Mark-Waid

As I was looking at the programming guide to see which panels I was going to attend, I saw The Liberty Brigade. The idea of using a bunch of old, out of copyright characters from the Golden Age of comics sounded very interesting. Then I saw that Mark Waid was the editor. Waid is practically an Encyclopedia Britannica when it comes to Golden Age comics, so that meant I had to see just what this was about. Well, the panel revealed that this graphic novel ( currently being funded via Kickstarter), was even more interesting than it seemed from its description. Take a look: ...

Mark Waid and Ramona Fradon joined a science teacher (and science consultant to comics) at a panel to discuss science in comics. While the panelists made a point of reminding the audience that superhero stories are best enjoyed with a suspension of disbelief, the value of science within comics was discussed. For example, Mark Waid mentioned that it can sometimes become the basis of a story or it can become the basis of a character trait - such as Aquaman being quiet on land because underwater his voice would carry further. It was a good panel overall, but I think a series of episodes of a podcast or TV show could really do the subject justice. ...

Back in January I wrote about Kevin Smith’s take on The Green Hornet. In February I wrote about Mark Waid’s first two Green Hornet volumes. Although it’s not unheard of with the Big Two, it’s certainly much more rare to have the freedom to interpret characters as you wish. Take a character as iconic as Spider-Man. Until Miles Morales (nearly 50 years into the character’s history), Spider-Man was always Peter Parker. Nearly every aspect of his character is immutable. In fact, that’s one of the reasons his marriage was dissolved - he didn’t have the old Parker luck with women. Yet, because Dynamite is working with licensed properties a few volumes at a time, each writer gets a lot more leeway in how they can interpret the character (with only the licensor typically making any objections).

As I mentioned in my John Carter first look, I’m somewhat new to Dynamite’s properties; more accurately, their licensed properties. When I attended the Pulp Panel at Baltimore Comic-Con 2014, I was interested in the Green Hornet for the first time. My only previous exposure was the trailer for the Seth Rogan film. I knew it was an old character from the time of the radio serials, but not much else. But after hearing about Mark Waid’s take on it, I flagged it as something to check out. Last time we looked at Kevin Smiths’ Green Hornet. This time we take a look at Mark Waid’s first two volumes. I don’t want to muddle things with comparisons, so I’ll just be taking a look at what Mark Waid did and, in about a month, there’ll be a comparison article. As I did last time, I’d like to first quickly outline the story and then take a look at the themes Mark Waid is exploring. This time the story takes place in the 1940s, closer to the original Green Hornet stories. This allows Mark Waid to make use of pulp tropes and simpler technology. There are just some plots that don’t make sense in a world with Twitter, cell phones, the Internet, etc. The Green Hornet and Kato have been operating for a while, but not long enough that all the lowlifes know who they are. A new mob boss, Cerelli, arrives from San Francisco and already knows who The Green Hornet is, such is his infamy. In a plot that comes right out of the pulp era, The Green Hornet finds out that Axis power agents have infiltrated the USA and are trying to sabotage US efforts to assist the Europeans in the war. They are also waging a propaganda war to try and keep the US out of the war. Eventually Britt Reid figures out that the city’s industrialists are on the take as the Germans are paying them and they’re also collecting insurance on the goods they destroy. Additionally, it turns out that Cerelli is a German masquerading as an Italian. After The Green Hornet and Kato disrupt the German plot, they decide to retire as the events of this arc were hard to manage. Unfortunately, Lenore Case blackmails/guilt trips them into continuing. Thus we end with a proper pulp ending - the hero did some good, did some bad, and lost some of himself and his freedom in the process. (At least he’s alive at the end)

Just like when I spoke with Mark Waid two years ago, he is a VERY busy man at this convention. He is on nearly every panel and is incredibly popular with attendees seeking to speak with him and get his signature. So, first of all, a huge thanks to Mark for taking 5 minutes to talk with me. The conversation focused on the present and future of digital comics this time: ...

Comic Book Legal Defense Fund: Tales from the Code There are lots of great books to read about the comics code and why it came into being. I recommend The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. The neat thing about this panel was having Jim Starlin talk about how it did or, often, didn’t affect his writing. It appears that he took the stance that he’d write what he wanted to write and it was up to the editors to tell him to change something because of the comics code.

