This internview originally appeared on the MANIA site.
MANIA: Okay, I think we will talk about Ka-Zar first because that is coming out real soon. I know that Ka-Zar is really Lord Kevin Plunder, shipwrecked in the jungle as a child, which is all obviously straight out of Lord Greystoke from Tarzan. How is he different from Tarzan?
Mark Waid: He's very different. I actually call him the anti-Tarzan because he was old enough, when he was dropped off in the jungle, to remember the Bee Gees and Big Macs and Happy Meals and the Partridge Family. One of the things that happens in the series is that since the birth of his son with his wife Shanna, he finds himself inexplicably attracted more every passing day to things civilized. He's the one that misses getting a pizza in the middle of the night, who misses getting a pretzel from a vendor and misses his cable TV, and she is getting more and more into the earth, mother, goddess, herbal tea thing.
MANIA: Which is much more appropriate for where they are.
Mark Waid: Yes, much more appropriate, and so this is a wedge that has been driven between them as a couple. Why that's happening and what the nature of that is spelled out over the first year or so. Ka-Zar himself doesn't know from the get- go and neither do the readers, but things will make themselves clear as the series go on.
MANIA: Is it something internal?
Mark Waid: Yes.
MANIA: Okay, it is. As opposed to being something imposed on him by mind control from outer space.
Mark Waid: No, exactly. No, something very internal to the character.
MANIA: Well, at the moment then, who is Ka-Zar? What's his goal and his approach?
Mark Waid: Well, he's not sure, to tell you the truth. Up to this point, his daily goal has been to preserve the Savage Land, which is the last refuge of dinosaurs and other assorted life forms, in the area beneath the Antarctic.
MANIA: It's a full time job, since super heroes arrive there every month.
Mark Waid: Yeah, pretty much it is and there's all kinds of tribes there and all sorts of warring races and it's a matter of keeping peace and keeping people from being eaten by brontosauruses and that kind of thing. It's pretty much a full time job but he finds himself longing for more.
MANIA: And is he going to wait for something to come to him or is he going to go looking?
Mark Waid: Oh, pretty soon he'll actually go to New York City. Now, whether Shanna goes with him or not, that still remains to be seen. But the first three issues involve someone being sent from New York to come after him for whatever reason. Ka-Zar doesn't know why people are stalking him, Ka-Zar doesn't know why this man is after him, but when it's all said and done, he decides to go back to New York to try to find out where this guy came from. And he's going to find out that he enjoys it in New York a lot more that he remembered.
MANIA: So the point of going to New York was not to get away from it all....
Mark Waid: No, the point of going to New York was to track something down, but when he's there he's kind of digging the fact that, first off, in that sort of post-Heroes Reborn reborn when the Avengers and FF aren't around, New York is actually sort of crazy for super heroes. If you come into town and you're a super hero, we're going to kind of give you a wide berth. So he rents out the top floors of the Plaza Hotel and that way he can go to Central Park and walk Zabu the tiger and he brings in a bunch of funky little dinosaurs and tribal people and stuff to keep him happy and the New Yorkers just kind of give it a pass because on top of everything else he's filthy rich. So they are willing to give him a pretty wide berth too.
MANIA: Yeah, the New Yorker says. Dinosaur guys. Whaddevah.
Mark Waid: Okay, as long as he keeps making contributions to the policeman's athletic society and to the New York school system, they'll let him do what he wants to do.
MANIA: So you say he's there for at least three issues.
Mark Waid: Oh, at least. Probably more; the thing is, Andy [Kubert] loves drawing dinosaurs and I love writing New York and in a lot of ways we're like Ka-Zar and Shanna.
MANIA: Possibly with a longer term future.
Mark Waid: Let's hope.
MANIA: So you're planning to do Ka-Zar for the indefinite future then?
Mark Waid: Yeah, no plans to leave.
MANIA: And you've thought things out in some detail for three issues?
Mark Waid: Yes, we've actually thought things out for the first six issues.
MANIA: What brought you to work on Ka-Zar?
Mark Waid: Andy. Andy wanted to do it and, frankly, I wasn't insanely interested until I started reading the old Ka-Zar and remembering how much I enjoyed the 1980 run by Bruce Jones and thought there's something here. This is a chance to play around with modern characters in a prehistoric setting and I like the paradox of it and Andy is just a joy to work with so you can't go wrong with Andy Kubert.
MANIA: No, that's certainly true. Although for the first while it's going to be prehistoric characters in a modern setting. Plenty of other Marvel characters in there?
Mark Waid: No, in the immediate future. I am trying really to stay away from the traditional "Wolverine guest stars in issue number two" because it takes the focus away from the characters and I find the best way to approach a new series, weather it's when I took up with Flash or Valor or anything, don't worry about guest stars for the time being just get down to the core of the main character and go on from there.
