Gail Simone's Blog, page 152

Hi Gail, just wanted to tell you how much I've enjoyed your latest Secret Six series, and thank you for bringing back Ralph and Sue. You've written some of my favorite DC comics this century, and I think it hasn't always been easy for you to work there. Ca

Aw, thanks. :)

I’m not doing anything for DC at the moment but I do have a ton of stuff elsewhere, including Vertigo, so I am very happy. :)

Do DC and Marvel have big official reference books on all their characters powers and abilities and the state of their universes for the writers to read? Is it mandatory? feel like some writers don't pay attention to the characters they take on in terms o

I don’t know about big reference books. The only big reference ‘bible’ thing I ever got was when I was working on Superman in Action Comics, and it was mostly a huge stack of copies of various key stories with some notes in there. It was helpful.

There was never a hard and fast limit on powers, and inventing new things is always encouraged with new characters. With the icons, you’d have to get it approved. I did once have to get approval for Wonder Woman to survive a nuke, which I thought was perfectly fair.

vylla-art:Updated an old piece!NICE!

vylla-art:

Updated an old piece!

NICE!

Do you support same-sex shark espousals?

It’s Adam and SHARK, not SHARK and SHARK!

To add MOAR context to The 100 thing, though Shawna Benson didn't make the decision to kill off the lesbian character, she DID go into LGBT fan forums and reassure queer fans that the character wasn't going to die, at a point when that character's death ha

Ah. 

Okay, again, I don’t know this show OR the writer and am not affiliated with BOP or DC at this time, so it’s still sort of at the edge of my vision, but my email and dm feeds have been swamped with this stuff the past two days, and some of it is a little hard to follow. I appreciate people putting it in more context. It sounds messy for sure. :(

Thing I've always wondered: do Marvel or DC ever discourage their writers from making gay ships canon? Like some ""bromances"" I look at and I just can't understand why they're not canon, unless the writer was forced to censor it.

Anything considered a big development in any key DC or Marvel character is going to get looked at by editorial. In my case, I don’t recall anyone actively discouraging me, but a couple times it’s had to go up the ladder a bit. DC is actually pretty great on this stuff, as far as I have experienced. I don’t know about Marvel as much but they seem to be making strides.

Are you allowed to tell us more about your part in the Attack on Titan anthology?

Just that it’s a very moving story (I hope!) about a young girl in the middle of an outer district attack, with art by the magnificent Phil Jimenez!

Is the 100 an Arrow?

Everything is an Arrow!

Hello Gail! I was just wondering at what point you started looking at comics as something you could see yourself creating versus just reading? And was that jump from an "outsider" who could feel free to talk about how women were portrayed in comics to an "

I was drafted. The first few people who asked me to write comics, I turned them all down because I was a hairdresser and I thought I would be taking work from a ‘real’ writer. That was honestly my thinking. It was people like Jeph Loeb and Adam Hughes and Ty Templeton who told me that thinking was nonsense and that almost everyone was drafted in in some way or another.

So I was the last person in line to actually believe I might be able to write comics, and I have to give major props to people like Mark Waid and Kurt Busiek and others who helped me understand how to do it.

As for the second part, outsider, insider, whatever, I am never going to stop speaking out about things I think are wrong. I’ve criticized many things my publishers have done and I get crap for it all the time. But I don’t know what else to say, I feel like we owe it to the industry we all love to be truthful. 

Do DC or Marvel ever discourage their comics creative staff from criticizing their film or television efforts? (IE if you don't like Batman v. Superman, keep your mouth shut. Also just keep pretending you don't watch Arrow)

Marvel does, I don’t know DC’s policy.

And I don’t watch ARROW because I am an expert.