Mark Waid started out in the superhero camp, as an editor at DC and then as a freelance writer, shaping such iconic series as The Flash and Captain Marvel and then looking deeper into that world with Kingdom Come and The Empire. Now, as editor-in-chief of independent comics publisher Boom! Studios, Waid is shifting and transforming the paradigm of monthly comics, bringing a variety of genre comics to the direct market while scripting Irredeemable, the story of a superhero who snaps and goes bad, and the newly announced companion series Incorruptible, about a supervillain who turns good. In a wide ranging conversation with PW Comics Week, Waid switched back and forth between his writing responsibilities and his e-i-c duties, covering the creation of Irredeemable, the overall state of the comics marketplace, comics for kids and the growing importance of digital publishing.
PWCW: I want to start with a very general question and then narrow down to some specific topics: Where do you see Boom! Studios in today's comics marketplace? What particular niche or niches do you fill?
Mark Waid: Currently, depending on the month, we’re the sixth or seventh biggest comics publisher in America, which is pretty phenomenal considering we’ve been around for such a short time. We made our bones (har, har) doing horror comics with our successful Zombie Tales and Fall of Cthulhu franchises, but co-founders Ross Richie and Andrew Cosby set their sights higher early on by acquiring a good mix of licensed properties along with original series. And if that sounds like a tangential answer to your question, it’s just to say that, paradoxically, we really seem to have carved out our market position in a pretty unique way—by being sort of weirdly uncategorizable, if you will. By building a line on the backs of some pretty prominent industry talent (like Steve Niles, William Messner-Loebs, Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis, Mike Ploog and others), some prominent non-industry talent (such as Kill Audio and screenwriter Christopher Morgan), and some highly marketable existing properties (like Warhammer, Farscape, 28 Days Later, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Muppets, and the Pixar books).
My God, that’s a long way around your question, and if I keep answering you in that level of depth, we’ll never finish this interview, but it’s all to say that the niche we fill is that we are very, very, very good at making non-superhero monthly comics, something not a lot of publishers have the resources or nerve to try. With the mainline BOOM! comics, we’re positioned uniquely and solidly on that thin edge between superhero books and more esoteric indie stuff; with BOOM! Kids, we’re selling children’s comics like they’ve come back in style.
PWCW: What do you think a smaller publisher like Boom can do better than the big guys?
MW: We’re great at getting a focused message out. Because we don’t publish eighty comics a month, our inestimable marketing department does a great job of making every title important in the marketplace and every launch an event. We’re also better than the big guys at taking risks because we don’t have stockholders to answer to, or lenders who would call us crazy for wanting to publish kids’ comics in a direct market traditionally unable to support them.
PWCW: I was watching your video interview with Michael Alan Nelson, and you mentioned the "Boom philosophy" (with regard to Hexed). Can you elaborate on that a bit?
MW: It’s pretty simple. We’re very much a writer-driven, idea-driven company. We start with the story first (with a talented writer) and focus on getting that right. Then we build storytelling-driven artwork around it, and we ultimately deliver something that's mainstream and accessible while still being “different” in what is primarily a superhero marketplace. Hexed is a great example of this. So is Farscape, where we went straight to the creator, Rockne S. O’Bannon, for the stories. The challenge—the hard part of the editorial job—is to then make sure that the artist is someone suited to the idea and is someone who can add to the creative process rather than just be an “art robot.” Scripts aren’t comics. Comics are comics. And BOOM! understands—better, I think, than a lot of guys our size—that the specific language of comics, the way pictures and words come together, forms a unique medium greater than the sum of its parts.
PWCW: Who are your readers? Are they superhero fans, genre readers who will pick up a comic once in a while, or new to the medium?
MW: Judging by the e-mail that comes in and by the responses we see on our message boards and in person at conventions—BOOM! has a very strong and very aggressive convention presence—my educated guess would be that most of our audience currently consists of already-existing comics readers who are looking for something beyond superheroes, but that’s changing fast. The BOOM! Kids line (the Pixar properties and the Muppets books) are bringing in new, young readers at an unprecedented clip. The God’s honest truth is that when Ross first talked about acquiring the Pixar rights, I figured we’d sell about half of what Ross projected and we’d be lucky not to lose our shirts. Instead, because I spectacularly underestimated the number of existing comics-shop regulars who now have children and want to buy books for them, too, we’re selling about twice what Ross projected. And I am here to tell you, those comics aren’t being purchased in any great number by forty-year-old virgins who live in their mother’s basement. They’re being bought by kids and for kids who get the rush of reading their very first comic book because they can trust these titles to be age-appropriate.
PWCW : Where is the potential for expansion? Are there readers out there that you think would enjoy Boom comics but who maybe haven't been tapped yet (i.e., fans of a particular TV series or genre)? How are you reaching out to them?
MW: I honestly, truly think that if you’re a fan of SF/fantasy genre TV or film at all, you can find something in our line you’d appreciate. As a company, without spilling all our trade secrets, we’re very good at finding those people in big groups, be it by visiting their message boards or setting up at non-comics conventions. Farscape is a great example of how we went around banging the drum in its fan communities, doing lots of interviews for non-comics SF websites and podcasts and such and making announcements on their community’s boards. Expansion is a combination of reviving forgotten markets, which we’re doing with our newsstand initiative; creating new markets, which we’ll talk about shortly; and finding existing markets that are untapped.
PWCW: As editor-in-chief, how heavily involved are you in the company's entire comics line, including the ones you don't write yourself?
