Dusting Off the Golden Lasso

An Oregon writer makes Wonder Woman relatable

It's fun interviewing someone famous, or at least famous enough to have fans, even when their fame leads to complications. This article, which I wrote for the December 3 issue of Eugene Weekly, is the product of attempts over many months to convince the intensely private Gail Simone to allow me to interview her. Guess now I have to find a new professional goal.

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Since her inception in 1941, Wonder Woman has been a symbol of freedom and democracy, a totemic 1970s feminist touchstone, a piece of bikini-clad eye candy and an icon of gay America.

What the foremost female superhero hasn’t been, particularly, is relatable, at least not for the legion of mostly male superhero fans who support the comic book industry. When the Amazon princess wasn’t being used for gratuitous T&A, she was portrayed either as a man-hating harridan or a cipher for blandly apolitical gender equality. Wonder Woman always seemed to work better as a symbol than as a character.

Happily, that’s changed. In an era in which parent company DC Comics is fostering iconic runs by star writers on some of its flagship titles — Grant Morrison on Batman, Geoff Johns on Green Lantern — Diana Prince (the heroine’s secret identity) has been quietly flourishing under the pen of Oregon native and former hairdresser Gail Simone. And though some women have tackled the character in the past, notably in a short-lived stint by novelist Jodi Picoult, it is Simone who holds the rather surprising title as the first female regular writer in Wonder Woman’s history.

“We have a different conception of feminism than was written in [Wonder Woman’s] conception,” Simone said in October at a panel for the UO’s Understanding Superheroes conference. And while the writer is certainly capable of writing a good, old-fashioned, politics-free superhero fight, Simone’s social messaging makes her work compelling. “I can’t write a story that doesn’t have some of that, somewhere,” she says.

Simone will discuss “Gender and the Superhero” in an appearance on Wednesday, Dec. 9, at the UO, likely touching on her work on Secret Six and Birds of Prey, both comic series that incorporate well-rounded characters of both genders, the latter detailing the exploits of an all-woman team of superhero espionage agents.

Even as her star has risen swiftly, Simone continues to live a quiet life on the Oregon Coast, far from fan culture. “I always wanted to be a writer to some degree,” she says, but the goal “just didn’t seem attainable, somehow.” She graduated from high school early and received a scholarship to study English and theater at the UO, but “life intervened,” and Simone wound up at a Springfield beauty school.

While managing her own salon, Simone began writing for online comics fan forums and soon attracted attention with her superhero humor column “You’ll All Be Sorry,” which led to work on The Simpsons comic book and then on Marvel Comics’ darkly humorous Deadpool. “It’s one of the amazing things about the Internet,” Simone says, “that kind of democratic notion that you can live in a town with no decent Chinese food and still be read each week all over the world.”

Continue reading "Dusting Off the Golden Lasso" at Eugene Weekly.