SDCC Exclusive: Mark Waid Talks Action Comics, Superman, Batman and Robin

Multiverse of Color sat down with legendary Mark Waid on top of the DC booth at San Diego Comic-Con 2024 on Thursday, July 25.  

Still on a star-studded run with Batman/Superman: World’s Finest (alongside Dan Mora, who is stepping back from the series and turning his focus to Superman with Joshua Williamson), Waid is now taking on weekly Action Comics with Clayton Henry and new series Batman and Robin: Year One with Chris Samnee.

Waid will be a larger part of DC’s new All In initiative, which DC describes as a “daring new publishing direction is also an exciting opportunity for readers to discover and rediscover their love for DC’s Super Heroes.”

“His mother’s smile reminds him of Lois and maybe that’s one of the reasons he fell in love with Lois.”

Multiverse of Color: So you have all of these projects going on between World’s Finest, Action Comics, Batman and Robin, have you somehow split yourself into three separate people?

Mark Waid: [laughs] I just – I worked 26 hours a day. I mean, I have no personal life, but that’s okay. I love these characters. And it’s a good problem to have.

MOC: For Action Comics, why choose the Phantom Zone? I remember you teasing something in an issue of World’s Finest, but why is it dying? Why explore this?

Waid: I think that I have two goals. First off, as a longtime Superman fan, I think that Jor-El was a jerk for inventing a prison where people just floated around bodiless. I wanted to fix that, so that he wasn’t a jerk. Secondly, over the last few years, it has really become the not-Phantom Zone. Because there’s all kinds of stuff in it and people are just walking around. Why are we calling it the Phantom Zone?

Waid: Mostly I wanted to add to the Zone, some mechanism by which the villains could rehabilitate themselves if they chose to, because that is Superman. It’s giving you a chance. But in doing so, it’s going to be very difficult. He’s dealing with a villain named Aethyr, who showed up in World’s Finest for a couple of pages, and is there to remake the zone in his own image. Superman ends up falling through time and space, ends up on Krypton, meeting his dad and his mother back when they were younger than he is. [He’s] learning stuff about the zone and then trying to figure out how to put it all together when he gets back.

MOC: I want to expand on that a little more. Why would a superhero, someone like Clark who represents hope, have a place like the Phantom Zone? 

Waid: In the 50s and 60s, nobody thought about it.

MOC: Because it’s a little more complicated now.

Waid:  Exactly. So why would you do that? That’s exactly it. He has no choice. I mean, there’s certain characters and villains that you have no choice but to put them in there. But they should have an avenue of getting better.

MOC: Is this story going to be more of a space opera or a detective thriller, with Clark being an investigative journalist? 

Waid: There’s a lot. Showing up on Krypton and having to deal with this mother and dad, but not telling them who he is. Pretending to be just an ordinary Kryptonian is trying on him, because again, he doesn’t really know these people that well, but at the same time, he realizes that his mother’s smile reminds him of Lois and maybe that’s one of the reasons he fell in love with Lois. 

Watching his dad be a temperamental, you know, temper-tantrum kind of guy who was, you know, he was not what he expected. His dad’s lab looks like Willy Wonka’s factory, not what he expected. So I like being able to take these characters and show you a different side of them that you hadn’t seen before.

“I needed someone in that realm to be sort of the Virgil to his Dante, taking him through the inferno.”

MOC: Super excited about the inclusion of Mon-El. I love the Legion of Super-Heroes. I know he has a connection with the Super-family, can you walk me through it?

Waid: Partly, I chose Mon-El because we haven’t seen him in a long time and there’s a contrast between him and Superman. Superman is always noble. Mon-El is basically noble, but Mon-El was also thrown in the Phantom Zone as a young man. So we will allude to the idea that there are things that Mon-El has done to survive that maybe Superman would not have done. But it doesn’t make him a bad guy. It just gives him some texture. I needed someone in that realm to be sort of the Virgil to his Dante, taking him through the inferno, taking him down through the stages of hell. So he was a great guide in that sense.

We asked him about including the rest of the Legion of Super-Heroes, while they won’t be included in this arc, he’s “moving some other pieces around,” he said. 

MOC: While Superman is going through all of this, what is the rest of the family doing?

Waid: Every issue is basically 15 pages of me and Clayton and five pages of subplot. So I’ll tell you something, nobody knows, how about that? The subplot begins with Kong Kenan and Connor [Kent] being summoned to the Fortress [of Solitude] by an alarm. They go in and everything in the Fortress has been stolen. They don’t know what’s going on, but the Fortress has been completely burgled. 

That is in issue 1072, that is specifically because my very first story was an Action Comics #572 [‘The Puzzle of the Purloined Fortress!’], it was a story about the Fortress of Solitude being burgled.

