Author Profile
Ann Nocenti
1957 • American • Journalist
44
Total Quotes
Collected Meditations
Showing 44 quotesI'm thrilled to be taking over Green Arrow. What I adore about the Arrow is his recklessness. He'll shoot off on an impulse, dispatch someone if they deserve it; his heroism is instinctive.— 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 want Green Arrow to have fun. I don't want him to be a tortured hero. I mean, I've written plenty of tortured heroes, like Daredevil. But it's all there in Daredevil's origin as to why he'd be a tortured adult. Green Arrow doesn't have that kind of origin. In fact, he's such a clean slate that he doesn't even have an origin anymore.— 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
Catwoman has an awesome, iconic personality. It's a blast to write her. You get her; she's an archetype. You can just kind of put on the cat-suit.— Ann Nocenti
There is an unspoken feminist layer to Katana. She's an aggressive modern woman with traditional Japanese roots. She was in love with her sword because she believed it contained her husband.— Ann Nocenti
When I was in college, I worked at a state hospital that was a dumping ground for all manner of the criminally insane and 'mental defectives' as they called them back then. It was a horrible place, like Arkham, mostly in terms of total neglect of the inmates, so I wanted to write an Arkham story.— Ann Nocenti
I think writers process their own experiences through the characters and situations they write. So for Batman, I used my own experience of losing a loved one. Grief is a strange place; it's like an altered state. You might sleep too much, so you can see the dead in your dreams.— 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
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
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'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 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
The Creeper in the 'Katana' series is the same Creeper that will be in 'Villains Month.'— 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
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