Gail Simone: Birds of Prey

Actually, our new CCO [DC’s Chief Creative Officer], and probably the most successful writer in comics right now, Geoff Johns, convinced me.  He said that the book’s fading left a hole in the DC Universe, and even a bit of a whole in comics in general.  When I was on the book, it had always been a bit of a gateway drug, in that it was a comic with female superheroes that actually attracted female readers, and not just masturbating guys, although I’m sure we get some of those too, bless their filthy little hearts.

It’s a bit like the Suicide Girls, as well, in a way…it’s a book that’s sexy, but there’s no question it’s an inviting, warm, and inclusive kind of sexuality in the book.  There’s gorgeous women, and there’s also a lot of steamy hot guys. The women in the book want what they want, they dress how they dress, they really don’t care what anyone else thinks about it.  And I think that had a lot to do with why it appealed to a wider swath of readers than most of the abortive female-led cape books out there.  The Birds don’t apologize.  They own what they are, which is what I love about the Suicide Girls, since this is on that site.

Geoff asked if I still had stories to tell, and that really became the crux of it, because I absolutely felt I did.  It’s not that other writers can’t write the characters, they can, there were some great stories in my absence.  But the mix of THESE characters and this creative and editorial team, there’s just a lot of love and care and dedication to the book, and I believe the readers respond to it.



Oh, absolutely.  Once a character is really in my brain, they never really leave.  When I was a reader of comics, my big pet peeve was always boring dialogue. I have no interest in hyper-realism, at least not in superhero books. I like the dialogue to be lively and surprising. I want each voice distinctive and layered.  There are still a lot of books out there where the characters, particularly the female characters, all have the same patois and cadence, and it just feels so empty to me.  I want to be surprised.

All the writers in comics that I love the best have that ear, that amazing gift of sparkling dialogue that doesn’t call attention to itself for its own sake.
 


Birds of Prey has always been a rarity in fiction: a female buddy adventure story. It’s weird how few of those exist in the combined weight of all media. 

Now for the first time, we have an actual penis-bearing GUY on the squad, which is fun.  Hawk and Dove are two characters who were given powers based on their ideology.  Hawk believes in aggression and the value of war and combat, whereas Dove, well, she searches for peaceful solutions.  I don’t want it to be so simplistic as war-mongering killer and tree-hugging pacifist. What’s interesting is to genuinely present those cases…what to do when confronted with a hostile aggressor. While philosophy is more likely to protect the innocent?

That’s interesting and meaningful stuff, told through brightly clad super-weirdos.
I really enjoy that. My love of superheroes is partially based on trying to imagine what is going on in the minds of people who would dress up like that and go looking for trouble.  I suspect there’s a huge number of beloved heroes who are actually closet perverts and I couldn’t be more proud.



I have to admit, the guy draws the human ass like no one else.  I’m being flip, but he really, really does. Admirers of rear ends should buy two copies in case one gets drool on it.

But there’s a lot I love about his work.  Ed’s story is amazing, he comes from a tiny village in Brazil.  He taught himself to draw by looking at a single old issue of Conan the Barbarian and trying to draw the characters with a ball-point pen.  You can’t teach that kind of love, that kind of fire.  He doesn’t speak much English, but he still manages to nail even the most subtle acting, it amazes me every time. I can ask for very, very emotionally subdued scenes, and he always brings it and improves it.

That said, he is of the Brazilian tradition, so his art is always hugely sexy and sexually charged.  It can be a bit much for some, but I never sense the, you know, the hate that some artists bring to their sexy drawings.  Again, it’s like the Suicide Girls, and I’ve used them as an example before.  What they do is so free of the kind of self- and other-loathing that infuses so much porn and cheesecake. It’s more about a sense of joy and freedom, and the effect is different. I suspect a lot of traditional porn consumers are utterly baffled by the Suicide Girls, it’s just not something that makes sense in their limited worldview.

