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Interview with Wonder Woman’s Gail Simone: Part 1

An American comic book writer known for writing strong female characters – and for drawing attention to the excessive rate of sexual assault and murder that female superheroes are subjected to in comics – Gail Simone took over the DC comic series Birds of Prey beginning with issue #56, and became the regular writer for the Wonder Woman series in 2007, which we wrote about at the time (as did The New York Times). Simone has also written for several other comic series over the years (including Killer Princesses, which wins my vote for best title) and currently also writes for the series Secret Six.

When I discovered that Gail had commented on one of our blog posts a few months ago, I reached out to her for an email interview about Wonder Woman, and women and LGBT characters in comics in general, and she graciously agreed.

This is the first part of the interview, focusing on the Wonder Woman series; the second part will be posted tomorrow. Special thanks to The Linster and StuntDouble for helping me come up with the questions!

AfterEllen.com: You seem to really love Wonder Woman as a character. Why? Gail Simone: Ah, well, that’s a long answer, there, so I’ll try to be concise (and probably fail!). But I have a scene in one of my early issues where Wonder Woman lets an opponent kick the crap out of her, without fighting back, just her extending an open hand to him, no matter what his rage makes him do. I think that’s a big part of it – she COULD tear someone’s head off, she COULD destroy a country if she chose. But she would consider that a failure as a warrior for peace.

The death of an enemy is not victory to her. I love that stuff. I think it’s a far better blueprint for the future than most of the action hero stuff out there right now.

But there are a million reasons. I love that she’s the DC universe’s premiere badass. I love that she was giving messages of the power of womanhood in the 40’s, you know, decades before Buffy or Xena or Lara Croft.

And there’s a part of me that loves the pegasi and the princess-ness of it all, and all the trappings of Paradise Island. She’s just brilliantly conceived.

And I like her with a dry sense of humor, while we’re at it. The sisterhood aspect of the Amazons is tremendously compelling to me. Who wouldn’t love to have that many sisters who loved you AND carried bladed weapons?

AE: You have allowed Wonder Woman’s relationship with Tom Tresser to sort-of go farther than anyone has ever allowed WW to go. She’s kind of a virgin figure in comic book, but you’ve let her sexual side out a little. Was that a conscious decision? GS: Absolutely, and I can’t quite give spoilers out on an ongoing story, but I can’t help but feel sorry for poor Tom. Not ONLY is he dating a princess and a warrior who can lift a battleship over her head, but she happens to have an over-protective, sword-carrying mother and a royal guard of albino gorillas.

That’s got to be a bit intimidating for the poor guy. It speaks well of him that he doesn’t simply crawl away in a puddle of his own urine.

It’s fun stuff to write, as we got to see a bit of the Amazon mating rituals for the first time, which of course implies that a lot of the Amazons are coupled themselves, which I think would’ve happened even if they HADN’T been exiled on an island with no guys for thirty centuries. AE: What has surprised you most about WW and her supporting cast, as you’ve gotten to know them? GS: Well, mostly how entertaining they are. Wonder Woman’s mother, Hippolyta, is just a joyful and stern character with this very dark, obscure sense of wit, who commands an army and intimidates everyone she meets.

Characters like that are why I chose being a writer over being a hairdresser, which I was for a number of years.

AE: Do you think we’ll ever get a [live action] Wonder Woman movie? When Joss Whedon’s script was rejected and he left the project he said that the lack of studio support was overwhelming, but WB said as late as last summer that the project is active. Why are they so reluctant to put their weight behind a WW movie? And what kind of story could a Wonder Woman movie tell that would make it better than the Elektra and Catwoman debacles? GS: Wonder Woman could have a movie where she sits in a chair eating peanut butter and it’d still be better than Catwoman and Elektra.

I honestly don’t worry about this stuff that much. But a good Wonder Woman movie could be a massive hit. A little bit Top Gun, a little bit Xena, a little bit 300 – and it’s not imitation. Wonder Woman was doing all this stuff decades ago. It’s in the source material.

I spoke with Joss at a Warner Brothers party, and our key cards for the hotel all had pictures of Wonder Woman on them. He said that every time he saw his key card, it made him sad.

