NateCosBOOM

Gail Simone writes funny-ass dialogue and zippy stories. She also doesn’t remember when I was an intern at Marvel and gave her notes on an Agent X script. She either doesn’t remember this because I’m not terribly memorable, or she’s done too many hard drugs. (It’s probably me).

I asked her four goddamn questions.

NATE: Tell me you follow a sport. Please?

GAIL: I actually don’t, I’m sorry.  My family played a ton of basketball, so I was a pretty good player for a long time and can still shoot pretty good hoops…which gave me this uncanny ability at games like Skee-ball. I’m not kidding, they actually have made me stop playing more than once because I’d win too often.

I don’t really follow any sport, but I do like to watch and research martial arts. Not the mixed martial arts cage match stuff, but the more formal events.  It comes out in the comics I write all the time, as well.

NATE: As a HELL of a writer of pretty much all kinds of characters, regardless of their gender, age, race, whatever…do you feel that when you’re asked to write books featuring women, you’re being asked because you’re A) A really good writer, and B) a woman? And if so, are you ok with that?

GAIL: Eh, I am and I’m not, really. Thank you for the kind words.  There are few enough female writers in comics that I think most of us do get asked to do more female-centric books than not, and it was definitely true in my case, as well. I turned down a lot of books so I wasn’t typecast as a woman who wrote only female characters. I turned down Wonder Woman, I turned down ‘Supermom,’ you know, that kind of thing. I took Birds Of Prey only because I was so crazy about Barbara Gordon and Huntress and Black Canary that I just couldn’t say no.  And Ed Brubaker and Geoff  Johns and Jeph Loeb, none of whom I even knew personally, actually talked me into going to try for the book. Their belief in me really made me take that step.

No writer wants to be thought of as anything less than a real writer, competing with other real writers. I don’t want to be a good writer, considering I’m female.  But even now, if you look at the best female writers doing superhero books, you have a lot of AMAZING writers, almost all of whom are writing a lot of female books. Ivory Madison on Huntress, Marjorie Liu on X-23 and Black Widow, Jen Van Meter on Black Cat, me on Bop…we all do other stuff as well, but that pattern does come up.  I don’t blame the publishers, in a way, it’s progress, that they are TRYING to get authentic voices for their female heroes.

And even while I think some of the recent Marvel stuff sounds a little weird in the solicits (with the Her-oes and Girl Comics titles, as an example), if the end result is seeing people like Devin Grayson and Amanda Conner and Colleen Coover and the other names names mentioned above doing this high profile stuff, well, that’s pretty delightful. So it’s a mixed bag. On the one hand, do I want a writer like Marjorie Liu to get typecast, no I do not, but on the other hand, look at what she accomplished, she wrote a RIPPING good Black Widow mini that was full of genuine female energy. Jen Van Meter benefits from doing a high profile book like Black Cat, but Black Cat ALSO benefits from having a terrific writer who knows her way around the truth in women’s portrayals.

The thing is, it’s important that these writers also get a chance to show they can do the other books, too, and it looks like that’s the case at both companies. I feel like we’re making great strides and taking baby steps at the same time. Which is okay, it’s a transition period, but it IS making progress, probably faster than comics are making progress in the areas of people of color and varied orientation.

I think it probably helped that by the time I did Birds of Prey, I had already written a successful humor column, a well-received run on Deadpool and Agent X, and a bunch of Simpsons material. So I was kind of typecast already, but for being a funny writer, not for being a female writer. So that was the skepticism at the time, “Can she write something dramatic?”

And it’s not just the publishers, the readers and creators do a lot of innocent type-casting as well, the names of female writers are often the first to come up when thinking of who would best write any given female hero. It’s kind of instinctive, I don’t take it personally at all. As I say, in a way, there’s some progress to it, because thirty years ago, the names of female writers didn’t come up for any books no matter how talented they were.

I’m proud of the choices I’ve made, I’ve never taken a book to be in the top ten or to make a huge royalty check. I’ve always taken books that interested me, and to Marvel’s credit, they chose me for a book that had never had a female writer and didn’t even have a prominent female character. I never felt like my gender was a big issue at Marvel (although my inexperience did cause some missteps). And to DC’s credit, they have offered me, at one time or another, nearly every major franchise character, male and female. I’ve been offered Flash, Superman, JLA, you know, all the big gun stuff.  So if my name comes up as a candidate to write, Power Girl or whatever, it’s fine, I’m happy to be considered, as long as that’s not ALL I’m considered for.  Even the bad choices I made, I feel like it was worth trying, at least. I don’t have any regrets like that.

My happy thought right now is that there are female creators who have their own readership. People buy Nicola Scott art because she’s freaking amazing. People bought Black Widow because it kicked ass.  That’s exciting.  I try to offer encouragement and support where I can but the great thing is, this crop is coming in with guns blazing. I think Jen Van Meter in particular is just one of the most underrated writers out there. At the same time, I’ve seen a few female creators crash and burn because they just weren’t ready yet in one way or another, same as with the guy writers. Girl or boy, you have to bring something to the table.
And publishers, you can no longer use the readers as an excuse. The readers are ahead of the curve on this. They don’t care if a writer is female or male anymore.

Long answer is long.

NATE: What sitcom would you like to remake for the modern age?

GAIL: I don’t know that I have any burning desire to do that…most of the sitcoms I love are so wrapped up with the actors who starred in them that they don’t easily translate.  Flinstones, that’s a concept that can be made into a modern movie, no problem, even if it sucks. But the Andy Griffith Show and the Dick Van Dyke show don’t work without those casts even slightly.

I get asked to write comedy television a lot, surprisingly, but I haven’t really found anything that felt like a good fit yet.

NATE: You’re hired to write a Marvel book called METAL MEN (we’ll work out the copyright stuff later). 5 characters that gotta be robots or kinda roboty. Your team, and their first mission?

GAIL: Wait…are these Marvel robots?  I don’t know that many. Hmm. Vision, Jacosta, Ultron?  Herbie?  The original Human Torch?  I suck at this. That was the fun of working at Marvel for me, I got to learn some of the backstreets that I hadn’t read about growing up. Is the Vision metal? It probably doesn’t help that he’s one of my least favorite Avengers. If the Vision is made of plastic, that makes his marriage the funniest goddamn thing in comics and nothing will ever convince me otherwise. But definitely Herbie. If it were me, seriously, I would make Herbie terrifying, and have him lead the team.

Their first mission would be to team up with the Agents of Atlas because that book is a blast. 

Either that or it’d be something wildly and sexually inappropriate with the Pet Avengers. Marvel needs more filth, I say.