Mark Waid on returning to DC and World's Finest

“This is where I was meant to be.”

That’s how Mark Waid describes his experience returning to DC after more than a decade away from the company. With one ongoing series underway – World’s Finest, which launched in March – and the five-issue Batman vs. Robin on deck for September, he’s back in a big way at the company where his writing career began with the shortlived The Comet and Legends of The Shield books, followed (more successfully) by The Flash back in the early '90s.

Beyond a career-defining run on The Flash, books like Kingdom Come, Superman: Birthright, and stints on JLA, The Brave and the Bold and Legion of Super-Heroes (twice!), meant that Waid would forever be associated with DC, even as he moved on to become a mainstay at Marvel – writing Fantastic Four, multiple Avengers titles, The Indestructible Hulk, and the award-winning Daredevil with Chris Samnee – as well as independent work like Irredeemable, The Unknown, and Strange Fruit, and executive roles at Boom! Studios, Archie Comics, and currently Humanoids.

The new World’s Finest series with artist Dan Mora is a homecoming for the creator, then, and one that he’s determined to make the most of, as he shared during a Zoom call earlier this month that also saw him addressing concerns about seeming too retro, talk about his longevity in the industry, and explain just what Dick Grayson can do better than Bruce Wayne.

Popverse: So what's it like being back at DC? You'd been at Marvel for a while, before this.

Mark Waid: It's the best. The phone calls started coming in some time back on a Friday afternoon, just, "please come home," which was so nice and so flattering. [I’m working on] World's Finest, Batman Versus Robin, [and] a couple of other tricks we've got up our sleeve that are waiting to be announced. I feel like the whole DC Universe is lined up to play with, if I want to, with respect to what everybody else is doing, obviously. It really just feels like, alright, this is where I was meant to be.

What can you tell us about Batman Versus Robin at this point? What can you actually get away with saying publicly?

What I can say is that the first arc of World's Finest is, was, and always has been, designed deliberately to lead into what is going to be Batman Versus Robin. It's five oversized issues. What I was trying to do with Batman versus Robin was try to take them into a realm that I'm not used to seeing them in, which is dark magic sorcery, rather