MW: If you’d asked me a year ago, I wouldn’t even have had time to answer you because I was too busy juggling plates. Since then, we’ve staffed up with a very good, very savvy editorial staff overseen by Matt Gagnon, my Managing Editor, who is much better at the day-to-day trafficking and planning than I ever was. I still look at first issues in particular to make sure that they do their job, I still look at art and scripts and covers as time allows, but I never was a particularly meddling editor and my staffers show good taste. Now a good deal of my energy goes towards the macro: making sure we have a good balance of different kinds of books in different styles.
PWCW: OK, let's talk about Irredeemable. You have mentioned in interviews that you were intrigued by the idea of a superhero who is not emotionally equipped for the job. When did this idea first occur to you? When you were writing for Marvel and DC, how much did you think about the internal life of your characters?
MW: How much? ALL THERE IS. That’s the only way to do that job well. If you’re going to write about anything or anyone, you have to live inside their skin and see the world through their eyes. Luckily, I’ve been reading superhero comics since I was four, and there’ve been enormously long patches of my life when they were the most important thing in it, so I think it’s safe to say that I’ve probably not had a single day since I was in kindergarten when I haven’t thought about Superman or Batman for at least a few minutes. Luckily, that’s paid off for me; there are a lot of writers out there who are better than I am, but you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of them who can talk for three mind-numbing hours about, say, why Aquaman does what he does and what motivates him, or explain in what most folks would almost certainly describe as suicide-provoking detail just what it’s like to have to be like Superman and precisely how he experiences the world around him. If I didn’t dwell on the internal lives of these characters, I’d never be able to make you care about them as much as I seem to be able to do, and I’d never be able to have built a substantial fan base having written stories of something as narrowcast as the superhuman condition.
Irredeemable is in large part a distillation of all those years of thought. I’ve been carrying around the core idea for Irredeemable for most of my forties, which has become a personal decade marked strongly by my coming to grips with the challenge of merging the simple moral lessons superheroes taught me as a child with the very complex world that I have to blunder my way through as a grown-up. Superman’s job is made easier by the fact that the whole world loves and trusts him—that’s certainly the trait I personally envy the most about him—and over the years, I’ve really become intrigued with the question of how someone like that would function if he lost the trust and admiration of those around him—or, worse, if that love became a demanding burden rather than a source of strength.
PWCW: What were the challenges of creating a character like this from the ground up?
MW: The biggest one was finding some way of translating what I just said above into an adventure comic rather than a post-grad psych thesis.
PWCW: Your line of children's comics based on Pixar properties and The Muppet Show characters have been well received by critics. How are they faring in terms of sales? Are you seeing more sales from the direct market or newsstands?
MW: Phenomenally. As I said earlier, far better than I would have predicted. Are we selling Wolverine numbers? No, not yet, but given that up to this point our sales have been largely through a direct market fed by superhero events, we’re very happy. We have moved in a very measured, sure-footed way into newsstand and seen great results. It's a small part of our business, but is steadily growing. But the real growth area for BOOM! Kids has been in trade collections; we're moving a substantial number of trades to the bookstore market in Canada via our partners HarperCollins Canada, for example, while other US-based publishers don't devote time and energy growing their presence there. We know full well how easy it is to take a hit with unexpected returns in that market, but even being extraordinarily conservative and guarded, we like the sell-through numbers we’re seeing.
PWCW: What have you learned from your move into newsstand distribution?
MW: That I can’t believe bigger companies with deeper pockets aren’t doing it. It’s an expensive outreach for us: we have to overprint, and we have to pay for premium rack space, but to my surprise, it’s hardly an expense that will bury us. Again, we’re being cautious; Ross has the checkbook, and he’s gotten us this far by being very cost-conscious. It’s an investment that he’s studied carefully.
PWCW: At San Diego, you announced that The Incredibles and The Muppet Show will be published as ongoing series rather than miniseries. Why did you make that change?
MW: We launched the series as mini-series to see what the market's reaction would be—remember, the Direct Market is considered hostile to kids' books, so we wanted to find out how the books would do. With the explosive retailer support and the really positive fan reaction, we greenlit everything we could into ongoings as quickly as made sense.
PWCW: You were one of the first publishers to put an entire issue of a comic online at the same time it went on sale in the direct market. It worked pretty well the first time you tried it, but how has it shaped up as an ongoing strategy?
MW: A crucial part of our success with that was MySpace Comic Books, but in the economic downturn, Fox/News Corp phased them out and we lost key players on that side who were crucial to its success, like Sam Humphries. We haven't been able to find a big, mainstream partner like that since.
PWCW: I notice you have free comics up on your site. Are you finding that drives sales of the books?
MW: Yes, and we've seen fans of the webcomics come by the graphic novels from us at conventions, as well as online, and even seen non-comics fans drawn to the site due to the content—that's one of the advantages of doing Cthulhu and zombies, it appeals even to non-comics fans.
PWCW: How are comics on mobile devices figuring into the picture?
MW: Like everyone, we’re approaching mobile with cautious enthusiasm. My own personal belief is that we’ll find less gratification doing what most everyone else seems to be doing—retro-engineering existing comics pages so they fit on an iPhone—and more success designing material specifically for the electronic format, which is something we’re actively pursuing. That said, we have some very impressive partners working with us on motion comics and, with Longbox, on digital delivery of print comics, and we’d rather be leaders than followers. Mobile is a big part of our future.
