Kelly Sue DeConnick quotes:

Pretty Deadly' is the story of these immortal and mortal characters, and the mortals' story follows Sarah's family, a black family, through the ages. I never made the choice of, 'Oh, this is gonna be the story of an African American family!'

Anybody who's read 'Pretty Deadly' knows that I tend to savor an immersive, 'You'll figure it out as you go!' style. 'Pretty Deadly' really does not hold your hand.

Going into the second arc, I'm making a conscious effort to do something I say I never do, which is to change my style because of feedback. I'm trying to make 'Pretty Deadly' more accessible by being more clear in the writing.

Complicated feelings are fertile soil for creative ideas.

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.

Being a woman in a male-dominated industry sort of sucks, but it doesn't suck any more than being a woman in the world. My advice? Be terrifying.

If you have a smartphone - and you have a smartphone - then you have a comic book store in your pocket. So you don't have to get over any social anxiety you have about entering that space.

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

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

Girls have always read comics. There's nothing intrinsically masculine about telling stories with pictures.

I like my heroes to be imperfect; I like them to be striving. I identify with that kind of aspiration to do better.

My son is such a lover, such a caretaker and so funny. He's seven, and he genuinely cracks me up. And my daughter is a fearless powerhouse. They fill me with wonder and admiration.

I'm kind of obsessed with Shaun White. I took a DVD of Shaun White to the hospital when I gave birth to my son. His physical elegance and his ease in front of the camera alone are inspiring, but he's got this... this dedication to excellence and this straight up courage that just... it personifies everything I want to be and everything I am not.

Everything that feminism stands for is everything American, white, red and blue democratic. It is all the same stuff. So, I am boggled that I should have to give up this term that encapsulates what I want for my children, for my world, culture, brothers and sister because someone else thinks it means I don't shave my armpits.

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.

There's nothing less funny than trying to force funny.

I hate when I get asked, 'What's it like to be a woman in comics?'

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

Romantic relationships are the least interesting thing for me to write about. I'm 45, and that's not the most interesting thing in my life anymore.

I think women are vital to the future of the superhero comics and the entire industry - as creators, as editors, as consumers, as retailers.

Yes, the Bechdel Test. It's named for Allison Bechdel, who is a comic book creator. The test is, are there two named women in the film? Do they talk to each other? And is it about something other than a man? I actually think the Bechdel Test is a little advanced for us sometimes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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