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.
— Gail Simone
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.
I just like to write stories about people who survive even very difficult, impossible things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you succeed at all, you find yourself suddenly working with artists whose work you don't just admire but you deeply love.
I feel humanity is often displayed in how we react to our mistakes and the misdeeds committed against us.
I feel like Vertigo is a place to have an adult discussion for adult readers.
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.'
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.
'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.
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.
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.
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.
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 like DC, and I love the DC Universe. It's a source of never-ending joy to me.
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 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.
