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Mark Waid On That Shocking ‘Justice League Unlimited’ #1 Ending Twist: “That’s The Whole Point”

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Justice League Unlimited #1 is finally here from DC Comics, and it’s the biggest, most powerful Justice League ever. So what will writer Mark Waid and artist Dan Mora pit against this nearly unstoppable force for good? Big, big threats like the terrorist organization Inferno, and a Parademon nest. And at least one jaw-dropping twist threat the team won’t see coming.

Spoilers past this point, but while the first issue spends a lot of time using Air Wave as the window character to understand how this new Justice League works… The young hero is actually there to kill them. And not only is that a surprise to readers, but it was also a surprise to Waid when he wrote the issue.

“To be perfectly honest, when I wrote page one, panel one, it never occurred to me that that would be Air Wave’s fate,” Waid told Comic Book Club. “It really wasn’t until I got near the end of the issue and I realized, oh, here’s something I can do with this character that I do not expect.”

To find out more about this wild twist ending, plus how Inferno might connect to someone from the Justice League’s past, read on.

Comic Book Club: On the final page, it’s revealed that Air Wave is there to kill the Justice League, or at least kill members of the Justice League. That’s a pretty wild turn!

Mark Waid: That’s the whole point. I really wanted that. I really wanted that last line of dialogue to be the big turn that makes you go, okay, wait now I have to see what happens next. And it’s the least expected thing I could think of to do with that character.

Once we started parsing out what that means and where that story is going, it made perfect sense and tied in beautifully with a lot of the other stuff that you’ll see building across the first six issues or so, with the rise of Inferno, that terrorist group that seems to have infinite resources… Why are they a terrorist group, if they get infinite resources? What is it with the death of Darkseid, as we established in the All In Special, that is the looming threat that will come back to bite the Justice League and the DC Universe in the next few months? It all ties together.

Going back and reading the issue again after the Air Wave reveal, almost every exchange with him and almost everything that he does goes two ways. You read it as a very naive thing, the first time through, and then the second time through, you realize there’s something a little nefarious going on there. What was involved in making sure that worked?

It was a lot of rewriting. To be perfectly honest, when I wrote page one, panel one, it never occurred to me that that would be Air Wave’s fate. It really wasn’t until I got near the end of the issue and I realized, oh, here’s something I can do with this character that I do not expect, because otherwise, it would have ended on the traditional sort of pat on the back, and, “Boy, I can’t wait to be part of the big Justice League! See you next issue!” But once I came up with that twist, it was a matter of going back and looking more closely at the dialogue, and making sure that you can read it two different ways.

You mentioned Inferno. We see a number of hooded, shadowy figures. There seems to be about the same number as the big seven in the Justice League. Are these potentially characters we’ve seen before, or is this an entirely new threat?

There is a tie to a character that we’ve seen before, and if you’re a long-time Justice League reader, there’s a clue staring you right in the face. So there is that connection as to who’s under those robes. That’s all I’ll say… I still need to keep my hand close to my chest on that one.

And one of the other aspect of the issue is Batman and Blue Beetle find a nest of, based on the solicitations for issue two, we can assume are Parademon eggs?

If you thought the threats in issue one were pretty formidable, wait until you get to issue two, where a nest of parademons being born In the Costa Rican jungles is not a job for just Batman and Blue Beetle. They’ll be killed. They need to start bringing in [the big] hitters.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Justice League Unlimited #1 is now in stores everywhere from DC Comics.

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