discipline, it’s just sort of like you reach a point where you’ve just got to do something. I wish that I were a 9-to-5 clock guy. I wish I were a Geoff Johns or a Chuck Dixon sometimes, who could just come in, and obviously they’re great writers, but they’re so disciplined. I mean Geoff in particular, will literally go into a studio at 9:00, sit at the keyboard, start writing, take a lunch break, sit back down, write, be over with it about 5:00, 6:00, and then go surf the Internet or do whatever the rest of us do all the rest of the day. I admire that discipline, but on the other hand if I really wanted that kind of a job, I’d be working in insurance. I like the flexibility. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. It’s just some days are 20-page days and some days are a lot of searching online for old episodes of What’s My Line? or something. I wish I knew. I think that you could really do some interesting studies if you were able to get ahold of the browser histories of most comics writers and see what their days are like, because you just kind of pinball back and forth between going online to look up a synonym for some word that you’re in the middle of writing a script for, and then the next thing you know you’re watching old Flash Gordon cartoons.

Toucan: Because somehow that came up in your search for synonyms.

Mark: Exactly. I make light of it, but I have come to accept grudgingly that this is just part of the process for me. Everybody has a different way of working, and for me it just seems to be procrastinate, procrastinate, procrastinate, procrastinate and then leap into the frame and get it all done. I’ve talked about this many a time with my other writer friends. If I could bottle the feeling I get when I catch a wave—you know, when I sit there at the keyboard and I’ve suddenly got an idea and I’m all excited and at that moment I can’t stop writing—I could have the easiest job in the world. But for some reason, and this is true for all of us, we forget what that feeling is every time we sit down at the keyboard.

Toucan: In August you marked your 25th anniversary as a comics professional. After all that time, what’s your most memorable moment as a comics pro?

Mark: Wow, that’s a good question. Not necessarily what’s my most memorable story or my most memorable as a comics pro, very good question because there’s so many and I’ve been very lucky. You know what, help me narrow it down. Let’s play word association. Give me something. Give me anything like conventions, store signings, I don’t know.

Toucan: How about seeing your name in print for the first time as a writer?

Mark: That rocked. Probably my most memorable moment is the moment of being a fan reporter doing stuff for Amazing Heroes magazine. And doing conventions, going back and forth as a guest liaison and getting to know artists and writers. And of course, all I ever wanted to do is write comics at that point in my life.

That’s not true, I wanted to be an editor, but I wanted to be involved in comics. I wanted to begin as a writer and see if there was anything there, and in 1984 I went to see Julie Schwartz and sat down with him in his office. Very nervous little 22-year-old kid and I came in with a pitch for an 8-page Superman story. This is back in the year or so before John Byrne took over the book, and the edict from on high, the edict from Jenette Kahn and Paul Levitz to Julie Schwartz, was we’ve got some big changes coming up, and we’re not sure when they’re going to fall. In the meantime Superman stuff does beautifully internationally for us, but we need it to be a little more kid friendly than the rest of the DC line. Not obviously sell comics for kids, not the Johnny DC line, but just make sure it’s kid friendly and fairly self-enclosed and in 8-page increments. At that point the standard in the industry was 22 pages and it had been for a while, but if you go back and look, all of Julie’s Superman and Action Comics books were 24 pages, because that’s what foreign marketers wanted. They wanted 8, 16, 24 [pages], they wanted things they could package into 48-page graphic albums. So with that in mind, Julie was buying a bunch of 8-page stories from anybody who showed any promise whatsoever, and I came in and pitched my story and he bought it right there on the spot, and I was over the moon. I mean, that’s still probably the greatest day of my professional life.

Toucan: What was the story?

Mark: It was a story called “The Puzzle of the Purloined Fortress.” Here’s the thing you got to give me credit for, the fact that I was writing for my audience. I knew what Julie liked. Julie liked stories with a strong first-page hook. He liked stories with a gimmick. He liked stories with a twist ending and with that bombastic alliterative title. So I pitched him a story in which Superman arrives at the Fortress of Solitude and opens the door to find that the place has been cleaned out and burgled. So it’s sort of a locked-room mystery. Who could have stolen the contents of the Fortress of Solitude?

Toucan: Would it be giving away if I asked who did it?

Mark: Trust me, it’s not worth going into. Next question. Next question.

Toucan: So if the Mark Waid of today could go back and tell the Mark Waid of 1987 something about working in the comics industry, what would it be?

Mark: Get it in writing, that’s one. Don’t overextend—plan your career better. My one regret is I wish I’d done a slightly better job of a certain narrowcasting, sort of picking and choosing my assignments with a little more care. Not that there’s a whole bunch. I mean everybody’s résumé has some crap on it. It’s just the way it is. Nobody passes that. Even Alan Moore wrote those horrible Vigilante stories.