I’m not condemning all traditional sex imagery, just trying to point out the difference. 
Ed’s also a delightfully equal opportunity sexy picture guy…some of the hottest guys in comics have traipsed through the book half-naked.

Which I support completely, may I add!

Oh, yeah, I am scrupulous about character arcs in particular. One of the reason some of these drastic stories don't really work is that the context hasn't been provided. You can't care what happens to SpudMan if the work hasn't been done. So there's some long-term stuff that will jolt long-time BoP readers, I think.

We have stories around the world--too many DC stories take place in the same three cities and I want to do away with that notion. But yeah, one thing never changes, badass chicks kicking bad guy ass.

I mean, it's a tradition.



It’s odd, but 30 issues is actually considered a long run on the icon books. I did love writing Wonder Woman…it’s an aggravating and inspiring assignment.  Aggravating because there are limits placed on what you can do at every turn.  I wanted to have Wonder Woman’s mother, Hippolyta, become engaged to marry another woman, the soldier Phillipus.  Now, I mean, really. It’s an island of only women, men haven’t been there in 3000 years.  Is it really that odd to imagine that they might fall in love and want to marry?

I do give DC credit, as they have actively supported LGBT content in comics in the past few years. I just feel we could still be doing a lot more.
 
But inspiring as well…I talk about this a lot, but I had people telling me endlessly how Wonder Woman had helped them get through some hurdle in their lives, not my stories in particular, just the character in her long history.  People who came up and said that they got through chemotherapy with Diana’s help, or out of an abusive relationship, or to come out of the closet.  One woman was inspired to become an honest to gosh astronaut.  A reader told me his very ill daughter was  a Wonder Woman fan, and DC sent her a care package of Wonder goodies and she made a full recovery. I mean, it’s more than just a gig, writing her.

But eventually you have to pass the torch, and I’m very excited about the next writer, who is a superstar in many different media, James Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5.  I think he’s going to do huge things.

I wanted to heal some rifts, for one thing.  It’s an odd singularity with Diana that every writer tends to write her completely differently.  They bring all their sexual politics to it.  Some of the previous writers have been, I’ll be blunt, a little messed up, to put it kindly.  And then she had magnificent writers like George Perez and Greg Rucka.   But she seemed very fractured. Every new writer would ignore the previous run and it got a little neck-breaking. My idea was to say it all happened, and every different version of her was simply an aspect of a complex character.

Wonder Woman is often asked to represent all women, in a way Batman and Superman are not asked to represent all men.  It makes her weighty and often a bit dreary.  

So priority two was to give her a sense of humor. I think we accomplished all of that.  She had a tribe of super-intelligent albino gorillas as her roommates. I think that kind of thing lifts the curse quite a bit.
 
That said, you always look back and wish you could have reached a bit higher and grasped a little more firmly. There’s a lot I’d have loved yet to make happen.  I did want to get her laid, for one thing.   Poor girl’s been without for since the 40’s!

I did the first two drafts, and a lot of the plot and characters are still mine, and some of the dialogue, but a talented guy named Michael Jelenic came in and did the final draft. He made a much tighter script, and I really love it, but I regret a couple things...I regret the loss of the character humor. My script had a lot of Comedy of Errors type stuff, that fish out of water thing I love, but might easily have been lost on an audience looking for a straight adventure story. And I found the gender politics a little baffling. I just felt it was very first wave. I don't ever write Wonder Woman as man vs. women.  I feel Diana is past that.

And taken to extremes, it's insulting to everyone, it paints women as victims and men as victimizers.  I have a pet peeve when women who are enjoying the full fruits of the choices offered purely because of the struggles of early feminists disavow feminism entirely, "Oh, I'm not really a feminist." I find that terribly frustrating.

But to give the benefit of the doubt, I believe what they are saying is that they reject what they see as some notions of First Wave feminism that they don't believe apply to them or their lives.

