The Mystery of Mark Waid

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A while back I read one of Mark Waid’s JLA stories and found it one of the more depressing iterations of super-hero genre douchebaggery extant. (Update: I also had a troll tussle with Waid, which you can read about at that link.) On the other hand, Waid’s goofball pseudo-Silver Age comics’ covers were deliriously demented in the best possible way. I didn’t figure that Waid’s Captain America would be as good as the second, but I was hoping it wouldn’t be as lousy as the first.

And I got my wish…barely. Operation:Rebirth — the trade collection of Waid’s first few issues on Captain America — isn’t quite as thoroughly godawful as Waid’s Midsummer Night’s Dream storyline for JLA. The art by Ron Garney is marginally better than the JLA art, for one thing. And with only one hero, there’s less self-congratulatory puffery about how we’re all just the greatest heroes ever, aren’t we so cool?

I mean, don’t get me wrong; there’s still plenty of that. Tthe comic opens with a by-the-numbers eulogy about how Cap is the best in all of us, how will we survive without him, and on and on and on. Because everyone thought Cap was dead. But he’s not. And then he wakes up and Sharon what’s her name is there back from the dead too, except now she’s all cynical and hardened and has a frizzier hairstyle. And then the Red Skull pops up and has to stand in line to kiss Art Spiegelman’s ass, after which he travels back in time to take Noah’s place on the ark — but Captain America and Sharon dress up as warthogs (Cap in red, white, and blue, of course) and then they….

Okay, right, none of that happens, no matter how much I would have liked it to. Instead Cap and the Red Skull team up to find the cosmic cube inside of which Hitler may or may not be trapped and then Cap goes inside it and lives his perfect dream life until he self-actualizes and comes back to face reality. And then he and Sharon whatshername banter a little. Along the way, Cap hits a soldier or two and tightens his jaw like Tom Cruise to show us that it pains him. Sharon makes some cracks about what a goody-two-shoes Cap is. And there’s the obligatory panel where we see her dim-lit, perhaps nude ass and she makes some vague comment about how she was degraded because intimations of prostitution are always welcome.

I do think, having read this, that Waid is at some sort of extreme of what super-hero comics can be. It’s not that he’s the worst writer in the world. Steve Gerber’s Man Thing is worse. The original Power Man is worse. But they manage to be worse by actually making some sort of effort. Gerber and the folks who worked on Power Man had pretentions to social and moral relevance that were tediously presented and hideously executed, and which made them very bad comics indeed.

But those same pretentions gave you at least some sense of why the comics existed in the first place. They were hackwork, no question…but you felt like the creators had put something of themselves into the creation. Gerber had a whiny, existentialist persecution complex; the guys who did Power Man had some sort of ax to grind about racial and social justice. Stupid, sure, and poorly handled, but the stuff from which actual artists who don’t suck have created actual art.

Whereas with Waid, there’s just nothing. Oh, sure, there’s the usual mouthings about truth, justice, and the American way, and there’s the fight against the Nazis. But there isn’t even a token effort to pretend that Waid or the readers give a crap. The Nazis are just central casting heavies; there’s no ideology involved. The best Waid can do is burble on about how Cap was born or reborn or rereborn or manufactured to defeat HItler…which, what does that even mean? Cap is Hitler’s natural arch-enemy? I mean, what about Winston Churchill? If anybody was going to go into a cosmic nether-space and self-actualize about trouncing Adolf, why not Winston Churchill? Oh, sure, he doesn’t wear his underthings on the outside, but he looks kind of like a bulldog. Surely that counts for something?

Anyway, the point is…Waid wrote this thing with his brain on call-waiting and his heart in the other room snoozing to infomercials. Really, it could have been composed by a computer or a monkey — except then there’d be absurdist touches. But here…you finish this and you figure, Mark Waid must be the absolute dullest man on earth. Cliché after cliché flows effortlessly across the page (teaming up with the villain; spiritual reunion with lost partner; saving enemy from certain death, and on and on) without any spark of life or even interest. The bland grey surface is unmarred by either skill or incompetence. There are no ideas, either bad or good. The book just sits there, like a lump on a bump, but without that much personality.

So I’m baffled. I know Waid does have a personality; that he can be witty and arch and goofy and mean-spirited. Maybe he feels it’s just not appropriate to bring that stuff to his mainstream bread-and-butter series? But, good lord, if you have a brain and heart, not to mention a sense of humor, as he appears to, how could you sit down and write this without slitting your throat? Even if it’s just hackwork for a paycheck…how could you resist doing something, anything, to show that it was you, and not some faceless drone, who put this book together?

In my review of JLA, I said that Waid made me despair of super-hero comics, and that kind of holds true here as well. When I read Man-Thing, I just hated Man-Thing and Steve Gerber and wanted it to stop. But you can’t really hate Waid when you read Captain America, because there’s no sense that he even exists. You’re left with just absence; with characters who move and speak and pretend to be human, but who are really just empty masks perched upon a void. The super-heroes seem like hollowed out tropes, dead but somehow upright. It’s uncanny and depressing. Management missed a trick, I think, when they didn’t have Waid write Marvel Zombies.

