Kelly Sue DeConnick Quotes

Comics are reflective of what's going on in larger culture. Wonder Woman came to be in her position when women were first entering the workplace in numbers during the war. Then Wonder Woman had another rise in the '70s when Gloria Steinem latched on to her as an icon for the [feminist] movement. I think we're seeing another wave of feminism today, a fourth wave characterized by intersectionality and the internet. And I think it falls right in line that we would see another wave of superheroines coming to the fore.

There's a thing that creeps into this conversation ... that if you complain about the depiction of women [in comics], it becomes, 'Well, but ladies - the dudes are idealized too.' And the thing is that the dudes are idealized for strength and the women are idealized for sexual availability. It's very, very different. The women's costumes are cut in such a way that I could give a cervical exam to 90% of our heroines. And I don't have a medical degree! So if I can find it, that's impressive.

If you're not interested in your work, you're not doing it right.

I just did an arc with Warren Ellis - and no one else on the planet could get away with this, because I think this is like harassment? - But Warren felt like there was a depiction of Spider-Woman where it looked like her waist perhaps didn't contain any internal organs. And he suggested very quietly ... 'You should fix that, or else I will come to your house and nail your feet to the floor and set your house on fire.' ... And it totally got fixed!

When I'm looking for a strong female character, or a strong character at all, I'm looking for a character that has a purpose in that story, that has an interior life of some sort. They don't have to be physically strong; they don't have to be morally strong or ethically strong, because men and women come in a huge variety of all of those things. Emotionally, ethically - I'm less concerned with that. I just don't want them to be props. That's the only thing that offends me.

The dirty little secret about comics is that the wall to getting published is actually not that high. You can publish your own comic. You can have your comic printed by the same people that print Marvel and DC and Image's comics for, I think, it's about $2,000 for a print run. So you can Kickstart it and get your own comic made. It depends on what is considered success to you. So if you need to be published by the Big Two to feel that you've made it, well, you should start working very hard.

Seriously, just buy the [expletive deleted] book. I promise you'll like it. Unless you're [expletive deleted].

I was asked in an interview once: You're writing another book with a female lead? Aren't you afraid you're going to be pigeonholed? And I thought, I write a team superhero book, an uplifting solo hero book, I write a horror-western, and I write a ghost story. What am I gonna be pigeonholed as? Has a man in the history of men ever been asked if he was going to be pigeonholed because he wrote two consecutive books with male leads?

There's a difference between feeling like I don't need to explain and deliberately confusing you. If the impression is that I'm deliberately confusing you, that is not what I am trying to do at all.

You can't write something actively trying to please everyone - you're going to end up with watery soup that way. You just have to write stories you would want to read and hope that people like them.

Get inside her head. Get inside any character's head and ask what they want in this scene. And if you work from the perspective of what they want, there's not going to be any wrong answer. There's going to be some boring answers, but none of them are going to be wrong. As long as she has agency, then you're on the right track.

I wish I could say confidently that pacing remains my weak point, if you could talk about your own stuff without sounding like you're self-obsessed. But I think you kind of have to be.

I need to go where I'm not comfortable. I think that's the artist's job.

One of the things about comics is people can linger on images and words as long as they want.

I guess I am conscious of my weaknesses, and I think pacing is probably my biggest. I don't know if I think the clarity thing is actually a weakness. It was a stylistic choice.

My husband makes fun of me, because I know I can use strong prose to jazz-hand my way through plot that isn't as interesting as I'd like it to be.

I think I'm very strong at dialogue, I think I'm very strong in characterization. I think sometimes I use dialogue and character work to cover weaknesses in my plotting.

My creator owned books sell better than my mainstream books. And that makes no sense.

Having my brain doing different work is helping me a lot in terms of retro-feeding from the other experiences. It makes me feel inspired, looking forward to the projects and wanting to work harder.

What I worry about is working in this serial medium, where people are talking about your stories before they're done, we have this instant feedback loop now. I'm very active on Tumblr and I have a very active engagement with readers and I love it, but I don't want to start writing to try to please someone else. I don't want my meter to get skewed.

The reader is not the customer. The retailer is the customer. So I try to have as much interaction with the retailers as possible because those are my customers.

I don't think we're supposed to say [expletive deleted] anymore.