Especially in the wake of Kingdom Come, I ended up being courted by everybody in the world, which was sweet and it’s nice to be the pretty girl at the party and I probably took on a little too much work . . . I think someone like Neil Gaiman had the right idea. Neil could have written two or three different DC books at the time he was writing Sandman, but he kept himself to one book and he did it smart. He just did one book, he did it to the best of his abilities, he focused all of his energy there, and that thing will be in print forever. Conversely, I wrote a ton of Green Lantern short stories for 80-Page Giants that nobody remembers. Also, Neil is insanely talented and I’m a guy at a keyboard, but that’s neither here nor there.

Toucan: So of all the characters over the last 25 years that you’ve written, who is your favo-

Mark: Superman. You didn’t even have to finish the question.

Toucan: Why Superman?

Mark: Well he’s not the character that drew me in, because Batman was the character that drew me in when I was 4 and I was watching Adam West cavort on the television. It’s Superman because I liked Superman when I was a teenager and I liked the mythos. I liked all the continuity and I liked the world building around Superman and so forth, but my soul didn’t belong to Superman yet. And then on January 26, 1979—probably the most important day of my life, certainly one of the top two or three—I went to see Superman, the movie. I walked into that theater and I was a kid with a troubled home life, I was not sure what I wanted out of life, I was depressed. I mean not blue, more like a teenager; I was really starting to deal with some depression issues and no real strong parental figures, and I wanted to get out. I don’t want to bring the conversation down, but let’s just say it was a very, very, very dark period in my life, probably the darkest. And I went into that theater feeling like nobody in the world cared about who I was or what I wanted or what my place in the world might be and nobody gave a crap. And I came out of that movie, after seeing it twice in a row, just elevated because—and it took me a long time to put two and two together, probably another 20 years to figure out the pieces of this puzzle—what really happened in that movie was that Superman is a character, especially as embodied by Christopher Reeve, who cares about everybody. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white or rich or poor or American or Indian or whatever, male or female. He cares about everybody, and that compassion radiated out and somehow through that performance and through that movie and through that moment in time, it reached me in a way that nothing else ever had and nothing else has since. And from that moment on I just knew that no matter what the rest of my life was going to be and what it was going to revolve around, it had to involve Superman. It sounds almost saccharin to say it this way, but as improbable as it sounded when I was a kid, Superman really did save my life, and I mean that in the most fundamental way and that’s an allegiance that will never go away.

So it’s led me down a pretty good path. It could have been much worse. I could have gone to see The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, and it could have been Clint Eastwood who had influenced me and I devoted my life to Clint Eastwood and I’d be defending a guy who’s yelling at an empty chair on the stage.

Toucan: Or you could be wearing a serapé right now.

Mark: Exactly. I could be walking around with a piece of metal hidden underneath it to shield me from bullets, smoking a cheroot. There are shortcomings and pitfalls to imprinting yourself on a comic book character like that that become more obvious as you get older. The obvious upsides to saying, “Well, I want to be like Superman” are obviously that Superman is a great role model for kids in terms of fair play, in terms of compassion, in terms of ethics and morals, but there’s a dark side to that, too, and I can’t pretend that that doesn’t inveigle its way into your consciousness as well, which is that Superman is also about lying to your friends about who you really are. Superman is also about putting others before yourself at all costs and in doing so not always looking out for yourself, which in the real world is something you kind of have to do. Superman is about black and white and we live in a world that is not black and white. So as I got into my 30s and 40s, I sort of realized there are some of my own character flaws or some of my own personal shortcomings. I’m not going to put them at Superman’s feet, but I’m just saying that’s how I interpreted what I read as a kid, but it’s interesting how it’s on a subliminal level and a very deep-seated level when I was impressionable and young how some of that stuff sort of took hold. And if you look at the influence of comics and its ethics and morals and its messages on me as a kid, if you look at that as a big lush garden full of beauty, of ethics and morals and doing the right thing and being truthful and so forth, there’s some weeds in the garden. I’ve probably stretched the analogy as far as I can without it collapsing under its own weight, but you kind of get it, right?

Toucan: I get it, and it also kind of relates to Daredevil, because he’s probably one of the most ethical characters in comics right now, at least the way you’re writing him. For a while there he was written way too dark and conflicted and kind of an anti-hero, but now you’ve brought positivity back to him and he’s very moral and very ethical.