MOC: That’s cool. 

Waid: So I figure if I get hit by a bus, after that comes out, I will have the greatest career arc of all time. That is a scoop for you and nobody knows.

MOC: That’s amazing. Thank you for sharing that. I appreciate it.

MOC: We’ve got Clayton Henry on this and Chris Samnee over on Batman and Robin: Year One, their two styles are so different. What’s like working with each of them?

Waid: I mean, I’ve worked with them so much. Clayton, very different style, but I’ve learned to work with Clayton. I really like what he does. I know Chris, back and forth. I mean, the reason that the partnership works is because he came to me and just said, ‘Hey, you want to write this?’ I’m like, ‘Absolutely. Whatever you want to do. I’ll do it with DC.’ It’s his dream project. It just looks so good.

MOC: So this is the end of the Phantom Zone? Where do the villains go? Where do we go from here?

Waid: I can’t give you too much here. Because there’s another factor here, which is that the Kandorians may or may not agree with his choices as Superman. They may, in fact, lay down the law and just say, according to Kryptonian law, you can’t do this. Superman has to make the choice of what do I honor? Is it my place to tell the Kryptonians, ‘no,’ right?

To begin, how invasive can you be to somebody else’s culture, even if it is partly yours? It’s not really his. How invasive can you be to their culture?

MOC: Why do you use that word particularly, invasive?

Waid: Because he’s trying to decide whether or not it’s okay to make a decision on their behalf. You’re making a whole cultural decision on their behalf, if you’re going to deal with them in a way that the Kandorians wouldn’t.

“After that comes out, I will have the greatest career arc of all time.”

MoC: Batman and Robin: Year One, how fun is it to explore that early relationship?

Waid: It is so much fun. It is not as bouncy and fun as World’s Finest, but that is only because there’s real tension. I mean, this is not the day after the circus accident, but it’s not long after that. Bruce Wayne basically just gets up in the morning and says, ‘What have I done? Have I made the right choice for this kid? Have I made the right choice for me? I don’t know anything about being a parent.’

Alfred is happy to point out to him, not only does Bruce not know anything about being a parent, he doesn’t know anything about being a child. When his parents were shot, he grew up that day. Batman’s entire frame of reference is ‘I’m a solo artist. I do what I do, I’m my best alone. I’m not used to having a partner.’ Conversely, Dick Grayson’s very life, every single night in the tent, depended upon him having a partner who could catch him. 

The two of them are trying to figure out how to make that partnership work and not getting along great. Meanwhile, Child Protective Services is watching. There’s a character from Child Protective Services, who becomes a major character, who’s ‘keeping an eye on you two’. Do we send the kid to school? We certainly can. He’s never been to grade school before. How is that gonna go? Not well.

MOC: I was going to ask about that if you were going to dive deep into the mindset of a man who takes a kid in and trains him to fight crime and apparently Child Protective Services? That’s an excellent inclusion.

Waid: The woman from Child Protective Services already has her guard up, because she knows that some of this was the Wayne family money greasing the wheels. ‘We normally wouldn’t do this, but you know, he’s got enough pull in the town to make that happen.’ And she takes that personally, that’s ridiculous. You can’t do that. So she comes in the door mad at Bruce Wayne and it only gets worse.

MOC: The next era after Dan Mora steps back with Adrián Gutiérrez coming in, what’s that going to look like? More Trinity perhaps?

Waid: The next era is more Justice League. Bringing in more guest stars because I enjoy that. I mean, and there’s only so many things you can throw at Superman and Batman that both of them need to be there for. The focus of the next arc with Eclipso will be the Justice League in general of that era, that sort of Bronze Age era with Elongated Man and Black Canary, Green Arrow.

MOC: Thank you for including Elongated Man and Sue Dibny, they’re so underrated.

Waid: Everybody gets his powers wrong. This is the thing that makes me insane. He’s not Plastic Man. He can’t shape himself into different things. He elongates, that’s what he does. He stretches, that’s all he can do. So let him do that. Honestly, with Metamorpho, Elongated Man, some of these characters, the only reason I bring them into World’s Finest is to remind people that they’re getting the powers wrong. That’s really that’s a big part of it. That’s the only reason Metamorpho’s in that story. Remind people you’re getting his powers wrong.

MOC: [laughs] I love a little bit of pettiness, as well as education. You have done such a brilliant job showcasing all these obscure heroes, giving people’s favorites a chance to shine throughout World’s Finest.

Waid: I love the second-, third-stringers because I’ve been raised on them. I’ve been reading these characters all my life. So if you like Air Wave, this is your year.