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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Ann Nocenti Quotes

When my editor sent me the first two images of Joker’s daughter, I was struck by how confident she looked despite her boney appearance and horribly scarred face. So I starting thinking, how did Duela gain such confidence in a world that prizes beauty?

– Ann Nocenti

I walked the streets of New York; I would feel the presence of Daredevil. I would see him up on the rooftop. What you are doing in your life, you start to see in your book. It all starts to merge together.

– Ann Nocenti

I like talking about comic book process, and one of the things is that I have plans going ahead for years, and the plans constantly get thrown away and shifted. There’s a difference between planning and what actually happens in life, and comics have a life of their own.

– Ann Nocenti

I’m very much about stories that are fast but character development that moves slow.

– Ann Nocenti

I’m a huge, huge lover of weaponry, of Japanese martial arts movies.

– Ann Nocenti

I’m dying to fool around with the distance between Selina Kyle and Catwoman. And, you know, the whole double identity thing is endlessly fascinating. I mean, you can always find another riff for it.

– Ann Nocenti

I believe in working with your morning brain – you have your coffee, and then maybe you’ll start thinking about the grand plan and what’s going to happen in the next arc, and then you write for a while, and then you get really dreamy, and over the course of the day or in the middle of the night, something comes, and you just throw it in!

– Ann Nocenti

I have a fascination for extra-judicial societies and underground cultures, and in situations where justice can only be found outside the law, and how these societies have evolved over the centuries.

– Ann Nocenti

There was a Japantown in San Francisco, but after the internment camps that locked up all the Japanese, Japantown shrunk down to just a couple tourist blocks.

– Ann Nocenti

Is it possible to run a big industrial corporation in a benevolent fashion? We see these days that even the hippest companies hide some rotten practices to make their profit margins work.

– Ann Nocenti

I don’t think most people are all heroic or all villainous, so I find ambiguity of motivations to be a natural human condition.

– Ann Nocenti

Green Arrow was a very complicated character to take on because he has archaic weaponry. Catwoman, I think is more of a simple archetype to grasp, so it will be about nuance. But I think you need three or four issues before you say, ‘Ah ha! Now I really know how to write this character!’ You’re carrying them around with you.

– Ann Nocenti

I wanted the new Green Arrow to somehow sense his long, brutal past. It’s like someone who has past lives they can’t remember but feels occasional flashes of.

– Ann Nocenti

I know my predecessors have written a Green Arrow who has a lot of thoughts about social justice, but that was a more evolved, older, wiser Green Arrow.

– Ann Nocenti

I know I’ve erred in the past putting too much of my social justice sentiments in comics, but hopefully not too much, and I tried to only do that with characters that it made sense with it. These days, with the ‘social justice’ aspects of the two books I write, ‘Catwoman’ and ‘Katana,’ the concerns are more about moral justice.

– Ann Nocenti

There are a lot of writers who just want to do their own thing and avoid the rest of the Marvel Universe. But for me that was one of the things I loved about Marvel: that shared universe. So of course you would run into a mutant in Manhattan. You would run into another hero in Manhattan. For me, I figured why not? Why not have that fun?

– Ann Nocenti

The things that churned inside Daredevil were deeply religious, somewhat guilt-driven traces of the messianic, with his powers being a compensation for and driven by the vulnerability of being blind. Green Arrow is not driven by dark forces.

– Ann Nocenti

When you choose the sword over a gun, just like Green Arrow chooses an arrow over a gun and Catwoman chooses a whip over a gun, you have to be highly skilled and highly trained. I can grab Green Arrow’s bow, but I’m not strong enough to shoot it. I can grab Catwoman’s whip, but have you ever tried to whip a whip? It’s not easy.

– Ann Nocenti

I think the best collaborations in comics come from a lot of talks with the artists where you are finding out what they want to draw, what kind of villains they want to do.

– Ann Nocenti

I actually have a peculiar feminism that does not involve the idea that women shouldn’t be sexy. Female characters written in comics have always been pretty damned sexy, and used their sexuality. And I don’t have any problem with that.

– Ann Nocenti

I’ve never written a character that wasn’t burdened by years of pain and trauma. Let’s face it: Most comic-book heroes have some serious baggage. Not Green Arrow. He’s a healthy guy – imagine that? Carrying your hero around in your head, imagining the world through his eyes, is just a hoot.

– Ann Nocenti

Katana is a trained, disciplined martial artist. She removes herself from Birds of Prey to go on a personal journey in Japantown, San Francisco, and pursue a quest for vengeance against the Sword Clan, the men that killed her husband.

– Ann Nocenti

There are a lot of Chinese comics, but the Chinese comics tend to be more historical and conservative. Japanese culture, just the comics are amazing. They’re like films: very few words; they move so much in these books with hundreds of pages.

– Ann Nocenti

Rotgut was, to me, just this way to get into the underground of Manhattan where you have these little pockets a villain could rise from; a rot in the bowels of Manhattan. It led to these stories that were just very creepy.

– Ann Nocenti

The Creeper in the ‘Katana’ series is the same Creeper that will be in ‘Villains Month.’

– Ann Nocenti

Comics shouldn’t be ‘tools’ for anyone’s agenda except for the characters. And I am speaking only of super hero action comics. I love many of the alternative comics that are like journalistic stories. Documentary comics, a mix of reportage and fiction. Those are just great.

– Ann Nocenti