0 thoughts on “The Mystery of Mark Waid”

  1. "But here…you finish this and you figure, Mark Waid must be the absolute dullest man on earth. Cliché after cliché flows effortlessly across the page (teaming up with the villain; spiritual reunion with lost partner; saving enemy from certain death, and on and on) without any spark of life or even interest. The bland grey surface is unmarred by either skill or incompetence."

    As I recall, those dull stories were all the rage on the AOL message boards back in the day, and I wouldn't be surprised if he was handed Eisners for them. So if you think he's that dull, I guess you must think there's a lot of dull folks who like em. (Waid has always bored me, personally, though I recall Empire was interesting)

    I think there was also some controversy over some Red Skull origin story he did where, among other things, Red Skull murders his girlfriend when he discovers she's Jewish or something (kind of an odd thing not to realize right away, really, though I could be misremembering it)

    I think Waid had his name taken off that issue because the editor rewrote it, so its probably evidence that he isn't just writing on autopilot.

    But really, *dull* is exactly what a certain set of fandom wants.

  2. I agree with Howard's point that a certain set of readers like dull stories. In fact, I'd argue that the majority of readers in the Direct Market enjoy Waid's type of stories: predictable plots that regurgitate stories and characters from the readers' childhood.

    But to answer your question, when someone like Waid writes navel-gazing nostalgia and is then rewarded with both commercial success and critical praise (from traditional fan sites like Newsarama), it's easy to see why they never bother to write anything more original or challenging. You may call it the work of a faceless drone, but many other people were telling Waid that is crappy fan-fic was great literature.

  3. Richard, the trick is Waid has written more original things, at least once (and maybe more if Howard is right and Empire is okay…..)

  4. i just read that you dissed 100 bullets?

    hey hooded, time to throw in the towel.

  5. Man, you are so late to the party on dissing me for dissing 100 bullets. That's so 40 idiotic blog brouhahas ago…

  6. I like Waid's work quite a bit more than you do (he's written a bunch of stuff that's left me cold, but he's also written stuff I've enjoyed quite a bit) — so you'll want to take the following comment with a grain of salt…

    Like you, I wasn't too impressed by Waid's work on Cap and JLA.

    But unlike you, I don't think that's because he doesn't care. I think it may be the opposite — in a way, he may care too much. He is so invested in the idea of characters like Captain America and Superman as moral exemplars that he depicts them as so unambiguously 'good' and 'right' that they come off as boring, lacking nuance, humor and depth.

    IMHO, Waid is much more effective when handling characters he sees as more fallible and flawed. His initial run on Flash, whatever else you might think of it, was loaded with hear and sentiment, and wound up redefining that incarnation of the character in what I thought was a pretty cool way.

    I'd also argue that his run on Fantastic Four had a lot of heart, humor, and affection infused within it, though I personally didn't enjoy it as much as the Flash stuff.

    I also hear good things about his recent work on Spider-Man, which I suspect may be working for the same reasons.

    If you ever get around to reading Waid's Flash or FF runs, I'd be interested to read your thoughts on them.

  7. My 2 cents: I really liked the first issue of Waid's FF run but thought it got dull afterwards.

    This point you raise about Waid sometimes being dull because he reveres a character … I think a lot of times modern-day superhero writers see doing the same-old, same-old as conducting a rite, not as phoning it in.

  8. Anon; that's an interesting point. Intentionality is hard to gauge, obviously. The Cap stuff felt completely emotionless to me…but that's no indication of what Waid's intentions were, obviously.

  9. Well, I'd say pretty much all artists are capable of producing good, bad, and indifferent work.

    And in mainstream comics there's at least 3-4 artists working in tandem, any of whom can fuck up or (very occasionally) save a story… Or whatever's left of the original script after it gets through editorial. I b'lieve Waid actually asked that his name be removed from some Captain America stories because the editorial meddling was just too much. (Unless I'm mis-remembering, which is incredibly likely)

    So, yeah, the quality of mainstream comics output from ANY writer is fairly inconsistent. Name me a reasonably famous comics writer, and I'll tell you three things they've done I've loved and three things they've done I've hated.

    I mean, you just reviewed Alan Moore's WILDCATS, right, and as much as that sucked it's like Beethoven jammin' with Charlie Parker compared to some of the Spawn stuff he did.

    Anyway, I thought Waid's Justice League got better. There was one where Batman writes all these plans to kill all his fellow JLA members, and Ras Ah Ghul steals them and goes ahead and takes out the JLA and Batman has to save them and then gets kicked out of the league for being a jerk and it was pure fanboy but also enthusiastic and awesome.

    Also recommended: Ruse, which is a Sherlock Holmes riff except that Watson is (A) a woman, and (B) a superhero and (C) Holmes doesn't KNOW (B) and is very slowly realizing (A).

    And Impulse, where he's totally making it up as he goes along which really gives his book a propulsive energy where YOU don't know what's gonna happen 'cause the creative team doesn't.

    If you wanna read Cap: Steve Engelhart or Jack Kirby's SECOND run, the one that he wrote 'swell as drew. I don't have much comment on Waid's stuff – I read some of it, and don't remember a damn thing, which says that I'm probably getting early-onset dementia and that you're probably right.

  10. It's not the badness per se; it's the absolutely anonymous quality of the badness which gets me.

    I did see that Batman/Ras thing you mentioned. It did have more personality…though I remember disliking it fairly intensely anyway. But it didn't make me despair the way this thing did….