MANIA: Speaking of Valor, are you going to do anything more with him?
Mark Waid: Yes, actually we had a whole thing planned out but he was a casualty of the reboot, he was a casualty of Zero Hour where the sales where climbing on the books and there was no reason to cancel it except for when you consider the recent reboot [of the DC universe], he wouldn't have made any sense anymore.
MANIA: You figure he could've had all sorts of issues in the twentieth century before he got put into that Stasis Zone.
Mark Waid: But still, we just finished doing a series of stories with the Legionnaires as they were before the reboot so it wouldn't have made any sense. Plus what we wanted to do was put him in the Phantom Zone immediately and then have him be able to come out from time to time over the thousand years. So the next long, long series of stories would've been about Valor emerging from the Phantom Zone from time to time throughout DC history during the thousand years intervening between the twentieth and thirtieth centuries. So we would've gotten a survey course of DC history.
MANIA: Now, that actually would've made sense. As a history major I would really like to see that series. But I may one day.
Let's see, the Flash. You're leaving the Flash really soon after what I'd call an epic run.
Mark Waid: I'm just taking a slight hiatus.
MANIA: For one year.
Mark Waid: Yes.
MANIA: And is that because you're going to be doing Kingdom.
Mark Waid: Kingdom and JLA year one.
MANIA: So it's sort of a trade off.
Mark Waid: Yeah, exactly. JLA Year One is as focused on Barry Allen as anybody else, so it's trading one Flash for the other. Plus we've announced that we are going to be doing and hopeful this will come to pass, we're still in negotiations, [but] we've announced our intentions to do the life story of the Flash, which is essentially Iris's book, and do it as an illustrated text and do it as a hardcover and as a release for Christmas of 1997. And the plan, I'm hoping is going to come together with Mike Weiringo and a few other Flash artists past and present so we're going to see how it goes.
MANIA: So as it might be two hundred pages of text like the Death of Superman novel.
Mark Waid: Well, it's going to be a lot more illustrated text, probably closer to 100 or 150 pages, we're not sure on page count yet.
MANIA: But still pretty hefty.
Mark Waid: Pretty hefty book. Yeah, sure.
MANIA: So this is something coming out fairly soon, I guess.
Mark Waid: Yes.
MANIA: Now how is, and this of course is a huge question, but how is Barry Allen different from Wally West?
Mark Waid: Well he's not as interesting, frankly. I mean we all love Barry, but everybody who wants Barry Allen back keeps forgetting that he's kind of a stiff.
MANIA: He's a great guy to have at your side.
Mark Waid: Absolutely, you couldn't ask for a better guy, but he wasn't a very interesting man, he was just a midwestern middle of the road guy. Not a very colorful man, but very noble man. He wasn't as given to self doubt, and to introspection as Wally; and I think that was the biggest difference between the characters.
MANIA: Okay, so you're going to pick up the Flash after a year. Do you know what state he will be in at that time?
Mark Waid: No I don't. Actually, Grant [Morrison] and I are going to have that conversation here in a little while to try to figure out where to go from here. He's coming on board with issue #130; it was originally announced as #131, but we're going to be an issue shorter than I thought. #129 will be planned for my last issue, then we'll be back a year from then.
MANIA: You are not going to try to wrap everything so you can start with a clean slate, or are you?
Mark Waid: We're going to make a transition. I can't say too much without giving some of the big surprises at the end.
MANIA: OK. Fair enough. Of course you will be writing Barry Allen as part of the big Flash book.
Mark Waid: ummm... hmmm.. (yes)
MANIA: And you are also doing Kingdom.
Mark Waid: Yeah.. Actually although you can't, and I know this isn't helping you, but there's not much we can say about it at this point; we're still trying to figure out exactly what it is.
MANIA: You know I was wondering how are you going to make a prequel to the series.
Mark Waid: Well, we thought we knew. Every time we think we know, I find out that DC is already working on something similar. We had an idea; I don't want to give it away because we may still use it, we had an idea that brought everything into a crystal clear focus and then I was flipping through that DC Preview issue of last week and I find that Vertigo has something happening very, very, very close to it, so back to square one. So we're still kind of floundering. We would like to get it out for 1997, but committed to it as am I, we keep being stymied by forces outside of our own reckoning.
MANIA: So you've come up with 2 or even more ideas on how you want to do the new series?
Mark Waid: We've got at least 3 or 4. Everybody likes them, they're all workable, but there's always some little spanner that gets caught in the works; but we will persevere.
MANIA: Kingdom Come: about a year later, what are your thought on what you've created there?
