Top 40 Gail Simone Quotes

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.

If you have something to say, especially that’s different and needed, then do it.

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 feel like Vertigo is a place to have an adult discussion for adult readers.

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.

Leaving a book is hard – ‘Secret Six’ was a book that people cared about. Even years later, the digital sales are great; the trades and single issues are expensive and highly sought after. It was meaningful to a lot of readers, which is endlessly gratifying.

My favorite characters are always the unpredictable ones, and with Domino, you literally never know which way the dice are going to roll.

I just like to write stories about people who survive even very difficult, impossible things.

I feel humanity is often displayed in how we react to our mistakes and the misdeeds committed against us.

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’.

We have so many fantastic creators – female creators as well as male creators that have their own followings, their own fans, and their own books that are successful.

Nothing really prevented me from showing Catman as bi, but it’s how I thought of him.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think Tumblr tends to be – you can get more in-depth with things and more blogging, and Tumblr has been real great for me in terms of research because I have contacts with people from all walks of life all over the globe.

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.

Catman – what I really like about him is he’s a really grounded character in terms of – he’s an excellent tracker. We’re giving him a set of new skills for ‘Secret Six’ as it starts again anew. But he’s very sexy, very dangerous, unpredictable.

I have worked with a lot of great artists, including some of my heroes like Michael Golden, George Perez, and Jose Garcia Lopez, just to name a couple. I have been spoiled.

I’m excited for Christy Marx taking over ‘Birds of Prey’. I adore ‘Rachel Rising’ by the great Terry Moore. I’m also a stone cold Scott Snyder fan; the guy is a joy to read and a pleasure to work with.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The ‘Womanthology’ book got a lot of people jobs, inside and outside the industry, and I think stuff like that tends to be really effective. You have something in print that you can point an editor or a publisher to, and it makes a huge difference for a lot of people.

With ‘Red Sonja’, it’s a single character leading a book although there’s a supporting cast, whereas ‘Secret Six’ is basically six characters who have equal time and equal place in the book, so it’s got a team dynamic that ‘Red Sonja’ doesn’t have.

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.

It’s time for a trans hero in a mainstream comic.

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.’

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.

My career path is the weirdest thing. I was a hairdresser, I worked at Marvel for a few months, and then I was signed to a DC exclusive for eight years.

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.

Wonder Woman is very much her own character. She thinks big.

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 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.

‘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 write a team book, it’s all about how they relate to each other and what they bring to the team and the book. Whether it’s Black Canary and Huntress or Bane and Scandal, I look for a relationship that people can believe in, that they want to follow and learn more about.