Mark: I think he has to be, and again I don’t speak for everybody who ever wrote or drew Daredevil and I would be foolish to, because it’s a murderers’ row of truly great talent, but from my point of view Matt had no choice but to be moral and ethical because it’s so deeply engrained in his psyche . . . he has to believe. And when I say he has to believe I’m not saying I think he must believe this and this because I want it to happen. I’m saying I think he has no choice but to believe that good can triumph and light can come, that might comes from right. That things can be put right and that the world can be made fair and there can be justice, because otherwise there is just no reason in the world why a 10-year-old boy who helped a man across the street in traffic could have been blinded in a horrible accident and had all this stuff taken away from him. In other words, if you’re Matt Murdock, you have to believe that it’s not that there’s a reason for it, not that there’s some sort of a cosmic destiny behind the accident that happened, but just on a more fundamental level. You got to believe that good can come out of that stuff. Does that make any sense?

Toucan: Yeah, definitely.

Mark: I’m not sure I’ve hit exactly the nail on the head, but these are good questions you’re asking me because you’re making me articulate things I have not yet articulated in 800,000 interviews about Daredevil.

Toucan: And you’re right in that Daredevil over the years has had a murderer’s row of creators on it, but he’s also a character that every once in a while has to be jump started again.

Mark: Yeah.

Toucan: What attracted you to the character that made you want to take over the book at this point in time?

Mark: A short story. A pro short story actually that was written in the late ’70s and it was . . . did you ever see those Marvel novels of the late ’70s, early ’80s?

Toucan: Ted White wrote a Captain America one I think, but that was maybe in the ‘60s.

Mark: Yeah, and Otto Binder wrote an Avengers one and that was the ’60s. In the ’70s it was Len Wein and Marv Wolfman and Ron Goulart and guys like that doing Hulk and Fantastic Four and Spider-Man novels. But there was a short story collection, Marvel Superheroes, and I think Chris Clairemont wrote one and I know Jim Shooter wrote one, and in there was a short story about Daredevil written by Marty Pasko—he’s one of my favorite writers—under a pen name, it escapes me what it is now, I forget. I read that short story when I was a kid, and it starts with Matt waking up in the morning, it’s that simple. In prose you don’t get the cool visual cues that you get from Daredevil and his radar sense, you have to rely purely on prose, and Marty did a great job of in a few pages outlining what your life is like if you have radar sense and you have enhanced senses and you have to live in that world. And the way he focused on Matt’s powers, the way he defined them for me in prose, made me really think about them, and I’ve always loved that set of superpowers. I’ve always been fascinated by what the world was like through Matt Murdock’s enhanced senses. And so that as much as anything is what drew me to the book. I mean I had always been a fan, and honestly the other thing that drew me to the book was Marvel was great. I said, “Look I accept the assignment but I can’t do what Frank did. I can’t do stories in the style of Frank Miller, because that’s just not what I do well. What I would like to do is what Frank did, which is do my own thing. Just go and sort of break rank with the tone of the book that had been established since Frank got there and try to find some new voice. I think it was a horrific gamble, I really do, because there’s every chance in the world that fans could have just strung me up and said well this isn’t Bendis, go to hell. You know, where’s Hell’s Kitchen, where’s Dark Daredevil, where’s the blood? But instead we just—in a gargantuan way thanks to Marcos Martin and to Pablo Rivera, the artists—we hit the right place at the right time, I don’t know, but man we struck gold.

Toucan: Well, both in the writing and the art, a lot of readers think you’ve made Daredevil fun again.

Mark: You know the reason he hasn’t been fun is because fun comics don’t sell. Thanks . . . you just killed the book, thanks.

Toucan: I don’t think that book is in any danger of being killed right now. When you look back, the character is almost 50 years old. It’ll be 50 in 2014. He was created to be kind of more of a wise-cracking, fun superhero like Spider-Man was at the time, not that Spider-Man, especially under Ditko, didn’t have his dark moments, but Daredevil was a lot lighter.

Mark: In some ways he was a poor man’s Spider-Man in that they were trying to emulate the same sort of soap opera, but the problem that you have with Matt Murdock was that first off, the supporting cast was much smaller. Spidey had a huge supporting cast, and Matt had Foggy and his secretary Karen and that’s it. And for some reason it’s just not as angsty and soap operay when problems happen to a successful adult attorney with money as they are when they happen to a hapless teenage kid who is struggling to make the rent. It was always a swashbuckling book, and I loved that as a kid. That’s one of the reasons the character appealed to me as a kid, but you know as well as I do fun comics . . . they close out of town. Especially in the superhero world there’s just not much room for whimsy or lightness or what have you. I don’t understand why we seemed to have escaped that curse for the time being, but I’m kind of looking at it like I’m the coyote walking off the cliff. I don’t want to look down or I’ll fall.

