The following is a fragment of an interview conducted between Mania and Mark Waid sometime before the release of JLA Year One.
MANIA: Okay, very good. JLA Year One: what's that about?
Mark Waid: One of the most exciting things I've ever done.
MANIA: Good!
Mark Waid: Brian Augustyn and Barry Kitson and I are working together on it. And it is, just as it says, the original plot for Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), the Flash (Barry Allen), Martian Manhunter, Aquaman, and Black Canary. Starting from the day after they first met to their origin as the Justice League up to, give or take, the first year.. year one is not quite accurate, it's more of a first few months of the group's formation.
It's how these 5 disparate personalities come together and form the world's greatest super-team and it's very much a character piece. There's plenty of action/adventure, but.... You get plenty of action/adventure in each month's JLA which is a great book, ours is character pieces, ours is...we're going to be spending as much time with each individual hero in their own identity... their own little world.
We'll spend as much time with them outside the JLA as we will inside the JLA and really get to examine the characters.
MANIA: That's appropriate for the story in which we see how several people became a group.
Mark Waid: Yes, and then how other groups in the DC universe at the time react to the formation of the JLA because we've got the Challengers out there, they've been around for a while, and the Doom Patrol, and now they are seeing this new wave of very prominent and very public, bright, happy super heroes coming along and so there are a lot of guest appearances by everybody in DC during this time.
MANIA: Anyone from the Justice Society?
Mark Waid: Yeah, actually in the first couple of issues, sure. You know, why are you guys using our name.
MANIA: Well, you weren't using it, but...
Mark Waid: Yeah, but still...
MANIA: And this is a one shot?
Mark Waid: No, actually it's twelve issues.
MANIA: Okay, I wonder why I haven't heard anything about that? But it's still some distance down the road, I guess?
Mark Waid: Yes, we're not sure, when it comes out, probably the last of 1997 but no official date has been set yet.
MANIA: Okay. Well, I'm excited about that and of course Grant Morrison will know something about that as well.
Mark Waid: Yes.
MANIA: So you are taking the five of the seven Justice League founders in that original story with the Appelaxians and weeding out Superman and Batman.
Mark Waid: Just an editorial fiat; it's been decreed by forces more powerful than us that Superman and Batman were not founding members of the JLA. But they will both appear.
MANIA: Okay, so it will be their reaction to the founding of the JLA?
Mark Waid: Yeah. One of the things that we've got going is that the JLA, right from the start, keeps a chair at the meeting table for Superman. But to them he is Bono and they are a garage band and they are terrified of approaching him. He's Elvis, for goodness sake, they are nothing, so they have to build their own confidence before they approach him.
MANIA: Not that Green Lantern or Flash seem to have a confidence problem.
Mark Waid: No, there's still a level of......
MANIA: They are human beings and he is a god. In fact that was sort of how they treated him in Kingdom Come, too, even before his actions started to justify that.