Catching Up with
the
Fastest Man Alive (Part 2)
Part 1 | Part 2
| Part 3 | Part 4 |
Part 5 | Part 6 |
Part 7
Mark [Waid]
took it back to
"Here's a guy who runs fast, and he's really
cool."
[T]hat really is all there is to say
about the Flash
when you're a little kid.
Let’s see here. I have
a few questions for you. I came a little bit early this morning and read
Flash. So I’ve kind of got a jump on you there, I hope.
[Laughs.] I didn’t
realize that it was just out, ‘cause I got a copy of it about a week
and a half ago. Is it just out in the stores today?
Just came out today,
actually.
Right.
It came from Diamond
yesterday, and we’re getting ready to start selling ‘em like crazy
today.
Great! We actually got a
really nice boost up in sales. Like, sales went up by 15,000 for the
book.
Whew.
Which is really good, you
know, ‘cause we were terrified we were going to fuck up Mark’s book
for him.
[Both laugh.]
You know, Mark said,
"Look after this for a year," and we were terrified of giving
him it back with 10,000 sales or something. [Laughs.]
O.K., let me ask you a
couple of questions about Flash.
Sure. Yeah.
First of all, Grant
Morrison’s your writing partner on Flash, and he has a well-documented
fascination with the character.
Yeah.
Do you have any kind of
attachments to the Flash like that, that go back a long way?
Well, I love the Flash
... I think for the same reason Grant had, that comics were very poorly
distributed in Britain in the ‘70s, when we were growing up. I’m
about ten years younger than Grant, you know, but we— Comics in Britain
tend to be in stores for a very long time; you would maybe get an issue
of a comic, and then you’d have to wait four years for the next part
of it or something. The distribution was really bad before
we had comics stores here.
And one of the few
comics that you sort of got every month was Superman and The
Flash, so
we grew up with these guys being our favorite characters. I think for
me, Superman actually is my favorite, and the Flash is, you know, a
close second or third. I know Grant, that’s his number-one character,
[the Flash], but I’ve always loved the Flash too. You know, just the
fact he’s a Justice Leaguer and he and Superman shared Cary Bates as a
writer through the whole time I was reading all of it. [I’ve] a real
affinity for the Flash; I really enjoyed it.
And I’d lost that,
really, post-Crisis. But what I did was I started picking up Mark
Waid’s Flash
about three years ago—well, actually, when I started
getting them sent by DC—and I rediscovered my love for the Flash again.
It’s like Mark’s job on it was so fantastic that I actually went to
my local comics store and I bought every one he’d ever done—went back
and got them all ‘cause they were so good. Mark did such a
great job on it.
Mark’s
Flash has been
very popular. What’s your favorite thing about Mark’s Flash?
I think what’s really
happening now is—
You know, I kind of split
comics ages up, and it’s like there’s four categories. I think
we’re now entering the Fourth Age of Comics. The Golden Age ran from
‘35 to ‘55 approximately. The Silver Age was ‘35 to ‘75, and I
think ‘75 to ‘95 was really what could be called the Dark Age.
And, you know, it had its
good and bad points. The peak of it was probably in the middle of it,
where you had Watchmen and Dark Knight and everything. And then the crap
really came out as the comics recession happened. You know, the comics
recession was caused really by the amount of terrible comics, where
people [were] dwindling with ideas, exactly the same as what happened at
the end of the Silver Age and the Golden Age—just people run[ning] out
of ideas before the next big wave came along.
And I think Kingdom
Come precipitated the entire new wave of this one—you don’t know what an
age is called until it’s finished, you know?—but this new one was
entered about ‘95. For me, I think Kingdom Come and The
Flash were the
kind of harbingers of it, and what really has happened in this age is
the heroes have been stripped ... back to what makes you like them in
the first place. So where you had all sorts of ridiculous storylines
with top characters for so long, Mark took it back to "Here’s a
guy who runs fast, and he’s really cool." You know? And
[laughs]—that really is all there is to say about the Flash when
you’re a little kid.
Exactly.
Mark just really gave you
that wide-eyed wonder, that optimism that you had when you read these
books. And I think Grant’s applied the same strategy to JLA. And
I’ve tried to apply the same strategy to Superman. He’s the
world’s greatest super-hero; JLA are the world’s greatest
super-team, you know?
And I think, more than
anything, Mark taught everyone that these guys are great. Don’t
be embarrassed about it; just strip it back to what it is, and that is
so cool in itself. You don’t have to give him a black costume; you
don’t have to give him a grim expression: He runs fast. He’s cool.
continue
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