Gail Simone
When I think about Plastic Man, he was genuinely the first funny super hero. I'm obviously attracted to that. There's also this great mixture of tragedy in there, too, that I love. The humor comes from a place of pain.Collection: Funny
I always say, if a guy writes the same lead female character type over and over, we are not seeing their writing chops so much as their dating website wishlist.Collection: Dating
First, hugely popular and talented romance/dark fantasy author Meljean Brook gives a really deep, wonderful story. She's clearly spent so much time thinking about the world of Sonja and her story in particular, it could easily have been a novel of its own.
I have had a lot of dreams come true as a writer... I've gotten to work with artists I adored as a reader; I've gotten to write characters that changed my life as a kid.
The first Knightfall story is four issues, and it is extremely focused and intense. People who have read, say, the 'Cats In the Cradle' arc in 'Secret Six' will get some idea of the primal tone of this story. It doesn't let up at all, and it ends in a new place.
Actually, the notion of what is acceptable for a moral government to do seems to have eroded in some ways since 9-11. Not to get too political here, but countries, including our own, seem to have accepted what was once almost unimaginable - condoning torture, for example, and even criminalizing peaceful protest.
When I created Mary for the 'Batgirl' issue of 'Night of the Owls,' there was a lot of excitement at DC. Scott Snyder in particular was a champion for the character, bless him.
I love crossovers, I love Wonder Woman, and being able to bring the undisputed greatest warriors of the DCU and Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age together for the very first time is a dream come true.
Batman has what is quite possibly the best rogues' gallery every created. People who have never read a comic can name half a dozen of his foes, and that's barely scratching the surface.
Wonder Woman is very much her own character. She thinks big.
My hope is that we can spread the word: Wonder Woman is not some unapproachable goddess. She's funny, dangerous, intimidating, brilliant, and compassionate. In many ways, I think she's the most human superheroine there is.
People who are exposed to great Wonder Woman stories love her. You have to do your best work and get it out there so people can experience it.
Red Sonja, she was a hellraiser before Buffy, Xena, and Ripley even existed. When so many heroines in comics were all hung up on romance and the bizarre gender politics of comics at the time, Sonja was out cutting off the heads of dragons and pirates.
Part of the joy of my career, for me, has been giving these iconic females a bit of shading of that unapologetic female vibe. I think it's an interesting approach.
I have never really gotten to write Catwoman. She's one of the few iconic females at DC, along with Supergirl, that I haven't really gotten to take out for a spin.
Nothing really prevented me from showing Catman as bi, but it's how I thought of him.
'Batgirl' and 'Harley Quinn' are the first DC hit books in a while that aren't starring Batman personally, really. But some of the attempts to reach the female audience have been really depressing to me.
When I started in comics, people were always trying to classify me as either/or. Either a writer who appealed to women or a writer who appealed to guys. This need to categorize was just exhausting.
I don't need every book to have female creators, I don't care if there are books that appeal mostly to guy readers. I don't care if some books have cheesecake. I am fine with all of that. It's the not allowing anything else that makes me furious.
My thing with the Secret Six is that they never win. The odds are always against them; everyone wants them gone. So they never win. But they never give up, either.
I have a terrific editor in Molly Mahan - she's the best - and Red Sonja has become up there with Black Canary as my favorite character to write, ever.
I was a fan of the idea of Red Sonja, but the gender politics of the character made her hard to read, for me, at times.
I get asked a lot about writing for games and prose and film, and I will do some, but I can never see myself leaving comics. I love it too much.
I like DC, and I love the DC Universe. It's a source of never-ending joy to me.
I've always said my whole career that I wanted to write by the improv credo, 'don't negate,' which means, even if you didn't care for something, you try to make it work. You don't say, 'Oh, that particular story didn't happen.'
As time goes on, at both DC and Marvel, characters notch up so many victories that we often start to think of them as infallible, which is kind of death for adventure fiction.
A lot of readers and a lot of editors had a story problem with Oracle, in that she made for such an easy, convenient story accelerator, that we missed the sense of having characters have to struggle to discover, to solve mysteries. Famously, it helped make Batman less of a detective and more of a monster hunter.
