Mark Waid introduces two interesting ideas that, in our opinion, become conflated. The first isn’t really new: “Remember: this is what media does. Radio up until the 1960s was two or three formats. Now it’s a million formats. Television? Same thing. Three channels becomes a hundred channels. Any medium eventually fragments out towards a wider base of people where each individual fragment does what it has to do to survive on its own. It doesn’t have to appeal to the wider base. In retrospect, it’s kind of amazing and surprising that something that’s been around for 75 years like print comics hasn’t sort of gone through that same dissolution. Instead it’s put all of its eggs into the one basket.”  (“CR Holiday Interview # 22 – Mark Waid,” January 10, 2013, www.comicsreporter.com). This promotes the fragmentation of tastes, where a consumer can more easily find something that appeals to him or her. However it also makes for smaller markets, which then brings up the issue of profitability, or more concretely, of how to limit costs on these projects.

However, from a writing point of view, the story should be compatible with its publication format. And here is where Waid brings up his second point, a more original one: “That’s what you have Marc Guggenheim for. That’s what you have comics writer Marc Guggenheim slash lawyer Marc Guggenheim for. He’s on speed dial. I take the same approach that Stan and Gerry Conway and a lot of other guys who’ve written Daredevil in the past have taken, that is that you want to try to be very, very faithful to the law, but not to the point where it stifles your story. And you kind of have to give it some leeway. Especially nowadays, nobody wants twelve pages of Matt Murdock in a courtroom, because comics don’t do that well, television does it better and for free.” (Christine, “Mark Waid talks Daredevil at Baltimore Comic Con”, September 7, 2013, www.theothermurdockpapers.com). This would imply that some formats are better adapted, or more natural, for exploring certain themes or certain types of production. That’s certainly something to think about.