We’ve entered a period where every year there will be major comic anniversaries. All of the iconic characters that were created during the 1960s—including most of Marvel’s most notable characters—have fiftieth anniversaries on the horizon. This year one of the most notable birthdays is Daredevil who turned fifty this month. Daredevil, created by Stan Lee and Bill Everett, has been a popular character since his inception and has had an ongoing for most of that time. He’s been a swashbuckling hero full of joy and a gritty hero living in the darkness. He’s a disabled hero in a world of superhuman perfection. He’s been blessed with some of the best creative teams in the business and has the awards to prove it. He even made it to the big screen in an admittedly lackluster movie and next year is getting his own—hopefully much better—television show on Netflix.

Superman has been the subject of countless papers and books exploring what is so compelling about this alien super hero. Interestingly, as comics have become more sophisticated, it’s become harder and harder to write a good Superman story that encompasses all that makes him great. Oh, I’d argue it’s not much harder to write a compelling origin story. Mark Waid’s Superman: Birthright, which I wrote about here, is a pretty good indication of what Superman’s appearance in our world might look like. Grant Morrison’s run on Action Comics Vol 2 also gave us a good look at how Superman might work to use his working man convictions to do as Superman what the justice system was failing to do. But I think what makes Superman so hard to grow as a character is his ability to maintain his “blue boyscout” ethics in the face of all he deals with. It’s an accusation that would be easy to levy on Batman except that his writers have had a succession of boy (and girl) wonders in the Robin role to evolve Batman emotionally. (Even if it took until Batman and Robin Vol 2 for him to stop grieving his parents and start celebrating their legacy) In a nutshell, there’s no reason why Superman’s time growing up in Smallville should make him perpetually maintain those values. There are tons of people who move from the countryside to the big city. Very few of them maintain their small town views. Everything is changed, even just a little. We often use platitudes like Superman seeing the best in humanity and, therefore, being above the pettiness, but I find no reason why this should be the case. So what might it be like if Superman actually existed in the real world? Well, two different authors have explored that in two very different ways.

The Private Eye, Brian K Vaughan’s indie comic book, is two things at once. It’s primarily a noir private investigator story - a broad who may not be all she seems comes into a PI’s office and hires him for a case that goes deeper than you thought it would at first. But, much like Saga, which could be described as a story about being parents in the middle of a war zone, it’s also a science fiction story. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: the best science fiction shines a light on the present; this takes many forms. The form used in The Private Eye is the of extrapolating of the present to some future conclusion to show where things might end up if we continue on this path. With The Private Eye, Vaughan takes a look at what might happen if we continue to live our lives in the cloud. Since my other job involves technology, I’m constantly reading the tech press and people on there are always predicting a day of reckoning when we’ve given so much away that we lose all control of our lives. The first issue arrived just a month or two before Edward Snowden decided to do a huge dump of top secret National Security Agency documents, and so the comic has an entirely different feel to it as though we are even closer to the future depicted in The Private Eye than we thought. Of course, the self-sharing to places like Facebook and Twitter that form the premise of The Private Eye are more insidious than any nebulous government agency. You have no control whether or not you are observed by the government, but you are indeed in control of whether or not you post those drunk photos to Facebook. The future of The Private Eye takes place when people currently in their 20s and 30s are represented by PI’s grandfather. Here’s how PI retells the story to Gramps:

It may be cliche to say that art reflects its times, but that does not make it any less true. Mark Millar’s relatively new book, Jupiter’s Legacy, is a book that very specifically speaks to 2013. However, as I’ll get to momentarily, the way we feel now isn’t unique in American (or even world) history and so, depending on which direction the book goes, could end up becoming one of the classics like Watchmen or V for Vendetta which are both very much products of their time, but still stand up today. The book opens up during the Great Depression, after the stock market crash of 1929. Within the first two issues there are a lot of parallels drawn between 1929 and 2008. It’s not perfectly parallel, as I intend to return to later on, but it certainly is the closest the world has come to that moment. Many European countries are still reeling from the Euro collapse and even here in the USA we haven’t yet fully recovered. Folks can debate on the reasons why things didn’t get as bad as they were in the 1930s, but it certainly is the closest that about 3 of the 4 living generations have actually experienced and so we can understand what drives the main characters. ...