Gail Simone's Blog, page 1164

ohmygil:I got Catman in the mail today.Deadshot reacts.This...

ohmygil:

I got Catman in the mail today.

Deadshot reacts.

This made me laugh really hard for some reason.

Oh, man. I didn't realize they were at the same scale.

Holy wow, that is beautiful.

Holy wow, that is beautiful.

Unfortunately...

…I am behind on a couple scripts and getting ready for a con so I have to hold off on answering the ever increasing mound of questions in my ASK thingie line.

Sorry!  Will get to them as soon as I can!

Will we be seeing any Misfit? I love her!

I can't really talk about this stuff much more than I have yet, I'm sorry.

But I do promise that we are trying something that will make a lot of people happy, I think. It involves emptying a bench!

When are you co-opting King Shark and Deadshot from Glass and Suicide Squad?

Haha! 

I had my turn, it's the nature of comics, you steal characters and then you have to give them back, reluctantly.  I didn't invent either King Shark OR Deadshot and a lot of great writers are going to use them before the world explodes, I hope. :)   But thanks.

Speaking of Ragdoll, do you know if he's coming back anytime soon in the DCnU? Or is he another character who's sort of in limbo for now?

Just not sure, I'm sorry. They have asked us to focus on newer characters for a while.

The ray of hope is that Dan has expressed to me several times that he'd like to see the Secret Six return, with a modified line-up, after a hiatus. But I'm not sure the DCu needs two villain team books right now when there are still so many great heroes on the bench.

Just don't have a good answer right now, sorry!

In DCnU continuity, have the other Batgirls (Cass, Stephanie, Charlotte) existed or is Barbara the one and only?

I can't say for sure, the bat-editors are the ones deciding the backstory stuff, to be honest. I just don't want to offer an opinion and be wrong. In particular, I don't see why Cass couldn't have easily been Batgirl during Barbara's paralysis…or Steph, really.  Can anyone think of an in canon reason in the new 52 why those characters could not have been Batgirl?

ataxiwardance:Five Things You Should Know About Fred...

ataxiwardance:

Five Things You Should Know About Fred Shuttlesworth

When legendary civil rights activist Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth died today, many Americans had no idea who he was or what he'd accomplished in his 89 years on earth. It's an unfortunate reality that people often think Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were the beginning and end of black activism in the Civil Rights era. In fact, nothing could be more wrong. From the 1950s onward, Shuttlesworth was a major factor in ending Jim Crow laws in the South, and many other oppressive forces throughout the United States. Here are the top five things you should know about him.

1. From the start of his career, Shuttlesworth, who was raised poor in Alabama, was fiery and obstinate. After Alabama officially banned the NAACP from operating within the state in 1956, Shuttlesworth, then a pastor, founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. The ACMHR's first major order of business was a Birmingham bus sit-in, during which Shuttlesworth and others boarded city buses and sat in the "whites only" sections. The ACMHR would eventually become charter member organization in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

2. He lived nearly nine decades, but many people tried to kill Shuttlesworth much earlier for his outspokenness. He was the target of two bomb attacks, one on his home and one on his church. And when Shuttlesworth tried to enroll his daughters in an all-white Birmingham school in 1957, an armed mob attacked him, beating him unconscious and stabbing his wife. The couple survived, and when a doctor remarked that Shuttlesworth was lucky to have avoided a concussion,Shuttlesworth said, "Doctor, the Lord knew I lived in a hard town, so he gave me a hard head."

3. Though he worked closely with King, Shuttlesworth's style was decidedly different. "Among the youthful 'elders' of the movement," historian Diane McWhorter told The New York Times, "he was Martin Luther King's most effective and insistent foil: blunt where King was soothing, driven where King was leisurely, and most important, confrontational where King was conciliatory—meaning, critically, that he was more upsetting than King in the eyes of the white public." Despite their differences, King once called Shuttlesworth "the most courageous civil rights fighter in the South."

4. Shuttlesworth's fiercest enemy in Birmingham was infamous public safety commissioner Bull Connor. Connor's violent responses—attack dogs, fire hoses, billy clubs—to Shuttlesworth's peaceful demonstrations were integral in changing America's attitude about Jim Crow. "The televised images of Connor directing handlers of police dogs to attack unarmed demonstrators and firefighters' using hoses to knock down children had a profound effect on American citizens' view of the civil rights struggle," says the Shuttlesworth Foundation's website.

5. After his actions helped spawn the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act in 1964, Shuttlesworth continued fighting for justice in realms both racial and economic. In 1988 he founded the Shuttlesworth Housing Foundation to help low-income families own their own homes, and in 2004 he became president of the SCLC. A firebrand to the end, he resigned from the SCLC within months, saying "deceit, mistrust and a lack of spiritual discipline and truth have eaten at the core of this once-hallowed organization." Three years ago, the city of Birmingham named its airport after Shuttlesworth. There are still no monuments named after Bull Connor.

Ashamed to admit I had never heard of this man. Wow. What a legacy to leave behind!

The Merry Soul: See no Evil, Hear no Evil

The Merry Soul: See no Evil, Hear no Evil:

themerrysoul:

You might be wondering about the above picture. You might recognize DC's third Doctor Mid-Nite, Pieter Anton Cross but not the lady in blue. There's a bit of a long story regarding how this pic came about. To cut to the chase, skip to the very last paragraph.

I'll start with a quick chat…

Thank you for that very heartfelt post.

This needs to happen. I don't know what to do about it right away, I'm so far ahead on my outlines for the couple books I"m doing.

I will ask around.

I love all of the Secret six characters but I find myself missing Ragdoll most of all. It made me realize that I don't think I have ever read how you came up with such a lovely twisted character. How does one come up with Ragdoll?

Thank you!

This is a question with two answers. The Ragdoll-specific answer is that Ragdoll represents every outsider, every bullied kid who loves what he loves and doesn't QUITE understand what other people are saying most of the time. Ragdoll himself is joyous, but I find his observations often borderline tragic. 

Sometimes, a simple thing like cherry jello sends him into euphoria, so in a way he lives with the eyes of a child.

But the downside is, he can watch Deadshot shoot a female escaping slave in the back and not understand at all why people are sad about it. It's not a lack of empathy so much as that he simply lives in his own head so much that things that don't relate DIRECTLY to him at that precise moment, pretty much don't exist.  A cat, for example, doesn't care if you get the saddest phone call of your life. But if you left a grocery bag on the floor, that's the most amazing thing that ever happened. That's Ragdoll to me.

The larger answer is that you find that part of your brain that understands and empathizes even with the worst and oddest possible characters and you deliberately let go and live in their heads.  The act of writing serial fiction with extreme characters is not so much that of a storyteller, sometimes, but that of the quick change impressionist.  You have to learn to switch to your various virtual brains with every exchange of dialogue.

Hope that makes sense.