Mark Waid Scripting Interview


So we're very lucky to have Mark back with us. He's going to be talking a little bit about the scripting process with us today. So, Mark, you've done a lot of work for your own projects, for established characters. Where do you start with this whole thing?


You really have to find your way into the character, whether it's something that you've created or whether it's an established character that you're stepping into, you have to understand that character. I'm not saying you have to know everything, you don't spend a week of your life mining out every detail of that character's history, but you have to know what that character wants, what motivates that character, what he's afraid of, what his goals are. You have to know all that before you know the story. You have to be able to be able to put that character in any sort of situation and just organically know how they would react in a way that makes sense for the story. And that's, like I said, that's true whether or not it's out of your own head or whether you're doing a Batman story. You still have to know what the character wants and what's in his way. It's true in any character because again, even the villains, they're heroes on their own story, they believe they're doing the right thing. So you have to get into that headset. If you can do that, you can tell any kind of story you want.


So with a script, you're kind of, usually you'd probably be working on a team with a couple other people, so the script's really fundamental for getting your idea for what happens on the page across when you're not actually doing the art. But our art learners for this course are actually creating a comic book all on their own. Why even work on the script? Why not just skip straight to the art?


If you're going to tell a joke shouldn't you know the punch line before you start telling the joke? It gives your whole apparatus structure to work in. Look, a script no matter what, and I keep hammering this home, it's a collaborative process. because otherwise you may as well be doing stage plays or prose, or writing poems or whatever. If you're going to do comics it is a collaborative process. You're working with an artist so that script is going to be malleable and changeable and you're going to find new things about it. You're going to want to twist and turn right up until the point where it just it's out of your hands and it goes out to an audience. But comic script is structure and it gives you a place to start. Everybody then knows they're kind of on the same page of the story they are telling. And also, if you're going to make adjustments, it's much easier to make adjustments in the script form, move this block and copy here, change this line of dialog here than it is to make changes once you've drawn nine panels out of your 16 panel grid. It really sucks to go tear up the floor boards and you can't really move things around and you're erasing stuff. This much easier to get it right in the formation.


Great. So I want to talk a little about experiences, or even referencing, having something to reference when you're creating. You did a blind experience to get in the head of Daredevil, where you went around New York and were blind.


Yeah. So why is that important?


It just, again you have to live in the suit of the character. Well you know, you have to be able to see the character through their eyes and know how they experience the world and on a more mundane level if it's, you know, if it's a corrupt businessman or if it's a housewife or it's whatever it is. You know that's something that is easier for you to get into obviously if it's a you know grad student, well I can play. I know how a grad student thinks. If you're talking about larger than life characters. With Daredevil I was able to be lucky and have that actual hands on practical experience and be taught by blind people how they perceive the world. It doesn't mean if I want to write Superman I should learn to skydive so i'll know how to fly. But the thing is, what you do in that case and what's important is draw on the memories of the emotions and the sensations that you have. Or go out and create new experiences and link them to that. I wrote Flash for eight years, you know, he's a super sleek, athletic runner.


[LAUGH]


So I can't relate to that but I can relate to what it's like to like wish I could have all my homework done but it's Sunday night. I can relate to just missing the bus by this much. I can relate to the need for speed. With flying, nobody knows how it really feels to fly through the air, but everybody knows what it's like when the bell rings on the last day of school before summer vacation, and you burst out the door and you've got all of summer ahead of you. And it's that, creating those experiences, linking into those experiences, those emotional highs, and those emotional lows and bringing that to the work. So that it's not just about, characters are not just puzzle pieces that you're putting down, they're not just, you're not just doing a crossword puzzle, right, where it's just plot, thing happens, plot, things happens, and it all inter locks. It's that there's an emotional component to it to.


Great, thanks Mark.


Sure.