Some Videos About Mark Waid’s Poorly Timed Response

Superheroes. Maybe we don’t want their world to exist as ours, seeing that it often comes with supervillains and a lot of destruction and even death. Still, when done right they’re a great escape from the weight of the day, a catharsis where good triumphs over evil and everything is right with the world. Try telling that to Mark Waid. The man who made many superhero comics in the 1990s, some with questionable stories, like dismembering a hero’s girlfriend and shoving her parts into a refrigerator, now says that due to Donald Trump retaking the White House, Waid is no longer able to write superheroes because he no longer believes in the goodness of humanity.

He’s started working on Justice League Unlimited, where practically every DC hero is now a member of the League, something they tend to flip flop on a lot through the various incarnations.

Two videos from Comics By Perch on this one, plus one more after that by two other guys. The first is a gut reaction to Waid’s post on Bluesky (where some people ran to after Elon Musk opened TwitterX to all points of view) about not being able to write heroes anymore. The third is a clip from the Rip & The Silverback podcast that goes over what should be DC’s response rather nicely. This started out just being a Daily Video with Perch’s response, but I had more to say and boosted it to full article. Note that there will be swearing in the videos but they make the point better than I can.

The second is a calmer continuation of his thoughts on the matter. I thought it prudent to show both, though he does go over many of the same points.

Given Mark Waid’s history of having a worse temper than me, and I’m practically Bruce Banner without the gamma rays, it’s not surprising that he would go off on a tangent like this. Personally I don’t think Waid’s been able to write superheroes in years. Ignoring that this is the same guy who created and later killed off Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend Alex in a manner so heinous Gail Simone coined a trope name from it, the last big superhero work of notoriety was Ignited, a comic in which superpowered teens responded to a rally to arm teachers after a shooting in their school not with “don’t worry, we’ll protect people instead” with “if you arm those teachers we’re going to go on a rampage”, aka showing themselves to be more dangerous than one lone shooter. Here’s an old review by Just Some Guy of one of the issues Waid co-wrote.

Admittedly I don’t know how much influence Waid ultimately had, but you’d think he’d have enough to tell Kwanza how bad this story is.

Now he just started working on Justice League Unlimited, a version of the League that once again has virtually every DC hero on it, meaning practically all the superheroes, and now he proclaims that he doesn’t have enough faith in humanity to write a superhero comic? I like the response from Az of HeelvsBabyface on a recent Rip & The Silverback podcast that he shares with Eric July‘s commentary channel. The editor should consider this his resignation, even if you know Waid isn’t going to because he needs the money.

Look, I don’t care who you voted for, Trump or Kamala Harris. I’m not going to hate you for it. I’m sick of one-sided politics, sick of superheroes who can’t be heroic unless they follow those one-sided politics, and even that’s up for debate, and sick of seeing heroes not acting heroically. I’m sick of deconstruction without reconstruction, the remaining elements of DiDio’s Darker DC, and nothing of what I’ve loved about superheroes being in modern superhero stories because they can’t hire writers who can make good superhero stories because they don’t believe in the human race in general, nevermind superheroes. And that’s if they even care about the genre and are just doing for a resume credit, making a bill payment, pushing some kind of social agenda, or all combinations of the three. If you can’t do superhero stories, then leave the title, work on a comic you CAN write, and let people who can write superheroes do the job right.

I’m available, DC. Just give me a good editor who can handle an amateur trying to go pro and I’ll give you the superhero stories we’ve been missing out on.