I would love to see Charise Carnes/Knightfall in Secret Six. It seems like 99% of super-villains in the Batman-verse are referred to as insane, and since the series is so well known it often makes me wonder whether it contributes to people stigmatizing men

I have said this a lot and I have been just as guilty of this as any other bat-writer, but I’m trying to do better. The shorthand in comics for decades has been mental illness = evil.  The bat-verse in particular is thick with it. 

I think it’s okay to keep the major villains with their problems but we have to balance it out, we have to show nuance and context, and we have to rethink how we design characters in the future. It’s going to be an ongoing process.

For Knightfall, you are exactly right, I wanted Batgirl to have a villain that was more like Bane, someone who has assets and determination equal to the hero of the book, but didn’t have that stock mental illness-as-origin-story that so many comic villains have. 

I like Charise and I know I shouldn’t, but you know, the thing about her is, we think her methods are so deplorable and far-fetched, and I’m not sure they’re really that far-fetched at all. A state recently re-instituted the firing squad. We have shown again and again that many people don’t care if we torture prisoners, without trial or evidence. We have shown again and again that we don’t care about creating an eternal prison culture. We see large numbers of people at best apathetic and at worst downright joyful at police shootings of unarmed citizens. 

Knightfall is s product of that thinking. It’s a big part of what Secret Six has been about, that lack of empathy and humanity is not strength, it’s not an asset. It reminds me of how the Punisher started as, essentially, a Spider-man villain, that eventually ended up glorifying the exact methods he was created to condemn. 

There are people who are telling us every day that compassion and mercy are weaknesses. They’re wrong, and they are making everything worse by spewing that philosophy.