‘The Flash’ Writer Mark Waid Not Really Interested In Writing An Absolute DC Book, But Does Have “An Absolute Deadman Thing I Would Love To Do”
Though generally averse to the idea of ‘radically reinventing DC canon’ due to having spent so much of his career overseeing its initial development, current The Flash Vol. 6 writer Mark Waid says that while he has no current plans to pen an entry in the publisher’s fledgling Absolute universe, he’s ready-to-go with a particularly interesting take on Absolute Deadman.
Waid, whose notable contributions to DC’s overall history include The Flash Vol. 2, Kingdom Come Vol. 1, the weekly, post-Infinite Crisis epic 52 Vol. 1, and the current Batman/Superman: World’s Finest Vol. 1, offered his thoughts on the Darkseid-created Absolute universe during a recent appearance on the pop-culture-centric Word Balloon podcast.
Amidst a larger discussion whose topics ranged from his current work on The Flash Vol. 6 and Justice League Unlimited to Marvel and DC’s upcoming Superman/Spider-Man crossovers, the veteran comic book writer was at one point asked by host John Siuntres as to whether or not DC had “approached you, at all, for any Absolute ideas,” to which he replied, “Not really, because it’s ︀︀my job to help steer what we’ve got over here in the regular DC universe.”
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“I’m also not sure that I would have an Absolute take on some of these characters,” he further noted, “because I’m just so invested in how I’ve been thinking about them for 60 years.”
However, despite his overall disinterest in overdosing on Omega Energy, the Legion of Super-Heroes Vol. 4 then declared, “That said, I do have an Absolute Deadman thing that I would love to do.”
“I don’t know if anybody’s doing anything with that, but I love that character. There’s so much to be done with that character, and, you know, there’s some Deadman in my future somewhere, whether it’s Absolute, or whether it is somewhere in the DC universe.”
And far from his interest in the undead hero stemming from finding him anywhere in the realm of ‘boring’, Waid then proceeded to gush about just how much he loved the specific character of Boston Brand, beginning by exclaiming to Siuntres, “But what a great character!”
“Circus aerialist, killed by an assassin randomly as a test for an assassin’s organization. How can you can you kill somebody in a circus tent and still get away? And the god Rama Kushna didn’t let him move on to the next level of existence. His job was going to be able to stick around as a ghost and find his killer.
“And to do that, he was able to possess people, sleep into their bodies, be them, nd move through the world that way, which is a great take. Nobody had done anything like that before. It’s very common now, very Quantum Leap-ish, but that was a brand new concept in 1967. And it’s a great simple hook for a character and I love it.”
“Arnold Drake, who created the Doom Patrol, created Deadman. The commonality there is these characters have character. These characters are personalities. These characters sound unlike anything else. He was a good writer, and for the first time with Doom Patrol, you’re reading a DC team book where you couldn’t just move all the balloons around and have anybody say anything because it didn’t matter because they all sounded exactly the same (laughs).”
Bringing his history lesson to a close, the New History of the DC Universe Vol. 1 scribe ultimately beamed, “And with Deadman, that first Deadman story, there is just some brilliant dialogue in there.”
“I don’t want to quote anything because I’m going to get it wrong, but boy, it’s a good story.”