I feel like Vertigo is a place to have an adult discussion for adult readers.
I just like to write stories about people who survive even very difficult, impossible things.
I've said this many times: I don't care which hero punches which hero to get the Infinity Jockstrap or whatever. I do care that people find humanity in these stories, and maybe something connects, makes the world a little better for having read it.
I feel humanity is often displayed in how we react to our mistakes and the misdeeds committed against us.
I have been involved in lots of crossover and event books, and the truth is, I dearly love them. I love stories that actually take advantage of the huge DC library and catalog - that stuff thrills me.
If you love Tarzan, you can read stories from the 'Jungle Tales of Tarzan,' where he's just a kid, all the way up until he has a son of his own and beyond. Same with 'Batman' - you can follow him from Gotham, as a kid, to 'Dark Knight,' as a cranky old weirdo. I really love that.
If you succeed at all, you find yourself suddenly working with artists whose work you don't just admire but you deeply love.
For me, even though I love, love, love both Cliff Chiang and Brian Azzarello, I haven't read the new '52 Wonder Woman' past the first issue. It's just... you know, once I'm on a book for a really long time... it's like going through a divorce. It takes a while before I can be 'friends again' with the character.
Ideas are not - ideas come at me all the time; it's just the way I'm wired. It's just a matter of focusing it in and figuring out what to do with that.
Secret Six has always had a special place in the DCU, just because they're the misfits. The content is a little bit different than the rest of the mainstream titles. It has a completely different tone than any of the other books out there.
What I feel responsible for is, if my name is on a comic, I want it to be the best-written comic that I can possibly do. I want it to include some new things we haven't seen before, new story ideas, new characters. Quality, quality art, all those kinds of things.
I've written, like, 450 comics, and 'Secret Six' was the first one I've had ship late, ever. So it took a lot to make that happen. So we had a little bit of a stop-and-start, and then we had Convergence, and then Issue No. 2 of 'Secret Six'.
I do a lot of book signings and conventions every year, and I meet a great many readers who are struggling... they're working through illness, injury, addiction, depression, grief, or some other trauma. It seems to me that there's a lot of heroism in fighting those things as well, as best you can.
A lot of action heroes, we're told they are heroic primarily because they commit violence upon the bad guy. It can be cathartic; it can be thrilling. But at some point, I think you want more from your heroes than just the ability and willingness to pummel someone.
Greg Rucka always writes lovely, believable female characters in books like 'Whiteout,' 'Queen and Country,' and 'Lazarus.' I am a fan of Kelly Sue DeConnick, who does a wonderful female lead in 'Captain Marvel.' And DC's 'Batwoman' is currently the only book at the Big Two with a lesbian solo lead character, and it's always outstanding.
One of the things I am most excited about personally is a five-issue anthology I put together, 'Legends of Red Sonja,' which is full of wonderful little short stories written exclusively by my favorite female writers of comics, prose, and gaming.
The stuff we're seeing in 'Deadpool' and 'Harley Quinn' now, Plastic Man was doing in the 1940s. It's a character that was ahead of its time back then and the stories are still funny and still relevant.
I think it's important to have diversity in comics for a thousand reasons. It's not just some airy conceptual thing: it's important to reflect the humanity of the readership.
Famously, DC has been pretty great showing gay women, with characters like Batwoman, but has shown fewer prominent men on the sexuality spectrum outside of hetero. It's something we need to address. I also think it's lovely how the readers respond to this.
I always look for a story that hasn't been told in the same way. I don't care about a lot of the usual elements people use for a quick drama boost. I want to know, for example, what happens when a man who was victimized by his father tries to be a father to a woman sixty years his senior.
People resist and fight against things that are new that they haven't seen before, especially if they make them uncomfortable. But fiction is a safe place to tell these stories and to reach out to people and maybe affect them and make a difference in their lives.
People who support Kickstarter, we love them all. We're so grateful we have these products out here that allowed us to keep the copyrights and own them and everything, but people don't realize just how massive an undertaking it is.
If you have something to say, especially that's different and needed, then do it.