Gail Simone interview
June 7, 2007 | Interviews
New Wonder Woman writer Gail Simone.
Gail Simone is one of the hardest working writers in comic books.
She first caught readers’ eyes with her witty wordplay for Marvel Comics’ Deadpool and quickly rose to stardom by taking DC Comics’ Birds Of Prey to new heights, leading to her taking on the adventures of Superman in Action Comics and showing why being bad is so darned good in the acclaimed miniseries, Villains United.
More recently she’s completed a Secret Six miniseries and writes the monthly comics: The All New Atom, Gen 13 and Welcome To Tranquility.
And now comes Simone’s greatest challenge, as she’s signed on to tackle the adventures of one of DC’s most iconic creations, Wonder Woman.
“Wonder Woman is the premiere female action hero of all time, in my opinion,” Simone said in a phone interview this week from her Oregon home, ahead of her trip to Toronto where she’ll be a guest at the Women Of Comics symposium as part of this weekend’s Paradise Toronto Comicon (www.torontocomicon.com).
“I’ve written Wonder Woman in a few different projects — in a JLA Classified six-issue arc and once in Birds Of Prey — and I really love writing her character.”
Penning tales of the Amazon princess is rife with challenges, Simone said.
“There’s going to be some difficulty because she has such a long history and everyone knows Wonder Woman and everything, but I’m just really just excited to get her back to being the No. 1 female super-hero in the world and to make her the star of her own book,” she said.
The fact that Simone is the first woman to write the character on an ongoing basis is fun, but daunting, the creator admits.
“I’m really excited and I’m kind of nervous, too, because I have the added thing of a mainstream female comic book writer getting to do Wonder Woman and there seems to be a lot of anticipation,” Simone said.
“I don’t want to let people down.”
And making the move to Wonder Woman hasn’t come without a price.
Simone is ending her over four-year run on Birds Of Prey as a result.
“It was really hard,” Simone said of leaving the book. “I still have moments where I’m really sad because I really miss the characters because I wrote them for so long.
“(But) I feel that I reached my goal, which was to make those three characters — (Black) Canary, Huntress and Oracle — lead characters, not just sidekicks or plot points for the male characters.”
And Simone hopes readers will agree that the move is worth it.
“I don’t want to give away too much, but I can guarantee you it is not going to be a boring book,” she said.
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