Mark Waid

Mark Waid is the closest thing comics has to a complete professional—a writer, editor, publisher, and walking encyclopedia of superhero history who has done literally everything in the medium short of running the printing presses. Born in Hueytown, Alabama in 1962, he bought his first comic book at age four and never stopped. Perfect for fans of Kingdom Come’s operatic spectacle, the pulse-pounding Wally West era of The Flash, and Irredeemable’s “what if the world’s greatest hero snapped?” deconstruction.

Waid began his career as an editor at DC Comics in the 1980s under legendary editorial director Dick Giordano, soaking up the house’s history before stepping out from behind the desk. His 1990s run on The Flash with artists like Greg LaRocque and Mike Wieringo turned Wally West into the definitive Scarlet Speedster and introduced concepts—the Speed Force, Bart Allen, Savitar—that still anchor the character in comics, TV, and film. In 1996 he and painter Alex Ross produced Kingdom Come, a four-issue saga set in a future DC Universe that became one of the best-selling American graphic novels of all time and cemented Waid’s reputation as the medium’s resident historian. His Superman: Birthright later redefined the Man of Steel’s origin for a new century.

At Marvel, Waid’s influential 1995-96 Captain America run with Ron Garney refocused Steve Rogers on what it means to be “a man out of time,” and he returned for a celebrated follow-up run in 1998. He took over Fantastic Four with Mike Wieringo, wrote the launch-era Avengers and Black Widow, and—with artist Chris Samnee—delivered a Daredevil run that won the 2012 Eisner Award for Best Continuing Series and earned Waid an Eisner for Best Writer the same year. He even famously rebooted Archie for modern readers as lead writer of the publisher’s 2015 relaunch.

Waid has also been one of the industry’s most persistent champions of creator-owned work. With Barry Kitson he created Empire at Image Comics, imagining a supervillain who has already conquered the world; at BOOM! Studios he wrote the acclaimed Irredeemable and Incorruptible, a mirrored saga of a fallen hero and the villain trying to take his place. In 1999 he co-created Gatecrasher with Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti, the Black Bull Media sci-fi action-comedy about a teenage super-team guarding Earth from alien invaders—Conner’s first creator-owned work. In 2011 he founded Thrillbent, a free digital-comics platform launched with the serialized Insufferable, and his 2013 essay “An Open Letter to Young Freelancers” became a landmark commentary on the industry’s changing business practices.

Behind the scenes, Waid has shaped the medium from every chair in the room: editor at DC, co-founder of Gorilla Comics, Editor-in-Chief and then Chief Creative Officer of BOOM! Studios, and publisher of Thrillbent. He joined Humanoids in 2018 as Director of Creative Development and was named its Publisher in 2020, overseeing the publisher’s H1 superhero line, as Publishers Weekly covered at the time. He is equally known for standing up to the industry’s worst impulses: when Comicsgate figure Richard C. Meyer sued him in 2018, Waid crowdfunded his legal defense and the suit was voluntarily dismissed in 2020. In a rare career-spanning interview with The Comics Journal, Waid distilled his entire philosophy into a single line: “All that truly matters in a story is emotion.” Few writers have made that feel so effortless, and fewer still have done it across four decades and nearly every major publisher in the medium.