With Wonder Woman #9, we get this full trip down memory lane for Diana, leaning into her history, like moments out of the 2017 movie and her killing Maxwell Lord. How did you want to incorporate Wonder Woman’s mythos into your own story?
The idea of the issue was that Wonder Woman is that going through these three trials that Sovereign is putting upon her and we’re seeing that this is part of a larger plan to defeat Sovereign, in the Wonder Girls aspect that we’ve been cutting away to. She has to endure these three trials to get to the end and, at the first trial, she has to endure someone telling her lies about herself and get her to believe that she is what she is not.
The second trial is one of isolation, taking away what she loves in the world, which is people. She’s not Clark and Bruce, she wasn’t raised as an orphan. She was raised by a village as her family, so Sovereign takes that away. She fights that by going into her own mind and finding her own imagination and past and finding love there. What she finds is Steve, he’s there throughout her whole history. Steve and her have this argument the whole time where she’s like “You’re not even there! How can we be having this argument? Why am I imagining you? How can you possibly save me?”
In all these different contexts, Steve is always there going “Why are you here? What is the point of you?” She’s arguing with herself, this Steve doesn’t exist, and sometimes he agrees with her and sometimes he disagrees with her. What she learns by the end of the book is that she’s not alone and when you love someone, as she has, and been through all the things that her and Steve have been through when you depend on each other and save each other, you exchange souls in a way. That person is part of you and you’re part of that person.
She goes into her own mind learning she’s not alone and that she has a bit of Steve’s soul with her. That’s what carries her through this trial. The challenge of Wonder Woman as a superhero writer is that she’s a warrior, she’s tough but, generally speaking, she doesn’t fight with violence, she has to find another way to triumph. The love she made throughout her life makes her triumph in this issue, that’s what it’s about.
How has it been working with Daniel Sampere? Has getting to watch his work come in consciously affected how you’ve structured the story and issues?
It’s incredibly freeing just knowing that whatever you make, he’s just going to make it beautiful. Just today, I wrote a page and it’s Wonder Woman at the beach and she just goes into the water and I was like “This is the most boring page anyone has ever written. It’s just Wonder Woman walking into the waves.” But I could see in my head how Daniel would draw those waves and how Tomeu Morey would color the glint on the water and her sinking into it and it becomes symbolic of her cleansing herself, like a baptism.
It’s working with a net, knowing that whatever happens is going to look beautiful, so you take more risks, like doing an issue like this where it takes place all in her head with around 20 different scenes, knowing that Daniel is going to make it look beautiful and interesting. And Daniel is going to be on time! He’s productive, he gets it done! I work with the best artists in the world, some of whom are my best friends. If I gave some of them something like this issue, they’d be like “I’ll see you in six months.”
With Daniel, he’ll be like “I’ll see you in eight weeks” and that’s such a difference because I know the next issue will be Daniel on Cheetah, which will be fun. It’s an absolute joy and I got super lucky to work with him on this and I’ll forever be grateful.
How was it bringing the Wonder Girls into the story? We get to see Donna Troy, Cassie Sandsmark, and Yara Flor together with Diana.
My first instinct was not to use the Wonder Girls at all. I wanted this very much to be Wonder Woman’s book. Having written a lot of Batman
where we involved the Bat-Family and going back to Batman after wanting to write just Batman, I didn’t want to make the same mistake again. This is going to be Wonder Woman-focused because, in a lot of books, she ends up not being the protagonist in her own book. It ends up being about her love interest or the villain.
With this, every single issue of this book is about why Wonder Woman is awesome and I never want to distract from that. What happened was, when I started writing the book, the fans were coming at me, not in a mean way, but in the kindest, nicest way, saying “We want to see the Wonder Girls! We want to see her family, and especially the three Wonder Girls!”
I love a good argument, but I like to think I can be convinced of things. I was convinced and I was like “I know this was Rule #1 in my bible, but I’m throwing it out.” With the encouragement of my editor, Brittany [Holzherr], we brought them into the book and it’s been incredibly rewarding. The three of them are incredibly fun to write and they give a new perspective on Diana and who she is, each of them in a specific way.
Donna is sort of the loyal sister, Cassie is the fangirl made good, and Yara is a cynical, tough warrior. I feel like you’re seeing different sides of Diana reflected back at her, which I love.
You’ve spent several months writing Wonder Woman now. Across all your time at DC, what’s been unique about writing Wonder Woman compared to your other work?
I just hit over a decade at DC, it’s been 11 years and about a decade since Grayson. If I had to say it in one word, it’s been hard. She’s harder to write than Batman, Superman, Grayson, or the Human Target. When I sit down to write her, it’s challenging. I just wrote a page, and I almost never do this, and just went “nope,” and I erased the whole page because I got it wrong. She’s been defined by so many different people in so many different ways over 85 years, so which strings do you follow and which do you ignore?
The stakes are incredibly high because people read these books like the Zapruder film; they’re looking for messages in the book. That can be a very good thing, because people want to talk about the book. One way to make Wonder Woman easy is to make it as boring as possible, by writing little, ethereal nothings that go nowhere and have no stakes. As soon as you put stakes in, everyone is looking over it and they start talking about it, which can turn into a bonfire that heats up all of comics.
It’s difficult but, at this point in my career, I need difficult. Don’t get me wrong, I want easy, I love easy. When things are easy, simple, and I get to write them, God bless. But if I’m doing my 15th suicidal boy who’s looking out a window sad, people are going to turn it off and go “That one-trick pony is one-tricking again.” I need something that’s going to force me out of my comfort zone and force me to really work hard and do bizarre stuff, like Superman getting a pedicure or Wonder Woman throwing the Washington Monument. I need that challenge right now and I’m grateful that it’s here.
I
still feel like Danger Street was your most experimental DC book.
With Danger Street, the plotting was really difficult because it was 25 characters all crashing into each other. Page-to-page, that was easy to write because I could just put two random characters together and see what happens. Like, here is Lady Cop and Creeper – what are they going to sound like together? You just had fun that day.
The narrative voice was really hard, doing that fairytale voice; I don’t know why. With Wonder Woman, I’ve got to do Sovereign’s voice. He’s so fun but I’ve got to do so many three-to-five syllable words that it drives me insane. But I love it!