Mark Waid: Oh gosh, I know we didn't change the industry, I know we didn't change anyone's life, it's not Watchmen, it's not Dark Knight, I doesn't inform the way we do comics, but if people felt that they paid, whatever it was, and got a good story, then that's all we can ask for. Alex really did a terrific job and will win every award this year, and more power to him.
MANIA: Do you think you did a good job?
Mark Waid: I think I did a creditable job. I look back on it and I see some things I wish I had done differently on it, but nothing egregiously horrible.
MANIA: Well, our readers like tweaks; what sort of things would you have done differently?
Mark Waid: Oh. I'm still am not completely 100% comfortable with the way Wonder Woman is characterized.
MANIA: Really? I kind of liked her.
Mark Waid: I would have liked to have given her more of a resolution to her own story.
MANIA: Yeah, I can see that.
Mark Waid: The problem with this is all of it is dependent on more room. There were other things we would have like to have done but we had 180 pages and that's all we had. If we had 300 pages it would have been a much different story.
The novelization that [Elliot S.] Maggin is doing is brilliant; it had to be this enormously thick hard cover prose text book, and I'm reading chapter after chapter and he's using 30% of Kingdom Come and 70% new stuff, and it's just amazing the stuff he's coming up with. So anyone that likes Kingdom Come, this is required reading.
MANIA: So that's probably in the works for later this year?
Mark Waid: I think November this year.
MANIA: Wasn't Kingdom Come the doom to which Know Man referred in A Midsummer's Nightmare?
Mark Waid: Perhaps, we're still playing with that in terms of Kingdom. We may be able to use some references there.
MANIA: Because the only thing we hear is "something bad is going to happen." There is the image of bloody spears well that could be a lot of things.
Mark Waid: Yeah, but we also played in a couple of riffs in Midsummer's Nightmare to Kingdom Come intentionally.
MANIA: Such as?
Mark Waid: There's the moment when you find Green Lantern is monitoring the Earth.
MANIA: That's true! And the fortress he was sitting in was just like the one in Kingdom Come. Sure, it was a dream, but everything he dreams becomes real, so ...
Mark Waid: Right. If you go back and look, there's a couple of riffs like that.
MANIA: So, the Kingdom series might actually answer some of those riffs, in whatever form it takes. It seems like you're writing not only all over the map, but certainly all over the shelf. X-O, Kingdom, Ka-Zar, how do you chose what things you want to work on?
Mark Waid: Same way a kid chooses things out of a candy store and comes out with a belly ache. I am trying to refine what I'm working on, trying to pare down the things I'm working on. I like to have a nice mix of nostalgic favorites like Flash and Justice League I used to read when I was a kid, and mix it up with things that are new to me like Ash for Event comics or Ka-Zar, because it gives me a chance to stretch a new muscle. If I can do about a book a week I'm OK with that. If I can do about 4 books at a time that's a pretty hefty work load right there.
MANIA: You are currently doing more that that?
Mark Waid: Oh, yes I am. So I have got to find a way to pare it down, it'll happen.
MANIA: You're handing off X-O to Brian Augustyn, are you not?
Mark Waid: Right, he's take away the issues, I'm still credited as plot assistant and plot consultant and I would do that anyway.
MANIA: But you can put in as much as you want.
Mark Waid: Yeah, but I don't want to sell Brian short. He's going to do a terrific job on his own.
MANIA: Joe Quesada, when we spoke to him two weeks ago, said his understanding is that the miniseries Ash: The Fire Within will concentrate mainly on Ashley Quinn the man, as distinct from Ash the super hero. Well, who is Ashley Quinn?
Mark Waid: We're still trying to figure that out. He's just ... next question.
MANIA: Okay, very good. JLA Year One: what's that about?
Mark Waid: One of the most exciting things I've ever done.
MANIA: Good!
Mark Waid: Brian Augustyn and Barry Kitson and I are working together on it. And it is, just as it says, the original plot for Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), the Flash (Barry Allen), Martian Manhunter, Aquaman, and Black Canary. Starting from the day after they first met to their origin as the Justice League up to, give or take, the first year.. year one is not quite accurate, it's more of a first few months of the group's formation.
It's how these 5 disparate personalities come together and form the world's greatest super-team and it's very much a character piece. There's plenty of action/adventure, but.... You get plenty of action/adventure in each month's JLA which is a great book, ours is character pieces, ours is...we're going to be spending as much time with each individual hero in their own identity... their own little world.
We'll spend as much time with them outside the JLA as we will inside the JLA and really get to examine the characters.
MANIA: That's appropriate for the story in which we see how several people became a group.
Mark Waid: Yes, and then how other groups in the DC universe at the time react to the formation of the JLA because we've got the Challengers out there, they've been around for a while, and the Doom Patrol, and now they are seeing this new wave of very prominent and very public, bright, happy super heroes coming along and so there are a lot of guest appearances by everybody in DC during this time.
