Gail Simone Eventually some pro friends, particularly the great Scott Shaw!, got fed up and pushed me to try, for which I’m eternally grateful. I love it, and I wouldn’t trade back for anything. Telling stories is a terrifically thrilling and slightly sordid occupation. I love the reaction when someone asks what I do for a living and I tell them I write comics . . . there’s often this lovely mix of nostalgia and discomfort! CCM: You’re one of the few women writing mainstream superhero comics, and part of the only team of women doing a monthly superhero title (with artist Nicola Scott on Secret Six). What attracts you to the superhero genre? Gail: I used to have a longer answer to this, something about how I find the concepts so endearingly insane . . . I mean, if you divorce everything you know about, say, Batman, and just reduce it to its utterly unreal elements, you have a story of a man who revenges the death of his parents by dressing up as a flying rodent who has a vaguely Fight Club relationship with any number of disfigured psychopaths. We’re used to it, we’re sort of immune to the insanity of a story like that, to the point where 70 years of stories featuring Batman aren’t enough, we still want more each month. But recently, I’ve rethought this a bit, and I think women who read superhero comics like the same diversity of things that African American readers and gay readers and transgendered readers and Asian readers and Caucasian readers like. I think the lines of female readers I talk to aren’t necessarily looking for some secret, Da Vinci code–protected content, they want to know what’s going on in Wonder Woman’s head this month, or how the X-Men are going to defeat Magneto. If you look at the people who have chosen this genre, this oddball cape mythology, I would stack them up against the creators in any other medium. Sure, film has David Lynch and Stephen Chow and music has Tom Waits and Yo Yo Ma, but we have Grant Morrison and the Kubert family and Jeff Smith and Ethan Van Sciver and Brian Bendis and Ed Brubaker, and a hundred other people who are as good as creative talent gets, and they all find something new and interesting to say every time they’re up at bat. That’s kind of thrilling to be part of. CCM: Your work with Nicola Scott goes back to an impressive run on Birds of Prey, and the two of you obviously have a lot of fun on whatever you’re doing. What makes a great collaboration between writer and artist?
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Gail: From my side, I want to say it’s pure dumb luck. I’ve just been ridiculously fortunate in the people I’ve gotten to work with, and they’re obviously above my pay grade. Nicola Scott, Michael Golden, Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, Neil Googe, Aaron Lopresti, and the other artists I’ve worked with are going to make any writer look brilliant. But for them, for the artists I enjoy working with the most, I think it’s purely a matter of personal pride. An artist like Nicola Scott, she simply won’t accept any page that she feels doesn’t meet her standards, so she draws and she sketches and she redraws and resketches, and in the end, she simply has a higher standard, and it shows. Nicola and I are particularly simpatico in that we don’t shock and we like things that are a wee bit disturbing. And particularly with a great artist, you don’t want to hand them a subpar script. You don’t want them wasting their love and devotion to their craft and talent on something less than it could be. CCM: With Wonder Woman you’re writing one of the most famous comic characters of all time. How do you deal with the almost 70-year history of THE most recognized superheroine in comics? Gail: I think this is a little bit like asking, “How do you deal with the horsepower of a Ferrari?” I really don’t find the mythology to be some sort of great speed bump. It’s more the opposite, that looking through her history is entering this tremendously compelling alternate history of the world, where the fate of a culture is written in the footprints of combat-trained kangaroos. Seriously, the early WW stuff in particular is so full of ridiculously addled and wonderful invention that it’s completely irresistible. My tribute to all that stuff shows up in little ways, like her albino gorilla bodyguards. Wonder Woman can be many, many things, but I like her best when her stories are right on the verge of going completely over the abyss of reason. She can be many things Spider-Man and Batman can’t be, but one thing she should never be is stuffy and humorless. CCM: With Secret Six you’re taking a bunch of DC’s second-tier “conflicted villains” (for lack of a better term) and molding them into a heroic team. Why this bunch of characters (because let’s face it, it’s kind of a motley crew), and what does each one bring to the table (or page)? Gail: I don’t think of them as heroic at all. What occasionally happens is that each of them finds a line they believe they won’t cross. But it’s still a team of thieves, killers, and perverts, bless their horrid little hearts! Each represents a particular species of villainous thought.
Scandal has the closest thing to a regular conscience. I actually like her better than most of the clawed “heroes” who kill as much as or more than the villains, with no thought of the lives they’re taking. Scandal at least has doubts. Catman has functioned as a P.O.V. character to some degree, he wants to think of himself as a bystander. He’s holding out this sad little hope of maybe someday achieving some kind of greatness. When he does commit to something, look out, because everyone underestimates him. Ragdoll represents complete, unbridled selfishness. He does what he does because it makes him happy or achieves a goal. That said, occasionally rising to help his teammates may be the first time in his entire spoiled life that he’s been selfless, and if he were a more thoughtful character, that might give him some pause. Deadshot represents the opposite. He is the man who doesn’t care. He doesn’t care if he lives or dies, really, and that means he especially doesn’t care if you live or die. Bane signifies the “honorable” villain, the man with a rigid code. His code of conduct is more restrained than most superheroes. It’s just that it is very much at odds with polite society. And Jeannette is a stone cold psychopath. She finds pain amusing, and she finds death amusing. CCM: You’ve written Superman on a regular basis in Action Comics, and now you’re doing Wonder Woman. Any desire to tackle Batman? Gail: Oh, absolutely. I want to write Batman as an adventurer again. I got to write him in JLA, where I thought of him as the ultimate tactician, but in his solo stories, I’d really like to get him out of Gotham and into some exotic locales. I’ve been offered several things in the Bat-universe but haven’t found the exact right project yet. It’s not that DC hasn’t offered, they’ve been great about letting me infect the icons. CCM: Are they any other characters you’d really like to write? Gail: I do feel that I have some fun Spider-Man stories in me at some point, and Batman, again, is someone I’m dying to write. I’d like to redeem my two-part story by writing some really good Teen Titans issues someday. And I love the pulp stuff, would love to write more Spirit, or some Tarzan, or Avengers, or the Shadow. I adore those worlds. CCM: Is there any desire on your part to do something that doesn’t include superheroes, maybe something more personal, something creator-owned?