Top 121 Quotes & Sayings by Mark Waid - Page 2

I was the last guy I imagined anyone would ever associate with 'Daredevil,' but once I gave the character some thought, much like with the 'Fantastic Four,' I found my hooks and, I think, some angles on the series that have never been explored.

I think it's imperative of me to advance that theory that you can win your small victories against the dark.

I think comics are really - superhero comics are at their best and most primal when they're about joy and flying, and about escaping the gravity of the world. But, at the same time, that's not to say all stories should be happy.

The nice thing about working with BOOM! on 'Irredeemable' and 'Incorruptible,' man, was they let me have my head. No one said boo about anything.

I think someone like Jack Kirby, for instance, would suffer greatly in the transition from print to digital were he still around.

I love print comics.

There are other ways to create tension and drama than to have somebody stabbed through the back with a sword.

I love what Max Landis is doing with 'Superman: American Alien.' That's a really good book.

The problem with most digital comics is that you're simply taking print material and adapting it. It's like reading through a cardboard tube.

Captain America is an interesting character because it makes you ask those questions in yourself as a writer. What do we want as a nation, what do we mean as a nation, what is our role in the world as a nation? What are our strengths and weaknesses as a country?

If you come into any creative project without questions, you're gonna bore yourself, and it'll show on the page.

I do believe that any sort of electromagnetic energy that can be measured beyond the moment of death is, by the definition of energy, eternal. But I cop to the fact that calling it a 'soul' and presuming it sustains our consciousness in any form is, to put it kindly, a leap.

I got taught a lot of great lessons by superhero comics as a kid about virtue and self-sacrifice and responsibility. And those were an important part of imprinting my DNA with ethical and moral values.

Dialogue is one of the easiest ways to get character conflict across immediately in comics.

I think there are things that digital can't do as well as print thus far. Even an iPad is only 80% the size of a standard comics page, so the images are going to be smaller. You don't get your big, whopping two-page spreads.

We want the reading experience of digital comics to be as simple as tapping a tablet or an arrow key or mouse button to move forward or back.

In a perfect world, I'd like to start running comics for kids - by kids.

The beauty of Captain America is that you didn't have to come from a distant planet, like Superman, or he didn't have to be born into a family of billionaires like Bruce Wayne. He happened to be in the right place at the right time, and someone gave him a magic potion, and he grew muscles and became a superhero.

I think there's a moral imperative when you're writing fictional heroes to give characters who somehow give us something to aspire to as opposed to dragging them down to our level.

I am just tired of writing about heroes that we're dragging down to our level, and I want to write about heroes that we want to be.

Jan. 26, 1979, was the most important day of my life. Because that's the day that I saw 'Superman: The Movie.' I came out of it knowing that no matter what the rest of my life was going to be like, it had to involve Superman somehow.

I just love rolling up my sleeves and doing research, and I especially love doing research on the origins of folklore and the origins of mythology.

Teaching is good for me. It forces me to articulate ways of doing things or rules of thumb that I've sort of taken for granted.

When you're writing a team book where every character already has his or her own series, you don't have dominion over them as individuals - but what you can exploit is their relationships with one another.

Flash is about freedom; Flash is about expression. Flash is about just the joy of exuberant running and of freedom, and the moment you weight him down with too much Batman-like baggage... that's not the Flash anymore.

I genuinely enjoy the puzzle put before me with a crossover - how do I use this bigger piece of the Marvel Universe to tell a character-based tale I wouldn't normally think to tell?

Years ago, I was asked to come up to do a store signing in Vermont. The short version is the two younger guys who own the store pick me up at the airport and start driving me around Vermont, showing me the sights and the textile mills and the restaurants, and the punchline is there's no store. There is no store!

The best stories, the most-fun 'Avengers' stories, explore the relationships between the characters.

You can do all of the world-building you want; at the end of the day, what's important is the heart and the drive of the story and the heart and the drive of the characters.

I'd still love to work with John Romita Sr. at some point. That's the dream.

Real science is the greatest, most exciting springboard I have available to me as a writer, and I don't feel the least bit constrained by it.

All of us who grew up reading comics love the memory of sitting under an apple tree with a comic book in one hand and a peanut butter sandwich in the other; the tactile sensation of the paper on the skin and so forth is part of the experience.

I'm a big believer that if you buy a comic, you ought to own it.

I think of it this way: When you hear that people have downloaded your comic, appreciate that thousands are eager to hear what you have to say. The poetry club down the hall may not have the same problem. That's a good problem to have.

What I've found over the years working on various projects is, you can have a clever book or clever tagline, but there has to be a story to go along with it that leads to something bigger. Something with a little more texture to it.

It's always an amazing gift to be able to work with storytellers who 'get it' and who can not only draw anything but can draw it better and more dynamically than you'd ever envisioned.

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

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

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

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

A superhero is someone who, at some point or in some way, inspires hope or is the enemy of cynicism. Even if you bog it down with political allegory, or even if you're doing celebrity allegory. You still need to take the cynical out of it.

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

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

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

Not since Walter Gibson has anyone been better suited to The Shadow than Howard Chaykin

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

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

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

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

In a 22-page comic, figuring an average of four to five panels a page and a couple of full-page shots, a writer has maybe a hundred panels at most to tell a story, so every panel he wastes conveying a.) something I already know, b.) something that's a cute gag but does nothing to reveal plot or character, or c.) something I don't need to know is a demonstration of lousy craft.

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

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

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

I was a teenager, and I went to see the Superman movie, and up to the point I walked into that movie, I was a kid with no direction and no real purpose and no strong parental figures, and kind of aimless. I walked out of that movie knowing that whatever my life was going to be from then on, it had to have something to do with Superman, because something touched me emotionally with Christopher Reeve's performance.

Socrates should have written comics.

Does Batman ever NOT have a plan...?

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

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

When you give me something that I love, then I spend a long time drilling down on it and figuring out what it is I love about it.

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