How come you decided to go with a more humorous/less dark version of the Secret Six for the New 52? I know that the previous incarnations of the Secret Six had their funny moments (especially when Ragdoll acted as comic relief), but it, in my eyes, had a m

Part of it is just my nature, as a contrarian. I hate to be doing what everyone else is doing.

Before the New 52, there were pretty severe limits on content, and most books could be dark, but not as MORALLY dark as Secret Six. I wanted a book that pushed the boundaries and made it an ongoing question of whether or not the characters were even good people at all. In other words, if everyone is doing, say, Shrek, I wanted to be doing Pulp Fiction.

I think there was a lot of humor in those issues, but I admit a lot of it was gallows humor.

As a contrarian, I felt most of the New 52 was just pointlessly dark, it was grim without having an underlying context to give it all meaning. My struggle with that is a big part of why Firestorm didn’t go as I had hoped…I wanted one thing, they wanted something else. It was just a bad mix.

So I wanted to do something that wasn’t such a migraine, I wanted something that had a bit of charm in it, because that was in shorter supply (despite some excellent exceptions). A lot of other people seemed to feel the same way, which is how we got the revamped Batgirl and Black Canary and such.

Some of it is just me not ever wanting to do what the rest are doing. 

The final factor was that I didn’t want the make-up of the team to be exactly the same, and I didn’t want to just swap out, you know, say, Deathstroke for Deadshot or something like that, I didn’t want to replace some characters with very similar characters. Which led to me thinking, what if the Secret Six had an ACTUAL HERO on the team? Not an anti-hero, but a genuine hero?

The original choice was Ryan Choi. He was going to lead the team. Then that got nixed for reasons I don’t know, and Dan suggested Ralph Dibny. Since Identity Crisis is such a weird low point in some ways for me (it’s written and drawn beautifully but MAN, it’s annoying in its childish rape tropes), this seemed like a beautiful way to take advantage of the New 52, to put one of comics’ great romances back together.

I knew that having even a single GOOD GUY on the team would change the tone. Which I like, I didn’t want to try to recreate the original. And I’m really enjoying the team, it’s got unexpected surprises, like Ferdie wanting Strix to feel okay about herself, I just could never have imagined that happening a couple years ago when I created them.

I like to explore new territory, there’s always lots of time to go back and revisit old, familiar stuff. I’d rather try something new, even if it’s riskier.

Hope that makes sense.