I got to work some on the Wonder Woman animated film and had a great time. It’s a fine template for where a film about Diana could go, the spectacle that it could be. There’s endless material there. A gorgeous, ass-kicking warrior fighting hydras and dragons in downtown Washington DC? That’s eye-popping stuff, potentially.

And then you have the themes of power and tolerance in there – that stuff isn’t corny to me, not at all.

AE: How do you think the animated Wonder Woman movie turned out, and what do you think the movie says about feminism? My take on it was that the movie really reflected very well America’s current conflicted feelings towards feminism, but I’d love to hear your perspective. GS: First, I have to compliment you, as the way you phrased this question made me do an enormous spin on my perception of the gender issues in the film, so thank you for that.

All right, here’s how I see it. I did the first two drafts of this film’s screenplay and the basic plot and characters still reflect that. But as I’ve said, I don’t write Wonder Woman as Man Vs. Woman. I just feel that Wonder Woman would have settled that debate in her mind long ago with the universal truth: that there’s good and bad in every group. Seeing a woman as powerful as Wonder Woman debating things like guys opening doors for women seems a little like it’s lowering her, that she’s stooping.

In short, the gender issue stuff in my drafts was more subtle and a little more about miscommunication than outright hostility.

So when I finally saw the finished product, which I enjoyed tremendously, the one sour note for me was the insertion of all this gender politics stuff. At this point, I don’t feel it’s right or fair or even interesting for Diana to mistrust men as a gender, in toto.

The feminist discussions they’re having felt very early 70’s to me, very first wave. I think for most of America, that discussion is past. So I was a bit taken aback by that.

I’m friends with and a huge fan of animation genius Bruce Timm, and the writer who did the final draft, Michael Jelenic, is just this extremely talented, sincere, humble guy. I hadn’t met the director, Lauren Montgomery, but she seems pretty wonderful, too.

They really wanted to do right by Wonder Woman and I think they succeeded beautifully. It’s a cracking good action story. But the man vs. woman stuff really baffled me on first showing.

Until I read your note, in fact. Now I’ve quite been rethinking the gender stuff in the film.

I have a teenaged son, and he’s grown up with Xena and Buffy and Lara Croft and Ripley and Alias and any number of strong, interesting female characters in video games. To him, he doesn’t remember a time when we were starving for portrayals like that.

Put simply, he missed that first wave debate. He and an entire generation grew up in the shadow of the work Gloria Steinem and others like her did, but I’m sure for the life of him, he couldn’t pick her out of a line-up. They take things like moms with careers in stride, it’s not unusual at all to them.

In a way, I think that’s the way it should be, that each generation moves a little farther from the debate, from the upheaval, and more towards a working model where successful, powerful women are simply part of the fabric of living in this country and this world.

But in another way, it means that a lot of these kids this age haven’t ever really discussed the subject in a way that we all went through. That philosophical trial-by-fire hasn’t really hit this generation.

Right now, most of the gender discussion these kids see is ignorant ranting by zealots on either side on the internet. There’s very little exposure to the core concepts of what feminism is about, presented in an entertaining and non-academic manner.

And the shame of that is, that allows idiots and creeps to define the term FOR us. The Rush Limbaughs and morons of that stripe. He can call us feminazis, actually compare the desire to be treated fairly with Nazism, and where is the pop-culture voice that says “hell, no!” to that? Where is the popular media that addresses that sort of hateful nonsense head on?

So, I’ve really done a bit of a turn-around here.

It’s not how I imagined it, but the feminism in the film is sincere and so much a part of the story that it can’t really be easily ignored. I’d like to think that those early feminist ideals as expressed in the film are planting seeds, getting people talking about this stuff, asking questions and seeking answers, especially teens and their parents. And I like that the two main participants in the story are all sincere, no one is portrayed as inherently evil or superior, they’re simply misguided and a little ignorant about one another. And they grow to trust one another. They have their eyes opened.

In that regard, I really think they did something very interesting and maybe even important. Because these issues aren’t resolved. These questions still haven’t been answered. And I’m thankful that they did us all that service.

That really might be Wonder Woman’s best legacy, her greatest super-power, in the end. The power to open minds.

Read the second part of our interview with Simone, in which she discusses female and LGBT characters in comics – including Birds of Prey and the upcoming lesbian Batwoman series.

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