When I took Wonder Woman, I told DC flat out, I will not write any gender war stories. I will not do the man-vs-woman shtick. Because I hate it.  And inevitably, that is the first thing people request when they don't understand the character. We actually subverted the idea, by having gods try to arrange a gender war, but the men and women end up respecting each other and choosing to tell the gods to go to hell.

So while I found some of that stuff a bit off-putting, I still really like the movie. It's sharp and smart and funny.  Terrific writer and a great new director, Lauren Montgomery.

I don’t know if it’s really flown under the radar, really.  It’s been kind of a critical smash and big seller in collected editions.  The Secret Six are a half-dozen b- and c- list villains in the DC universe just trying to survive, not conquer the world.  It’s fun to see them with their petty squabbles, doing awful things to each other and to other people.  They’re more amoral mercenaries than villains, and yet they keep crashing up against moral lines they didn’t know they had.  

I say this a lot, but I honestly think it’s the ballsiest straight superhero book going. It’s disturbing and funny and very very black, with odd little redemptive spotlights along the way.  These aren’t world-beaters, they’re basically petty crooks by Luthor/Joker standards. 

Yeah, the stuff we get away with is sheer murder sometimes, and it’s not because DC is stupid. They love and understand the book and know that it has to push that edge a lot harder than, say, Teen Titans.

But still, there’s quite a bit there that is subtextual, or left to the vile recesses of the reader’s imaginations. I always feel like it’s easy to shock. Who cares?  But to disturb, to create the chill like a person’s just stepped barefoot into the carcass of a dead possum by mistake, that’s priceless and a lot harder to achieve.

A huge portion of the credit goes to the artists, the book has had some of the most fearless artists in comics. I can always think of this stuff, but these poor bastards have to DRAW it!

There’s always one or two things an issue that have to be rethought to stay in the confines of what a mainstream DC book can be, and often it forces us to be more creative, a little more clever, to get the same effect. I have zero complaints. A book like this couldn’t have existed twenty years ago in the main DC line.

Thank you, I love her lots, too!

Scandal Savage is the daughter of one of the DCU’s first great villains, an immortal guy who has been around since the days of the caveman, causing bad things wherever he goes. He’s had tens of thousands of children, but Scandal’s mother was the only woman he ever genuinely loved, so he considers her his only true heir, and she wants nothing to do with him.

She’s a matter-of-fact gay woman, not the usual softcore nonsense that’s usually passed off for lesbianism in mainstream media.  She’s Brazilian, very hard to kill, and the only thing of her father’s that she hasn’t thrown away are the Lamines Pesar, the blades she has in her wrist gauntlets.

She’s in love with a sex worker who is as optimistic and positive as Scandal is pessimistic and world-weary.  She’s desperately loyal and one of the few in the Six capable of genuine kindness.

I think what I like about her is that she has doubts. About her life, her career, about being a mercenary at all.  I never trust anyone who lacks the ability to doubt themselves.

She’s been a favorite of the gay community, I think at least partially because she’s not at all sensationalistic about it. She’s just who she is, couldn’t care less what others think about it.

A lot of the delay is simple scheduling, availability of the schedule and creative team. Thank you for the kind words, by the way.

The cool thing is the book is completely written and drawn, so when it starts out next month, there will be no delays, it’ll be there every month til it’s finished.

Tranquility is a retirement community for superheroes and reformed supervillains. I got the idea for the book from hearing about a town specifically for retired circus and carnival people, a place where they could live and not feel ostracized or stared at. At the same time, I was born in a retirement town, a little place on the Oregon coast, and I can verify it’s weird to grow up in a town that doesn’t really value young people. At its heart, the book is a generational story, and a lot of fun. I hope people will give it a try.

And I want to thank the Suicide Girls for what they do, and all their kind support of my work over the years, it’s much appreciated.  But mostly, I want to thank them for the spark they bring to the conventions they attend. It’s always more fun with the SG’s around.