Gail Simone's Blog, page 88
November 15, 2016
How you holding up post Trump?
Sometimes tolerable, most times terrible.
My sense of humor sort of hit the skids, even for scripting. And the scripts are coming slow. Worried about a lot of people I love. Feeling pretty helpless. Still defiant, but…well, I’m sure you know. It’s exhausting thinking about what happened. And what’s to come.
I made some plans for comics this year, to try to help keep the door open for diverse voices and talents. Hopefully I can announce them soon.
Thanks for asking. How are YOU holding up?
I hope you do not mind me asking, but why is it that they made a new Wonder Girl in Donna and Cassie, but Wonder Tot never became her own separate heroine?
I have no idea, I have wondered about that often.
A lot of people may not know this, but for a few brief years,...
A lot of people may not know this, but for a few brief years, the SIMPSONS had a Sunday comics strip in major newspapers around the world. It was immensely popular in some countries, if I remember correctly, a little less so in the United States, where it had some difficulty keeping papers. I think…memory might be a little hazy on that point.
It was a quality strip, drawn and written by the people who do BONGO COMICS, and one of my very first jobs was doing a few strips for this. I turned in my first scripts, I loved doing it, because it reminded me of things like Peanuts and Prince Valiant and all the other great comic strips that I had read in cherished collections.
I remember there had to be a gag in the first couple panels, and another big gag at the end, a punchline. But the first gag, while it had to relate to the overall strip, had to be completely removable for the newspapers that had less actual page space. So that was a bit complex…you had to essentially set up your strip twice and make it not seem redundant.
There were other restrictions, not evil ones, just things to keep the popular characters in front. They wanted us to have either Homer, Bart, Krusty, or (I think) Ralph Wiggum in every strip. I’m not sure why Ralph, but Ralph is a laugh machine on the show, when a writer is stuck they can always cut to Ralph.
I remember that my first strips were really successful, and I had JUST started writing for a living. The strips paid $200 each for the script, and at the time, I was doing haircuts for something like $20, before all the expenses were counted, so it took a LOT of work to make as much money in my own salon as it took to write one strip.
Bongo was really happy with my first scripts, even Matt Groening made a point of asking who wrote them. So they asked me to write s many as I could. And I thought YES!
The Bongo guys were SO great to me, they taught me the language of writing comics, they were supportive in every way, and were (and are) just generally wonderful.
I wrote quite a few, and some were experimental a bit, like some of my favorite comics strips. I had one where Homer walked in and out of the strip itself, explaining what the language of a comic strip was. I had a silent one following Santa’s Little Helper, I had Ralph Wiggum accidentally become a famous beat poet.
It was a blast, and I couldn’t believe my comics were going all over the world. What a joy!
The weird thing is, it got difficult. Bongo was having a hard time keeping the strip going because they weren’t getting enough great scripts…their best people were mostly being used for books and comics. And it got hard precisely BECAUSE it was such a small amount of space to tell a story and make it funny. People think writing the Simpsons is easy…until they have to do it. It’s tough, especially without the voice actors.
So I slowly stopped doing them to concentrate on longer stories. But that was so much fun. Eventually the strip stopped, and has not been collected, which makes me a little sad. For a while, there was a really funny, really well-drawn Simpsons strip in the funnies section, and it’s a shame that it’s gone.
gailsimone:
magnetical:
Star-Blossom! (this is happening just...
Star-Blossom!
(this is happening just because @gailsimone asked me to.)
I asked my wonderful Argentina fambly sister to share this, the first piece of actual fan art of Peony McGill, STAR-BLOSSOM.
Teff drew this because she loves the character. I asked her to post it because she is shy and I wanted people to see it.
LOVE YOU, TEFF!
Show my sister some love, folks! :)
November 14, 2016
It’s taken a while, but I did realize that I still have hope. It’s banged up and battered, but it’s...
It’s taken a while, but I did realize that I still have hope.
It’s banged up and battered, but it’s still breathing, somehow.
magnetical:
Star-Blossom! (this is happening just because...
Star-Blossom!
(this is happening just because @gailsimone asked me to.)
I asked my wonderful Argentina fambly sister to share this, the first piece of actual fan art of Peony McGill, STAR-BLOSSOM.
Teff drew this because she loves the character. I asked her to post it because she is shy and I wanted people to see it.
LOVE YOU, TEFF!
November 11, 2016
November 9, 2016
littlebluewing:
Peony McGill/ Star-Blossom and Diana Prince/...
Peony McGill/ Star-Blossom and Diana Prince/ Wonder Woman in Wonder Woman 75th Anniversary Special
my favourite story in this book (though everything is amazing i would def recommend reading the whole thing!)
@gailsimone (writer) Colleen Doran (artist) HiFi (colours) Dave Sharpe (letters)
This is lovely, what you have done here.
Do you support Jill Stein?
Not at all.
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