MANIA: Anyone from the Justice Society?
Mark Waid: Yeah, actually in the first couple of issues, sure. You know, why are you guys using our name.
MANIA: Well, you weren't using it, but...
Mark Waid: Yeah, but still...
MANIA: And this is a one shot?
Mark Waid: No, actually it's twelve issues.
MANIA: Okay, I wonder why I haven't heard anything about that? But it's still some distance down the road, I guess?
Mark Waid: Yes, we're not sure, when it comes out, probably the last quarter of 1997 but no official date has been set yet.
MANIA: Okay. Well, I'm excited about that and of course Grant Morrison will know something about that as well.
Mark Waid: Yes.
MANIA: So you are taking the five of the seven Justice League founders in that original story with the Appelaxians and weeding out Superman and Batman.
Mark Waid: Just an editorial fiat; it's been decreed by forces more powerful than us that Superman and Batman were not founding members of the JLA. But they will both appear.
MANIA: Okay, so it will be their reaction to the founding of the JLA?
Mark Waid: Yeah. One of the things that we've got going is that the JLA, right from the start, keeps a chair at the meeting table for Superman. But to them he is Bono and they are a garage band and they are terrified of approaching him. He's Elvis, for goodness sake, they are nothing, so they have to build their own confidence before they approach him.
MANIA: Not that Green Lantern or Flash seem to have a confidence problem.
Mark Waid: No, there's still a level of......
MANIA: They are human beings and he is a god. In fact that was sort of how they treated him in Kingdom Come, too, even before his actions started to justify that.
Mark Waid: Yes, very deferential.
MANIA: So is Magog Superboy?
Mark Waid: I can't say.
MANIA: Well, he uses all that flip dialog, the fact that he wanted to take over from Superman and felt he was owed that, somehow ...
Mark Waid: Yeah, nice try though, but can't say. No comment. Not even off the record.
MANIA: Fair enough. You created Impulse, did you not?
Mark Waid: Yes.
MANIA: And Max Mercury?
Mark Waid: Well, actually kind of. Max was actually in costume he was an old Quality Comics character from the forties named Quicksilver.
MANIA: Quality Comics, the people who did Freedom Fighters, Uncle Sam and them?
Mark Waid: Yes, and he was called Quicksilver and DC gained all the rights to him when they bought all the Quality characters years ago. But we can't call him Quicksilver, obviously.
MANIA: Yes, well, not these days.
Mark Waid: So I brought him back in Flash, The Return of Barry Allen and played with him and the only thing he really owes to the original Quicksilver is the costume. The original Quicksilver had no secret identity, he only had powers and intermittently. They couldn't keep it straight from story to story. But I always liked the costume; that was all of the idea I used; the costume, and built the character around it. Whereas Impulse was from the get go.
MANIA: But you don't have any rights to him or anything?
Mark Waid: No, DC gives a fair equity in things you create, so if there is an Impulse action figure I get a piece of change, if there is an Impulse cartoon show I get a piece of change. But still it's a DC character, sure.
MANIA: Well, even that is an improvement over even ten years ago.
Mark Waid: Sure, true.
MANIA: And I suppose some of the other companies might have some of the same attitude when you create stuff for them.
Mark Waid: Yes. Absolutely.
MANIA: Well, I wanted to ask you what other projects you were working on considering you are trying not to be swamped, but what other components are there going to be to that belly ache.
Mark Waid: Oh gosh, well, we keep talking about Captain America. Nothing confirmed, nothing denied. It would be fun to get back to Captain America. And beyond that I would like to take a crack at Superman someday. The guy in the red and blue. And it would be fun to take a crack at Captain Marvel. DC's Captain Marvel and this is no way to denigrate what Jerry Ordway is doing, which is really nice work and I'm not angling for his job, it just is a fun character.
And maybe I'll get to do something with them in Kingdom. At this point Kingdom is Mark Waid's travelogue for the DC universe, essentially.
MANIA: Sort of as Kingdom Come is Mark Waid's travelogue of the somewhat unpleasant side of the future DC universe.
Mark Waid: Yeah, kind of.
MANIA: Especially in the first issue where you're just wandering around seeing stuff. And getting some hints of the gathering doom. I am actually extremely fond of Super-Soldier, it's my favorite of the first Amalgam run.
Mark Waid: Thanks, good.
MANIA: And we just got the black & white advance of Super-Soldier: Man Of War. Is Dave Gibbons more involved in writing this one than he was in the last one.
Mark Waid: Absolutely. All I did was call on the phone. I didn't have time to do it at all but they didn't want to pass up the chance but we just plotted it over the phone. It was his baby all along.