Toucan: You mentioned before that one of the things that fascinates you about the character is how he sees things, and I think especially with the art, you’re bringing a lot of that to the page. The grid work on bodies and objects, that amazing cover on the first issue and all those things in the background, everything the way he sees them, this contributes to a totally different look for this character. But this interview isn’t all about Daredevil. Let’s move on and talk about the Hulk a little bit. By the same token of you taking over this character that has been around for 50 years, what made you want to take over the Hulk?

Mark: I was in the same bind. You know they said, “Hey, do the Hulk,” and I had the same reaction I generally do when you offer me a Marvel character, which is to say I have no interest. I don’t think I can do this and then I go off and I think about it for a while and I find a little tiny toehold in it. And in this case it wasn’t just “Hey, we want you to do the Hulk,” it was, “We want you to do the Hulk and we want you to try to breathe the same life into it that you breathed into Daredevil.” Well that sounds awesome and flattering, but I’m not sure what that means, because on the face they’re two vastly different characters and setups. With Daredevil you can tell a lot of different sorts of stories and there’s a lot more room for witty badinage between the characters and irony and humor and smartness and what have you. I think the characters are smart and I like writing smart. Hulk is a force of nature who is a living engine of destruction, and my old line was I don’t understand why Bruce doesn’t just throw himself off a bridge every day. He’s the most tormented character in all of comics.

So with that in mind I said, okay, well what do we do? What do we do to re-create in some degree what we did with Daredevil? What’s the commonality? What possible thing can thematically bring these two together? And then it came to me again. Again, that idea of torment. Both Matt Murdock and Bruce Banner were horribly tormented characters. In fact, I would make the argument that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby with the Hulk created in 1962 the first and quintessential tormented superhero. Before that the only contender would have been the Thing from Fantastic Four, who predated Hulk by like half a year, but Thing wasn’t happy in his skin and Thing resented being the Thing, but still he had a sense of humor and he was still heroic and he wasn’t tormented every second of the day. Whereas Bruce Banner, from the moment he first becomes the Hulk, is just weak and put upon and looks like he wants to die every moment. And he’s on the run and he is just—again, tormented is the one word that you can’t not use when you talk about Bruce Banner. So I said, okay, well . . . my problem with that now in today’s comics is that you can’t go to a comic store and throw a stick and not hit a comic about a tormented superhero. They’re all tormented. Jeez . . . I mean look at the DC lineup. Torment is the thematic keynote of the entire new DCU. They’ve got to be people feel cursed by their powers. “My powers are a curse.” Oh, look at the horrible things that happen to me because I have superpowers. And that gets old, man. I mean, that’s a valid storytelling tool, but to make it the entire cornerstone of entire universes worth of comics . . . and it’s not just limited to DC. It’s a lot of heroes feeling like their powers are a curse, and I thought, well, Banner started that whole thing and now everybody’s like that, so maybe we should take Banner in a completely different direction. Maybe Banner doesn’t have to feel cursed by his powers any more, and that sort of led me to the breakthrough of doing what we did with Matt Murdock, which was to say look, Bruce Banner wakes up one day and has his epiphany as Matt Murdock did. Matt Murdock’s epiphany was “I’m tired of being depressed, I’m tired of digging a hole, I’m tired of being miserable all the time so I’m just not going to be miserable any more.” And there are complications that come with that obviously, but that’s kind of what we’re playing out in the series now, but with Banner—same kind of deal. Banner gets up one morning and realizes all he’s done in his lab for the last 50 Marvel years is try to stop himself from being the Hulk, and it never works. Tony Stark gets to be a heralded super-genius billionaire and Reed Richards gets Nobel Prize after Nobel Prize, but Bruce Banner’s tombstone is going to say “Hulk Smash” and that sucks. And so Banner’s whole new outlook on life is as Hulk destroys, Bruce Banner will build. I cannot get rid of the Hulk. I can minimize his impact. I can try to tap it down as best I can, but it’s going to happen, so when it happens I’ve got to be sure I’m pointed in the right direction, I’ve got to be sure I’m in places where the Hulk can be used. I’ve got to make sure that I’ve got people and the support staff around me who could point Hulk in the right direction. And in the meantime, I will spend my civilian hours no longer obsessing over this unsolvable problem with the Hulk and instead obsess over how do I sort of balance the karmic scales for all the things that Hulk has done. And in that sense it’s not a throwback story and it’s not a light Silver Age-y romp, but at the same time it is a more positive, less cynical story.

Toucan: Was it you who came up with the “Indestructible” tagline?

Mark: No, actually it was I think Mark Paniccia, the editor, but it fits beautifully in the story because it really is about Bruce Banner sort of having to realize at some point that he can’t get rid of the Hulk, no matter how hard he tries. He just can’t. He’s indestructible.

Our Toucan Interview with Mark Waid is indestructible, too, and continues in Part Two . . . click here to read it!