Gail Simone Quotes

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"'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."

"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."

"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 succeed at all, you find yourself suddenly working with artists whose work you don't just admire but you deeply love."

"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'."

"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."

"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."

"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."