Ann Nocenti Quotes

#1. 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

#2. People struggle with moments of deep dread about life and moments of surety. Often within the course of the same day. Life is a roller coaster, especially if you take risks.

Ann Nocenti

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. I'm one of those people who believes you are what you do.

Ann Nocenti

#6. 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

#7. I'm a huge lover of 'Seven Samurai' and anything Kurosawa ever did. The comedic work out of Japan in terms of martial arts movies, some of them are hilarious.

Ann Nocenti

#8. 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

#9. Catwoman isn't a 'joiner.' She's a solo operator. She isn't naturally heroic; she's fairly selfish.

Ann Nocenti

#10. I'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

#11. 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

#12. I'm very much about stories that are fast but character development that moves slow.

Ann Nocenti

#13. 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

#14. Arrest the meek! Reward the obnoxious!

Ann Nocenti

#15. I am inspired by both Japanese Samurai films, in particular the films of Kurosawa, and how they share the spirit of American Westerns, with the influences running in both directions, and including the 'Spaghetti Westerns' and films of Sam Peckinpah.

Ann Nocenti

#16. It always amazes me that Japanese comics have, like, 200 pages. How do they do that? They're fat books; it's a whole different kind of comic that's very close to their films. So I'm drawing from that history and bringing it here - bringing it to Katana.

Ann Nocenti

#17. 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

#18. I'm a huge, huge lover of weaponry, of Japanese martial arts movies.

Ann Nocenti

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. Mythology contains a rich history of legendary weapons, most famously 'Excalibur,' weapons that could only be used by the pure of heart.

Ann Nocenti

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. I am thrilled to be working with Alex Sanchez as the artist on 'Katana.' His work is wildly eclectic, exciting and powerful, yet slyly humorous, which is a perfect match for Katana.

Ann Nocenti

#31. The Creeper in the 'Katana' series is the same Creeper that will be in 'Villains Month.'

Ann Nocenti

#32. When I read Katana's run in 'Birds of Prey,' I was curious about her restraint. She didn't laugh, didn't loosen up, didn't seem to have a light side. I thought, well, that demure nature is what we believe of women of Old Japan, so she seemed not like a modern Japanese but from an earlier time.

Ann Nocenti

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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